By Louise Rugendyke

Colin Donnell as Mack in Irreverent.Credit:Netflix

Falling coconuts aren’t an everyday problem for your average American TV actor but, then again, neither are crocodiles and roaming cassowaries.

But if you happen to be filming in Far North Queensland, they are absolutely a problem. Then, for Colin Donnell, there were the spiders to consider.

“So, full disclosure, I have a terrible fear of spiders,” says Donnell. “I’ve gotten better actually, thanks to spending so much time over in Australia now. But I still have a deathly fear of spiders.

“One day [co-star Kylie Bracknell] sends me a message over WhatsApp. I opened it up, thinking it was going to be something about the day’s work or whatever, now it turns out it was a huntsman that she had found in her sink that was splayed out over the entire dinner plate.”

Donnell and Kylie Bracknell in Irreverent.Credit:Mark Rogers/Netflix

He shakes his head and says: “I love how you’re nodding your head as if that’s completely normal.”

Well, it kind of is.

Donnell is the lead in Irreverent, Netflix’s next big local release, after the enormously successful Heartbreak High reboot. It’s a broad comedy, a fish-out-of-water story with community at its heart. If you’re thinking SeaChange and Northern Exposure you’re halfway there, just add crocodiles.

The show follows Mack (Donnell), a criminal mediator from Chicago, who flees the US and lands on the Gold Coast after stealing the identity of a US reverend who was on his way to a posting in Far North Queensland.

They didn’t mention the heatstroke and the tropical weather and the possible crocodiles and jellyfish stings. But I rolled with the punches.

He drives to Clump – it sounds made up, but it’s named after Clump Mountain and Clump Point at Mission Beach, where the series was shot – and arrives in a small town with scant mobile and internet access, and a community keen for their new reverend to tend to his flock. The first of many problems is that Mack has never read the Bible. And the Chicago mob are keen to find him.

“He’s somebody who has never had to really look out for anybody else but himself his entire life,” says Donnell of Mack. “So one of the cool journeys that he goes on through this, is a discovery about things that he has inside of himself – the capacity to care for individuals, the capacity to want to be a part of a community. And all those things come out of him due to his circumstances.”

Irreverent features a stacked Australian cast including (from left) Anita Hegh, Wayne Blair and Ed Oxenbould.Credit:Netflix

Clump is populated by the usual selection of small-town odd bods, all played by a stacked Australian cast: Wayne Blair, Susie Porter, Mad As Hell’s Francis Greenslade and Roz Hammond, Martin Sacks, Russell Dykstra and Ed Oxenbould. It’s got bogans, thongs, a hotted-up Torana and lots of local wildlife you probably don’t want to poke a stick at.

“We had scenes where Colin was running through the jungle and we had snake guys just out of shot like the Secret Service making sure there were no snakes there with electronics,” says Irreverent’s showrunner Paddy Macrae.

“We had irukandji [jellyfish] in the water that we had to check for with thermal marine cameras every time we put the cast in the water. It is really wild up there. But I think it comes across because the place looks real because there’s no green screen.”

And those falling coconuts?

Donnell (right) on set with Irreverent showrunner Paddy Macrae.Credit:Mark Rogers

“We had a coconut denutter on set because falling coconuts are one of the highest causes of death in Far North Queensland,” says Macrae.

Irreverent is Macrae’s first original series and first time as a showrunner, after years of working on shows such as Barracuda, Glitch, Seven Types of Ambiguity and Wanted.

He always thought he’d write a half-hour comedy for ABC, but then he did what every good writer should do: he wrote what he knew. “I grew up in north-east Victoria in a very remote town called Mount Beauty in the high country, where dad was the church minister and mum was a nurse,” says Macrae, whose grandfather was also a reverend.

“Me and my three siblings were very involved in every single part of the community. Mum and dad played sport for local teams and worked with the police and emergency services and the youth in schools and everything.

“Our house was a public space, like a town hall. And then I moved to another small town – ministers get moved around – and it was the same thing. And when I got a bit older, I thought it would be the most incredibly perfect setting for a drama because you naturally have conflict built in and interesting characters.

Irreverent was shot at Clump Point at Mission Beach in Far North Queensland.Credit:Julian Panetta/Netflix

“You have situations just walking through the door of the manse [a house provided by the church] – people who are desperate, people who are in the state of great victory or a state of great loss, you have absolutely everything.

“And my parents were renegades of sorts and I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we had a real troublemaker in the pulpit?’”

