At the dinner table in a small double-fronted Victorian house on the edge of St Kilda’s Botanical Gardens, Hugo Weaving’s Glenn Matheson has taken to his feet to declare his love for Anita (Heather Mitchell), a woman he’s only just met. His adult kids, Clara (Bojana Novakovic) and Aaron (Will Lodder), are stunned. Then, as he tells Clara that her late mother loved her even though she didn’t often show it, she begins to cry. And cry and cry and cry.
“I cried that entire dinner scene,” Novakovic says a couple of months after the scene I was lucky enough to bear witness to was shot. “I go there, and then the director says, ‘OK, we’re done’, and I just can’t stop.”
In the finished episode of Binge’s first local commission, the romantic-dramedy Love Me, director Emma Freeman (The Newsreader) has kept the merest hint of the waterworks, just enough to suggest Glenn’s words have touched an extremely raw nerve. But for the Serbian-born, Melbourne-raised, New York-based Novakovic, it was impossible to turn them off simply because there was so much going on for her at that moment.
Bob Morley and Bojana Novakovic in Love Me, Binge’s first local drama.Credit:Ben King
“It was my last day and I just didn’t want the shoot to end,” she says over Zoom from Serbia, where she has inadvertently become the spokeswoman for a national campaign against a Rio Tinto proposal to mine lithium on prime farmland. “I had been unemployed for 18 months, it was COVID, it was Melbourne, it was lockdown, it was a small crew. It was one of those times that can really psychologically affect the way we shoot.”
Adapted from a Swedish series, the six-part Love Me is all about heightened emotions at a time of great stress, as a widower father, his late-30s daughter and his early-20s son all stumble into new relationships in the aftermath of the death of Christine (Sarah Peirse), the chronically ill wife and mother of the family.
“It’s really love and grief told through the eyes of three generations,” says Hamish Lewis, the show’s executive producer at Warner Brothers Television Australia.
This is the first local drama from Warners, whose bread and butter has until now been reality fare such as The Bachelor franchise and shiny-floor shows like Dancing with the Stars and The Masked Singer. And winning the rights to produce the English-language version of the format for export to the entire world was no simple matter.
Elizabeth Banks had secured the rights in the US but, says Lewis, “they were struggling with the project a bit, and it was really clear from day one where this should be taken and how it should be addressed. We wanted to maintain that truthfulness that’s associated with grief, and at the same time tap into the uplifting nature that comes with love. And it was also really important to nurture that older generation, to tell the story of love through their eyes as well, where more than any other generation grief and love intersect quite often.”
The death of matriarch Christine (Sarah Peirse) lingers over the relationships that her husband and children are about to embark upon.Credit:Sarah Enticknap
At this point readers and viewers of a delicate disposition should be warned that Weaving and Mitchell do indeed get down and dirty in this show. It’s a revelation – and, according to Novakovic, a bit of a revolution too, one that demanded “extraordinary courage from the storytellers and the actors to portray people in their 60s as sexual beings”.
For Lewis, a big part of the beauty of Love Me is that its premise can be boiled down to a single sentence. It’s that kind of easy-to-explain pitch that makes a format sellable, and in the increasingly global television market, that’s crucial.
“It’s about, first and foremost, satisfying the local market, but then ensuring it’s got legs to sell internationally,” he says. “So we can start laying the platform for (a) lifting the budgets of dramas locally through the money coming back from international markets, and (b) constantly raising the bar in the quality of our drama and storytelling and making sure it’s on par with the best drama in the world.”
But for Binge’s executive producer Alison Hurbert-Burns, the primary intention was to make something that worked for an Australian streaming audience. “I wanted to see a fresh, modern, really contemporary way of doing a love story,” she says. “Think back to Love My Way or The Secret Life of Us, some of those breakout ways we told love and coming-of-age stories. I just wanted to say something like that with a fresh perspective.
Newly widowed Glenn (Hugo Weaving) has fallen in love with a woman he’s just met. The role demanded “extraordinary courage from the storytellers and the actors to portray people in their 60s as sexual beings”, says Love Me co-star Bojana Novakovic. Credit:Ben King
“I felt that was missing in the landscape and after COVID I was feeling, ‘Let’s have a bit of hope’,” she adds. “Not bubblegum silly – still complex, interesting stories – but they’re not about gloomy forests and death and lakes and stuff.”
Love Me ticks all those boxes. The characters are real and relatable, often infuriating but rarely anything but empathetic. It’s warm and funny and feels emotionally authentic. And it’s Australian if you know what to look for, but might not be if you don’t.
For Australian actor Bob Morley the role of Peter K – a model with a brain and a heart to match the body (“he’s the guy that’s too good to be true that girls always play in rom-coms”, says Novakovic) – was an opportunity to reframe his career.
Morley cut his teeth on Home and Away (as Drew Curtis) and Neighbours (as Aidan Foster) before scoring a lead role in the long-running dystopian sci-fi series The 100.
“Once you’ve worked on soaps in Australia it’s really hard for people to see you in a different light,” says the Victorian-born actor who still gets hailed as Drew Curtis when he’s home from LA. “I learnt so much from being on those shows, I’m proud of having done them and had that experience. But it was such a great experience to be working in a different capacity in Australia.”
For Morley, Love Me is a show “about being vulnerable and open to being hurt in order to truly fall in love and to be loved and to be accepted”. For most of us, he adds, “that’s a scary concept”.
In a sense, Love Me is itself about to take that leap of faith, daring to get out there and mingle with everything streaming has to offer from all around the world, in the hope that it too can find the perfect match – an audience willing to love and embrace it in return.
Certainly Morley is hopeful of a fairytale ending.
“It’s one of the best things I’ve ever worked on,” he says. “And hopefully that translates to screen, and how people respond to it.”
Love Me is on Binge from December 26 (all six episodes at once).
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