Latest news with #CharlieVickers
Man of Many
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Man of Many
Our ‘TASTEMAKERS' Digital Edition Has Landed!
From the Editor-in-Chief In matters of taste, there can be no disputes. For the longest time, I've viewed style as a sort of quiet rebellion; a declaration of discernment that is entirely, and unequivocally, your own. This digital edition is a celebration of that very idea. TASTEMAKERS, our second long-form project of 2025, spotlights the individuals and institutions who choose not to follow trends but to create them. From actor Charlie Vickers, whose digital cover story paints the picture of an artist with rare conviction, to Henry Cavill, the polished powerhouse who's proven that timeless style can still command a room. These are men whose taste extends beyond the physical and deep into the realms of the ideological. It's in how they carry themselves, how they speak and more importantly, how they live. Of course, taste doesn't merely exist in front of the camera. In this issue, journalist Rob Edwards pulled back the curtain on one of the country's most revered exports. Venturing deep into the heart of the nation's style heritage, he sought to uncover the rare and remarkable stories of the artisans behind iconic bootmaker R.M. Williams. What he unearthed was a story of raw emotion, pride and legacy. Elsewhere, we explored the meticulous craftsmanship behind TAG Heuer's newest F1 releases, a horological nod to both innovation and precision. And in true Man of Many fashion, we took a moment to indulge, from the perfect Old Fashioned cocktail to James Halliday's private wine cellar, a vault of vinous wisdom few have ever seen. So, here's to the TASTEMAKERS, who aren't afraid to forge their own path and set the tone for the future of great flavour, style, design and ideology. Enjoy the issue. Nick Hall Editor-in-Chief
ABC News
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
The Survivors, the Netflix series from The Dry author Jane Harper, lives up to the hype
By all outward appearances, The Survivors is just another cliché of its genre. What: An Australian murder-mystery adapted from Jane Harper's bestselling novel. Directed by: Tony Ayres Starring: Charlie Vickers, Yerin Ha, Robyn Malcolm, Damien Garvey, Thom Green, Shannon Berry, Catherine McClements, Miriama Smith, Don Hany. When: On Netflix now Likely to make you feel: Gripped (and craving a holiday in Tassie). In a small town full of buried secrets, everyone becomes a suspect when a young woman's body washes up on the beach. As its director Tony Ayres explains, the show's very premise puts it at risk of 'the worst version' of murder mystery: "Dead girl entertainment." 'Often, women being murdered feels more consequential as a story,' he told The Screen Show's Jason di Rosso. For him, the only way to approach this trope was to delve further. "It's not as though women being murdered is not something that happens every week in Australia. It's not as though it's not a reality," he said. "The best version of this [story] asks: why does this happen?" In his six-part series — adapted from the bestselling novel by Jane Harper and now released on Netflix — this question is explored in a uniquely Australian setting, as a town of "good blokes" and their women, "true locals" and outsiders are thrust under the spotlight. The Survivors is set in the fictional Tasmanian tourist town of Evelyn Bay, where tight-knit locals are still mourning the two young men who died in a freak storm 15 years earlier. Finn and Toby were top blokes in a stereotypically Australian understanding of the term: they looked out for their mates; they loved a banter over a beer; and they were good at footy. But Evelyn Bay has all but forgotten Gabby, the young girl who also went missing that day, and they dismiss her grieving mother as a hysterical nutcase. When Kieran Elliott (Charlie Vickers) returns to his hometown with his young baby in tow, he's constantly reminded by the town – and particularly by his mother – that those men, one of whom was his brother, drowned trying to save him. His wife Mia (Yerin Ha) grew up as one of the only Asian-Australians in Evelyn Bay, and became even more of an outsider when her best friend Gabby went missing that day. As Kieran and Mia endure their frosty homecoming, another woman is found washed up on the beach, and this time the town can't look away. It's easy for local crime to feel a little cliched, but The Survivors flows so naturally it almost feels like a true crime piece. For Ayres, it was important to twist the "dead girls" narrative into a story that felt "useful and reflective, that generates conversation, rather than [present it] in a way which is just kind of packaged". And the women of The Survivors are far from victims. Both of the mystery girls feel like fully fledged characters, while the women who call Evelyn Bay home display determination and nuance throughout. Particularly impressive is Robyn Malcolm as Kieran's mum Verity, who's lost one son and blames another for his death. At once a terrifying force and earnestly vulnerable, she is deeply protective of her town, its conventions and the men who inhabit it. Verity's tense relationship with her daughter-in-law contrasts with her infatuation with her new granddaughter, and their classic dynamic is deepened by their cultural differences. "As a child from an Asian background, you are never