And, just to check, his dad is not on the run from the Chicago mob?

“My dad is not a criminal,” says Macrae, laughing. “But he has been to prison a few times. He’s done a lot of environmental protesting.”

For Donnell – who has starred on US TV shows Arrow, The Affair and Chicago Fire – as well as leading roles on Broadway, Irreverent was nothing like he had read before.

“I loved Mack from the minute I met him on the page,” says Donnell. “And I just thought Paddy did such a wonderful job of creating a character that was so well-rounded and wasn’t all good or all bad. He was deeply flawed.

“And those are the kinds of people I love to portray. You throw in all this madcap humour that went along with the script and it was really a big desire for me to sink my teeth into something that felt very different from other projects I’ve gotten to do before.”

The sweat is very real. Colin had such a huge shooting burden … He was on set all day every day in 38 degrees with 100 per cent humidity.

Donnell moved from New York to Mission Beach, which is roughly two hours south of Cairns, with his wife, Broadway star Patti Murin, and their young daughter Cecily. He was soon climbing a bell tower and sent running endlessly along the beach in a heavy black wool cassock and dress shoes.

“I always dreamed, when I was just starting out [acting], of being able to travel the world and get to do this, on some level,” he says. “And this especially was like, ‘Oh, you want me to bring my family and come across the world and shoot a great television show that I get to be the lead of? Absolutely.’

“They didn’t mention the heatstroke and the tropical weather and the possible crocodiles and jellyfish stings. But I rolled with the punches. And I am still in one piece.”

Well, nearly. He had to wear ice vests under the cassock and drive a 1960s British Humber Super Snipe hearse that had no air conditioning. All totally normal, but to an American? Unthinkable.

“Apparently they had no air conditioning when they built those things,” says Donnell. “We realised there was a blower that we could turn on, but it turned out that all it did was blow the hot engine air into the car.

“And it just turned into a sweat box. I pretended like it was a sauna and everybody was watching me have salt pouring into my eyes.”

Did he get paid danger money?

“No,” he says, laughing. “I jumped into it with both feet.”

Donnell lost about six kilograms during the shoot, a consequence of the heat and all that running. He looks very sweaty for most of his time on screen.

“The sweat is very real,” confirms Macrae. “Colin had such a huge shooting burden. He barely saw the inside of his trailer. He was on set all day every day in 38 degrees with 100 per cent humidity.”

Mack’s foil in Irreverent is Clump’s police officer, Piper. Played by Kylie Bracknell, she’s a country cop who has no problems putting local drunks in the lock-up and a wheel clamp on the new reverend’s car. She has secrets of her own, too.

“She spent some time in the city in Brisbane as a detective,” says Bracknell about her character. “Things went really wrong there and she’s returned home. But her individual characteristics are those of strength, determination. She’s got a really high IQ. She’s a woman in a senior role in a small town, so there are obvious obstacles that she would face. But ultimately, she wants to be successful and be useful.”

It is the first lead role onscreen for Bracknell, an award-winning actor, theatre maker and Indigenous languages educator. She travelled to Mission Beach from Perth, and was immediately captivated.

“The country is absolutely breathtaking,” she says. “I’ve been to many places here and around the world where the scenery looks beautiful, but the energy of the place doesn’t match that. It’s unsettling, and we pick up on that as human beings.

“But being on Djiru Country and Mission Beach, even though it has a history of missionaries and Aboriginal people being taken from their land, there seems to be a really calming, welcoming energy up there.”

Except when you are pranking your co-star with photos of large spiders.

“I used to laugh about how jumpy [Donnell] was around butterflies and stuff,” she says, laughing. “No, I’m joking. But he really did not like any creepy crawlies.”

Donnell and Bracknell bonded off-screen, with Bracknell talking him through the area’s Indigenous significance. Onscreen, however, there are sparks. Will Mack and Piper be the next will-they-won’t they couple on screen? Like Laura and Diver Dan in SeaChange or Joel and Maggie in Northern Exposure.

“There’s something really unusual about Mack that Piper just can’t place,” says Bracknell. “I mean, the audience knows what that is, but there is definitely something developing between them.”

Says Donnell: “I will say that the relationship is very complicated because Piper poses the most dangerous, immediate threat to Mack in Clump. And over the course of this first season, you see him developing a real care for her. But there’s always that danger that she poses to his facade. And, you know, who knows?”

Irreverent streams on Netflix from December 4.

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