Logie-winning actor Henry Nixon says it wasn’t too much of a stretch pretending to be terrified of Game Of Thrones star Ian McElhinney on their set of their new Australian crime thriller High Country.
The former All Saints star, who won the 2017 Silver Logie for Outstanding Actor for his role in The Kettering Incident, and the veteran Northern Irishman play implacable foes on the eight-part series that streams on Binge later this month.
“That’s putting it mildly,” says Nixon, with a laugh on one of the outer Melbourne sets before the production relocated the rugged northeastern corner of Victoria for which the series is named. “He wants to kill me.”
And while this writer can attest that McElhinney, who played swordsman extraordinaire Ser Barristan Selmy for 25 episodes across five seasons of the award-winning HBO fantasy epic, is warm, expansive and affable company, Nixon’s first encounter with his on-screen enemy at a cast lunch was very different.
“He had just got in and we shook hands and he said ‘this is the last time I’m going to be nice to you’,” Nixon recalls. “But he did it in such a relaxed, offhand way. And I was like ‘f— man, is he sassing me?’ He was joking around but he has that casual menace and that gravitas that I didn’t have to do much acting in those scenes. He’s scary.”
High Country, from the creative team behind global hit prison drama Wentworth, stars Leah Purcell as a city cop who relocates with her family from the big city to a small bush town to replace retiring head cop, Sam Dyson (McElhinney). Instead of the quiet life she craves after work and personal trauma in Melbourne, she soon finds herself tasked with solving the mystery of five missing people who have vanished into the dense and dangerous bush that surrounds the town.
Nixon describes his High Country character Damien Starc, a former teacher who claims to be a psychic, as “a bit weird, a bit socially awkward” and “an oddball”. His supposed psychic abilities have also implicated him an earlier murder of a child, a case that Dyson could never solve but is convinced Starc is responsible for, an obsession that only grows after he leaves the police force.
“He’s the town pariah, he’s sort of like the witch of the town,” says Nixon of Damien. “Not everyone in the town hates him – some people are on his side – but most of the town think he’s pretty weird. He lives in a caravan by himself and he used to be a teacher but obviously lost his job when all that stuff went down.
“Sam is convinced that he’s a child-killer. He’s a child-killer in his eyes and he is obsessed with bringing him in. Basically Damien wants to clear his name with the Department of Education and get his old job back.”
Nixon, whose local acting credits also include Kings Of the Cross, The Secrets She Keeps and McLeod’s Daughters, says Damien’s feverish visions and fiery confrontations made for the kind of character he doesn’t get to play too often.
“From an acting perspective it’s a gift kind of a role,” he says. “|And in terms of Australian television, you rarely get roles like this where you get be quite outlandish – and I guess the challenge is to kind of keep him grounded.”
Nixon says although Damien is very different from his Kettering Incident character, cop Fergus McFadden, there are similarities between that show and the eerie, otherworldly elements of High Country, pausing before adding with a laugh, “but obviously without the aliens and the doppelgangers and the weird guy doing experiments on moths”.
While Kettering was filmed in remote Tasmania, High Country shot in the rugged terrain around Mount Buller and Jamieson, which was renamed Brokenridge for the purposes of the show. Nixon says the impenetrable bush and changing weather “gives it a spookiness” that perfectly suit the murder-mystery aspect of the story, to the point where the environment felt like a major player in the action.
“The country is another character,” he says. “It’s all-talking and all-affecting. I was doing a reading with Linda Cropper on my second or third day and we’re on this veranda outside her character’s place, and on one of the takes the wind came in and blew my hair, and it was just like ‘is the environment feeling the vibe and wanting to affect it and be a part of it?’ The world is speaking, the trees are talking to each other … there’s vibes.”
Nixon remembers his time on The Kettering Incident fondly. Although the award-wining, Tasmanian-shot sci-fi drama, especially its out-there, David Lynchian ending, proved to be divisive, it was viewed around the world, and helped Nixon gain a foothold in the US where he was based for a while, scoring roles in TV shows such as NCIS.
Nixon says his favourite thing is to travel for work, and he made it almost as far the Arctic Circle to shoot Lost In Alaska, for US network Discovery Channel. Although the docudrama was never released, shooting it the wilds of Northern America was its own reward.
“It’s out there man,” he says. “There’s all these Cold War like tracking stations and stuff around and it’s really cool because literally Siberia is right there. When you’re up there in summer, it doesn’t get dark. That’s just 24 hours of light, which is pretty weird. That’s the most far-flung place I’ve ever been.”
And while some actors and commentators like to downplay the Logies and or even dismiss them as slightly cheesy, Nixon says “it meant absolutely everything to win that award”. As a younger actor he never thought he’d even go to the glittering awards ceremony, much less be nominated for or win one.
“I gave it to my mum and she still has it,” he says. “She got a new dog and she called it Fergus, after my character in the Kettering Incident, maybe in lieu of grandkids, I don’t know. I really didn’t think I would win it – I was so surprised when I got nominated for it and I think that was evident in my speech. I don’t know if it changed anything but it doesn’t matter.”
HIGH COUNTRY launches March 19 with a double episode premiere on BINGE.
Originally published as Henry Nixon on High Country, giving away his Logie and ‘scary’ GoT star Ian McElhinney