supposed to speak up against your elders," Ayres explains. "So when Mia first enters the story, she is very polite … but you can see a steeliness underneath that." Her patience with her mother-in-law eventually dissolves into a "rip roaring fight" by episode four, which Ayres says was one of his personal highlights of the series. Evelyn Bay is a town that fiercely protects its own, but brutally excludes and intimidates those who don't quite fit in. Locals are quick to blame a backpacker from South America (no-one seems to quite know which country) for the recent murder, and a tree-changer from the mainland who isn't quite blokey enough (he wears a cardigan) is also viewed with distrust, his property vandalised. While Ayres was cautious about "banging the audience on the head" with it, running through the show's core is an undercurrent of Australian mateship and masculinity gone wrong. "I don't think you can make a TV series in 2025 where two young women die without in some way reflecting on the preconditions of why that happens," he says. "And certainly it's a theme that's very resonant in Australian society: why do men commit so many acts of violence against women?" The impact of all this on men is explored too, as they bottle up their grief and emotion and replace it with anger, blame and violence. Particularly moving is the portrait of Kieran's father Brian (Damien Garvey). After a full life as "a legend" with the "biggest pair of balls in the bay", Brian's now beset with early onset dementia, and relies on his wife to be his carer. The Survivors is full of staggeringly beautiful shots of the Tasmanian coastline, tough-talking detectives and plenty of twists and turns. But it's also a small-scale story of grief, growth, family and relationships, as the parents of Evelyn Bay begin to ask themselves: "Were we wrong about our sons?" "Why did we make them squash all those lovely kind pieces of themselves, into something that we thought they should be," Verity wonders in the show's finale. "What did we turn them into?"
Forbes
10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Netflix's Best New Show Lands A 100% Rotten Tomatoes Score From Critics
The Survivors Netflix has been on something of a roll with its mystery series as of late, from the 100% scored Secrets We Keep to the newly Emmy-submitted Dept. Q. Now, a new series has arrived from Australia that also has a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score. That would be The Survivors, a new series starring a lead from a rival streaming service, Charlie Vickers, who plays Sauron in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. It also has Yerin Ha, the actress who was a supporting character in the awful Halo show on Paramount Plus but who has landed some seriously big parts including the co-lead of the next season of Bridgerton and now a big role in this perfectly scored mystery. What a turnaround. What's the story here? This is the official synopsis: Unlike Dept. Q, this is meant to be a six-episode limited series, and it was based on a book, so there's no more source material to come with its self-contained story. It debuted at #3 on Netflix, a very solid performance, but again, viewership doesn't really matter when you're not attempting to grab a second season. The Survivors As it stands, with limited critic reviews in, it has that 100%. There are not enough audience reviews for a score yet on Rotten Tomatoes, but we can head over to IMDB to see that it has a 6.5 out of 10 with a thousand or so reviews in. That's okay, not amazing, given the context of ratings on that site. What's good about it? Here's a sampling of the critical praise: With episodes around 45-50 minutes, it's perhaps a 1-2 day commitment, depending on your schedule, and an easy binge so you can see if your view matches critics. I started it, and I was sort of immediately put off by some bad CGI showcasing the original accident, but hopefully, it gets better from there. I'll give it more of a chance, I suppose. Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram. Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
Man of Many
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Man of Many
Charlie Vickers on ‘The Survivors', Building Character and Coming Home
By Dean Blake - News Published: 6 June 2025 |Last Updated: 4 June 2025 Share Copy Link Readtime: 10 min Every product is carefully selected by our editors and experts. If you buy from a link, we may earn a commission. Learn more. For more information on how we test products, click here. Charlie Vickers is on the rise. After an impressively devilish rendition of Middle-Earth's Sauron in Rings of Power, the Aussie actor is returning home to star in Netflix's The Survivors: an adaptation of Jane Harper's novel of the same name that focuses on the small, coastal town of Evelyn Bay and a series of deaths that echo through the years. In some ways, The Survivors was a particularly personal project for Vickers, who saw his own echoes in the show—a big-town man returning to his small-town roots—and who connected with the inherent Australianness of it all. Since studying acting at the College of Speech and Drama in London, Vickers has been largely living overseas, and the opportunity to return home, especially for a script he felt excited by, was too good to pass up. We caught up with Vickers ahead of The Survivors launch on Netflix on 6 June to talk though what drew him