‘Mare of Easttown, with ghosts’: The new show that brought this Succession star Down Under

Esteemed English actor Dame Harriet Walter has been in high demand the past few years – from playing the icy, patrician mother of the Roy siblings on Succession and Rebecca’s flighty mum on Ted Lasso to a chain-smoking Russian gymnast-turned-assassin in Killing Eve.

“I focus on trying not to repeat myself,” the 74-year-old says.

That’s what brought her to Australia for a whirlwind fortnight late last year, to star as Pattie in six-part series Playing Gracie Darling: a character described by creator, writer and co-executive producer Miranda Nation as “an old hippie at heart”.

On a hot December day halfway through the 12-week shoot, Walter’s Pattie is sitting on the banks of Middle Harbour at Echo Point Park smoking a spliff and reflecting on motherhood and mistakes. She’s become the kind of matriarch who enjoys sharing an afternoon joint with her adult daughter, according to New Zealand actor Morgana O’Reilly (The White Lotus), who plays Joni. The pair reflects on tumultuous events that occurred almost three decades earlier, when Joni was a teenager and Pattie was struggling with the pressures of being a parent.

“You get quite a narrow band of roles when you get older, and even women in middle-age feel that the roles are pretty stereotyped,” Walter says. “Most people write you as an old lady in an old people’s home or something. They forget that we were the generation who grew up with the Rolling Stones, letting our hair down, literally, after the war. It’s easy to forget that the oldies now had quite a naughty youth, so I’m quite pleased to be playing someone in a script that recognises that.”

However, the show isn’t as laid-back as that tender scene suggests. In fact, Playing Gracie Darling could be described as a crime drama as it features several familiar generic markers: a small town, dark secrets and missing girls. Two disappearances have occurred, 27 years apart, with the spectre of supernatural forces at play.

Gracie Darling (Kristina Bogic), Joni’s best friend when they were teenagers, vanished one night after a seance staged by a group of friends in a shack in a forest outside town. Decades later, another Darling daughter has disappeared.

O’Reilly jokes the series is “basically Mare of Easttown, but with ghosts”. Yet in its focus on girls and women, during their teenage years and later life, it also traverses territory explored in a number of recent dramas such as Sharp Objects, Yellowjackets, One Night and Bad Behaviour.

Nation started working on the series in 2021 and took the project to Jo Porter and Rachel Gardner’s Curio Pictures.

“Miranda’s storytelling is so propulsive,” Porter says. “Her pitch drew us in from the get-go. It was a fresh way into a mystery thriller and a bit of a genre mash. The access point of a seance, that thrill of dabbling in the unknown, is something that many of us enjoyed as children. And what she’s cleverly done is create a pathway for people who are believers in the spiritual world. Though, for others who might be more rational or cynical, there’s always another explanation.”

When it came to casting the central role of the adult Joni, a child psychologist and the single mother of two girls, Mina (Chloe Brink) and Lulu (Stella Miller), Porter knew that she’d already worked with the ideal actor on Neighbours and Wentworth.

“Morgana is one of those actors who draws you in with her vulnerability, heart and warmth,” she says. “She brings an incredible honesty and a lot of that comes from her sense of humour. She’s not afraid to be vulnerable, she’s magnetic on screen, and she has a sprite-like quality, a sort of youthful energy that I’ll bet she’s going to have her entire life.”

For O’Reilly, the opportunity of a series lead came in what had already been “a great year” as she’d also appeared in the third season of The White Lotus, playing hotel employee Pam. With years of experience to her credit, she reckons that acting “can be a roller coaster ride”: the stress of auditions, sometimes never hearing anything afterwards, sometimes getting multiple callbacks but no work. Actors, she says, have “an addiction to hope”. But, she adds with an appreciative smile, “Then something like this comes out of left field.”

Walter also describes her involvement in the production as a left-field opportunity that came from working with Gardner and director Jonathan Brough on The End (2020). When she agreed to return to Australia for this project, the production schedule had to be structured to accommodate her commitment to Apple TV+’s dystopian drama Silo. Her scenes were shoehorned into a tight two weeks and Porter says Walter “hit the ground running”.

The story sees Pattie and Joni grappling with the pressures of parenting within the framework of the mystery surrounding the Darlings. Walter describes their relationship as “quite complicated because Pattie has a sort of free-spirit thing that would rather not be tied down to a family, but she’s got Joni, and she loves her very much”.

Meanwhile, Joni’s teenage daughter, Mina, who’s increasingly testing her independence, is now around the age Joni was when Gracie vanished. Memories of that traumatic event are triggered by the latest disappearance, reawakening Joni’s feelings of guilt and recrimination.

O’Reilly says Joni (played as a teenager by Eloise Rothfield) is rocked by emotional confusion. “Like everybody, she’s a paradox. She lives in a world of rationality, and she’s found a semblance of control of her life. She’s conquered a lot in a logical sense: she’s become a psychologist, and she’s very good in her field, she’s got children, she’s on top of everything. So at the start of the series, when another girl goes missing, it’s a reminder that she can’t control her life, and she can’t control her relationship with her daughter.”

To an extent, she adds, Joni embodies “the central conversation of the show, which is the rational versus the magic”.

Nation says that, though the saying is “a bit overused” her heroine is “a strong, complex character”.

“I love how complex and contradictory people are, the way that we’re all flawed and full of contradictions. Gracie’s disappearance has haunted Joni, and she has reached for the pragmatism of psychology as a way to protect herself and cope with her guilt. If supernatural forces do exist, then she’s guilty of abandoning her friend to their mercy. It’s safer for her to believe that they don’t and that there’s a rational reason for her friend’s disappearance.

“That’s the tension that we see Joni grappling with throughout the series, reflecting the question at the heart of the show: can everything be explained or are there forces that we don’t fully know and understand?”

Playing Gracie Darling is now streaming on Paramount+.

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