Nicole da Silva is no stranger to original local drama series, having clocked up hundreds of hours of television viewing on shows including Rush, Doctor Doctor and Wentworth.
She’s a familiar face on our TV sets and is about to embark on what could be her biggest project to date.
Speaking at a beachside hotel near Wollongong, New South Wales, for the launch of original scripted Paramount+ drama series One Night, da Silva, 41, says it’s a project that will resonate globally.
“It’s very much a global story set locally,” the 2015 Logie-nominated actor tells The New Daily.
“Those are always my favourite kind because they have the specificity of a local environment but they have a universal appeal.
“I am hoping Australian audiences will gravitate towards it because we can see ourselves in a global sense … we don’t have that idea of cultural cringe that we do know who we are and that our work resonates on a global scale,” she says of the series, written by Australian-American poet, novelist and screenwriter Emily Ballou (The Slap).
“And it has the sophistication of a European show.”
Whose right is it to tell a story?
One Night deals with the traumatic sexual assault of one of three friends 20 years earlier, the adults played by da Silva, Jodie Whittaker (Dr Who) and Yael Stone (Orange is the New Black).
Its complex subject matter deals with the issue of memory, recollection … or no memory at all.
Ballou, who travelled to the NSW south coast from Sydney in the early 2000s, tells the audience the story “encapsulated a time in her life”, about her younger self.
“The landscape leant itself to the kind of story I was trying to tell, that entanglement of beauty and poison and the memory of forgetting,” says Ballou, whose second novel Aphelion (Picador, 2007) was set in Adaminaby in NSW during the Snowy Mountains Scheme and spans four generations of women.
“One Night is about three friends, as teenagers, experience a traumatic event and then decades later, my character Simone decides to write a book about it,” da Silva said.
“It explores the shift of memory over years and decades and the shift of relationships and it looks at who has the right to tell a story.
“She writes a novel, presents it as fictionalised, and although what happened is a thread in the story, she doesn’t feel like it’s the only thread.
“She approaches it from an esoteric point of view and feels like it’s not only [her friend Tess’s] story but it’s every woman’s story.
“Hat, played by Yael and Tess, played by Jodie, beg to differ.
Paramount+ leads the streaming pack
Before the premiere screening at the ornate, 1925 Anita’s Theatre up the road, Paramount+’s drama and comedy boss Sophia Mogford told a packed crowd of entertainment industry types and Screen Illawarra staffers that local productions are a “priority” for the streamer.
This will be their ninth locally commissioned series, competing with Stan – which has just announced investment in three local productions – and Prime Video’s The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, which they say “is the most successful Australian original worldwide with the biggest opening weekend viewership globally for any Australian launch”.
According to data analysis by Finder, Paramount+ “claimed top honours” in the August Australian Streaming TV Charts, making it the streaming app’s eighth consecutive month in the top spot.
Binge is in second spot and Prime came in third.
Entertainment expert Chris Stead said the streamer “continues to find success through its mix of affordability and volume of in-demand programming” as Prime and Netflix “are on the rebound” after a series of poor months.
Da Silva joins so many in the industry here who say investment – not only by federal government funding body Screen Australia, but the streamers – in local productions is crucial.
“It would be remiss of me to say quotas and subsidies didn’t make a difference, because they absolutely do. They are necessary to set the tone and pace of what our local industry can do.
“If we don’t have the support, we can’t produce the product. It’s as simple as that. We do create content, and we do create stories that have impact globally, and do put us on the map.
“It elevates us from any ideas that we had from what it is to be Australian from the past. It’s showcasing who we are as contemporary Australians.”
Local flavour, global appeal
Importantly, One Night is an original scripted series and it was made here.
“Emily writes amazing scripts so when I read them I jumped at the chance … to set this story on the south coast, and Emily knows it intimately, she was here in her university days … she knows this area.
“So to have this area as the backdrop to this story really created this pressure-cooker environment where the crime happens.”
Da Silva’s character Simone still lives locally (and sees one of the adult men who was involved), has to deal with her father who has early onset dementia, and has issues with alcohol most likely a legacy of what she witnessed years earlier.
In the first episode, she has last-minute nerves about pressing the publish button, playing with that ever-present conflict about whether telling someone else’s story is OK, and whether memories are the same for everyone.
Fact or fiction.
Looks like she didn’t run it by her friends first.
Always good to fact-check, as it’s a tragedy that also happened to Tess and Hat, and the book brings back old traumas.
The perpetrators also still linger in the area – one has even gone on to get married and have two kids and Simone bumps into him, while another is in prison.
One Night is not for the faint-hearted … like The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, starring Sigourney Weaver, Leah Purcell and Asher Keddie, which deals with horrific domestic abuse.
In the hands of an experienced small-screen professional, da Silva carries the storyline with care, integrity and balance.
Above all, she says taking local stories “to the rest of the world is highly important”.
“From those who have watched it, there’s an excited buzz about what this show offers, and what it brings to the Australian story landscape.”
One Night premieres on Paramount+ on September 1
Nicole da Silva talks about One Night as streamers ramp up local competition - The New Daily
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