to the project, how he got started in acting, and what it was like coming back to Australia. Charlie Vickers in 'The Survivors' | Image: Netflix To start with, I wanted to get an idea of what it was about The Survivors that got you excited. What sold you on being a part of it? I love shows that adapt novels, really. The Survivors is a novel that I hadn't read, but I'd read a few other books by Jane Harper and this just sounded like a really fun adventure to be able to go on. So when I had the opportunity to potentially do it, I thought, 'It's in Tasmania, I grew up in Melbourne, but I'd somehow never been to Tasmania,' and being able to work with a whole bunch of new, amazing people and having Tony in charge of the whole project got me really excited. Also, just being able to be part of an Australian story. It's quintessentially Australian. I live in the UK now so I want to do as many Australian projects as possible, and this was such an enticing opportunity, really. The character of the town, although it's fictional, its kind of its own character in this story, and being able to film so much of it on location got me really excited. I also thought the story was interesting, and the way the script adapted the novel made me quite interested. It's quite cool seeing small-town Australia highlighted—I wanted to ask about that. Was that part of the charm for you? Is that something that reminds you of your childhood in Australia? In a way, it is . There are a huge amount of similarities between Tasmania and Victoria, and I grew up in a small coastal town exactly like . It's funny, the character of Kieran is still quite far away from who I am but he's also returning from a big city, in his case Sydney, to his childhood town, and there was a bit of familiarity there for me. I live overseas in a big city and often find myself coming back to my small, coastal town, and I think my son was about 6 months old when I was filming this, and he has a 4 month old, so there was a lot of 'world's colliding'. Having the opportunity to tell a story set in a coastal town, and you have all the dynamics . I was watching the show with my brother the other day, and he said 'god, some of these characters feel like they could be from our home town', it's crazy. Charlie Vickers in 'The Survivors' | Image: Netflix I wanted to get an idea of what you look for in a role? There's no shared characteristics of any roles , I often look for something that when I read it I get inspired, or I get excited by the idea of doing it. These roles can be completely different, but the thing they share is that I think I can bring something to the project: it has to ignite my imagination, reading it. Those kinds of jobs are few and far between, that make you excited, and this was one of those jobs. I've played quite a lot of villains in my career so far, but that's just coincidental and because of the material I've been given. How do you find your characters? When you're given a script or a treatment, how do you go about turning those words into action? For me, I try to keep it as simple as possible. I don't properly believe in the idea of 'character'. It's useful to use it in terms of referring to the character of Kieran, for example, but his 'character' is just the sum of a whole bunch of little moments. So I try not to look at things through a wide-angle lens, you know? And sometimes I watch the final product of things and find that 'oh wow, he's an entirely different person to how I had imagined him', because I tend to approach it from a moment to moment basis, and react to the circumstances he's in, and try to play to each moment truthfully, and then that paints a bigger picture of this character's life during the time period on screen. The only thing you have to be mindful of, I guess, is to think of the journey of the character throughout the show, but the specificity of each moment we see creates the 'character', I think. Charlie Vickers in 'The Survivors' | Image: Netflix Beyond being able to come back to Australia, what was the highlight of the filming process for The Survivors? There were so many. I loved being able to be in a really special place, Tasmania, that I'd never been to, with a whole bunch of amazing actors and creatives. To be able to work with these people made it an amazing experience: Actors that I've watched since I was a kid on screen. People like Damien or Robyn or Catherine and then there's this whole other amazing generation of actors like Yerin , Jess , Thom and George , and I think that's what I really love about projects. I've been really fortunate in my career in that you can just kind of go somewhere for six months and work on something and be fully immersed in the world of whatever you're doing, and then you get to move on and some of the relationships endure. That's the lasting memory of working in Tasmania : the combination of the location and the people. It was probably really good to have that filming location be somewhere you'd never been but also being very familiar in a way. Exactly, I don't know why I'd never been to Tasmania, but it really does feel different. There's an atmospheric quality to that place that is inherent, just when you're walking around. The energy there can be heavy, and I'm sure that's what Jane was trying to tap into when she wrote the novel. You mentioned earlier that you've enjoyed doing adaptations of novels, and you've done quite a few of them at this point: is there any book adaptations that you'd love to work on? I love Tim Winton's novels, and I read The Shepherds Hut recently, and also The Riders, and Eyrie, which is about a retired climate worker that lives in Freemantle, and I just think his stories are so evocatively written and I'd love to be a part of an adaptation of one of those novels on screen. I think they're pretty rarely adapted, though, and the adaptation process to take a novel to screen is often a really complex one. Those novels, when I read them, I really connected to a few of the characters and thought it'd be really cool to be a part of. I love imagining the world, that's part of the amazing thing about reading books. Charlie Vickers in 'The Survivors' | Image: Netflix You've worked in a few genres so far – is there anything you'd want to do that you haven't been given the chance to yet? It's quite a boring answer, but I'm lucky that I've been given the chance to work on bigger productions and smaller productions and things that are in pretty wildly contrasting genres that I don't really have that itch to do anything in particular. I just kind of want to work on stories that are exciting, the genre could be anything, really. If it's something that creatively inspires me, I'd be keen to do it, but there's no particular world I want to jump into anymore: which is nice, it's a nice place to be. How did you get started in acting? I did a lot of plays at school. I remember being in year 12, and I was playing Richard the 3rd in our school production of it, and it was the same year it was being done by the Melbourne Theatre Company, and Ewen Leslie was playing Richard the 3rd, and I remember going to see it and just thinking 'wow, that's so much better than what I'm doing', and thinking 'I'd love to be able to do that one day'. I remember that moment of 'wouldn't it be cool to be an actor', but then I never found it to be an accessible path. I think I was afraid. I knew you could go and audition for drama school, it just didn't seem to be a thing that was in my world, it didn't feel possible to me: getting in to a drama school and then going on to be an actor, so I didn't do it for a few years after school finished. In those intervening years I was studying a music/business degree, and while I loved uni and being around my mates and that whole period of my life, but I was really just treading water. I had no idea what I was doing, and throughout Uni I was doing amateur theatre productions. Melbourne Uni has this amazing theatre called the Union Theatre, so I did a lot of work there. Eventually, I drummed up the courage to do it, and that changed my life. I thought, maybe I should just have a go at trying for a drama school because I really didn't know what I was doing. The school I went to, the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, they come and do audition weekends in Sydney, and I decided I was going to go to it. I flew up and didn't tell anyone because I was afraid of telling people I auditioned and I didn't get in, so I did the audition over a weekend and then found out six weeks later that I'd got in, and then had to decide whether I wanted to uproot my life or did I want to wait until the end of the year and maybe try some of the Australian schools. But when you get into a drama school, it's so unlikely in the first place that I just thought I have to take this opportunity – it might not happen again. So yeah, I moved to London, and that was really the moment the direction of my life changed. The Survivors launches exclusively on Netflix on 6 June.
Sydney Morning Herald
04-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
How a Lord of the Rings star ended up stranded in Tasmania
When Charlie Vickers steps onto the set of the multimillion-dollar The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power as the evil Sauron, it's usually after he has spent several hours in hair and make-up, where a long blond wig and a pair of pointy ears are attached and he's been kitted out in a black suit of armour. He then stands in front of a green screen, conjuring up Middle-earth or whatever fantasy element is part of that day's story (orcs, elves etc), and utters lines such as, 'Whether or not his repentance in the Second Age was genuine, he chose to do evil again.' For The Survivors, the six-part Tasmanian murder mystery adapted from Jane Harper's 2020 novel of the same name, it was an altogether different (and much less expensive) story. Think boardies, thongs and a baby mullet. 'I can just rock up to work,' admits a cheery Vickers over Zoom from his home in London. 'I can just drive my own car to the set, get out and walk into the make-up truck. Whereas on Lord of the Rings, you're having to scan a pass, and then someone else scans another pass, and it's a very different experience.' Loading Despite being Melbourne born and bred, The Survivors is only the 32-year-old's third production in Australia, after the film Palm Beach and the TV series The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart. Unlike many Australian actors of his age, he didn't follow the usual path of Neighbours or Home and Away. Instead, he was accepted into London's prestigious Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, which meant he bypassed the local scene and landed, almost instantly, in the big time. 'I watched Neighbours religiously with my mum every night,' he says. 'Like, 6.30 it was The Simpsons on Channel 10 and then Neighbours. That's why I want to work more and more in Australia because you just inherently feel the connection to Australian stories, and because there's so much familiarity in these stories. 'There was a joy coming up in England, but actually, I genuinely wouldn't change that. The fact that I could go and watch Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart in the West End on a Wednesday night, that kind of thing you only get in London. But I certainly missed how quintessentially Australian a lot of Australian projects are.' He made it his mission to seek out Australian projects that he could film between seasons of The Lord of the Rings, and it was while he was on holiday that The Survivors came knocking. Loading 'I was coming back to Melbourne with my wife and my then, maybe, eight-month-old baby,' he says. 'And I got this meeting for a character returning to his coastal hometown with his four-month-old and his wife. And I was like, 'Well, I can't not throw my hat in the ring for this. This is eerily similar.'' The baby thing, by the way, is why he is so at ease as a young dad in The Survivors. 'Yes,' he says, laughing. 'Lots of bouncing.' Written and executive produced by Tony Ayres, The Survivors follows Kieran Elliot (Vickers), who returns with his partner and child to his small coastal Tasmanian hometown of Evelyn Bay, 15 years after two young men drowned, and a teenage girl disappeared on the same day. Kieran's relationship with his parents – and the community – is still fractured, so when a woman's body washes up on the beach, old wounds reopen in a town that is not quite ready to forgive or forget. 'He's a man who has lived with, and is always living with, the grief of his past,' says Vickers of his character. 'He's been through a really traumatic event at a seminal moment of his life, and he has forever lived with the repercussions of it. Not run away from it, but tried to start afresh. And he is then thrust back into a lot of the trauma of his past, and has to deal with a lot of unresolved emotion and a lot of unresolved pain.' For Ayres, a prolific film and TV writer, director and producer, with credits such as The Slap, Stateless and Nowhere Boys to his name, he knew Vickers had the role as soon as he walked into the audition. 'The director Cherie Nowlan and I were doing auditions in Melbourne, and as soon as Charlie walked into the room, we just looked at each other and we knew,' says Ayres. 'We both knew at exactly the same time. '[The character] Kieran is not an alpha male. He's actually a good, decent person. And Charlie is such a good, decent human being – I mean, he's a wonderful actor as well – but there was something so essentially Charlie in Kieran and Kieran in Charlie, that it just became like, 'Oh, well, it's a no-brainer. Clearly this is the guy who was meant to play this role.' Charlie is a very fine, nuanced, detailed actor and he has genuine emotional range.' Although Kieran sits at the centre of the story, Ayers was also drawn to the women in Harper's book. 'There's a monologue that Bronte's mother gives in the book, and it is so powerful and sensational and speaks to an anger that mothers feel at these unconscionable losses,' says Ayers. 'And it reminded me of Women of Troy, something at the scale of Greek tragedy.' Loading Ayers was also mindful to not create another murder mystery where women are overwhelmingly both the victim and the source of entertainment. 'If you're going to do it, then you have to do it in a way which respects the woman who died,' he says. 'The last thing we wanted to do was make a piece that was about a dead woman as entertainment. Certainly, that wasn't Jane's intention in the book, and certainly that wasn't our intention in making the TV series. 'We wanted to be part of a bigger conversation, which I think we need to have as a society about gendered roles and the limitations and constrictions of what it might mean to be a man or a woman and how we might look at ways of broadening that so we don't push people to the most extreme and violent situations.' What also makes The Survivors stand out is that while it features a well-known older cast – Robyn Malcolm, Damien Garvey, Catherine McClements, Martin Sacks and Don Hany – most of the younger cast are relatively unknown or, like Vickers, have worked overseas more than they have in Australia. Yerin Ha, for example, who plays Kieran's partner Mia, has been cast as one of the leads in the next season of Bridgerton, but her local work is limited. 'We had early 30s and late 50s as the two key demographics,' says Ayres. 'So when you're casting those demographics … the famous names that we have in Australia tend to be in their early 50s. And that's the most recognisable talent pool, and we don't have as many names who are younger at the moment.' Loading Ayres thinks the reason many younger local actors are struggling to find recognition is the lack of feature films being made in Australia and then, conversely, the sheer amount of TV being made in general. 'The world that we live in is so noisy, there's so many shows,' says Ayres. 'It's harder for a show to break out. And unless a show breaks out, the actors don't become stars. Interestingly, I think we're seeing more stars coming from TV now – happily, Murray Bartlett came out of season one of The White Lotus – but there are relatively few breakout TV shows.'
