It’s finally here! The hotly anticipated NCIS Sydney is premiering tonight. The Paramount show is the first in the franchise to be filmed outside of the US (excluding Hawaii) and will be shown at prime time in the US on CBS as well as here in Australia.
With global fame soon to be calling their names, B&T spoke to the cast of NCIS Sydney whilst they still had the time for trade mags like ourselves.
NCIS might be about as classically American as it gets, but actor Mavournee Hazel (previously on Neighbours), told B&T that this iteration is very much Aussie.
“I feel like audiences can expect quintessential Australian landscape landscapes – we’ve got Galahs and Koalas and Kangaroo,” she says.
“We’ve got the beautiful Sydney Harbour Bridge that we were lucky enough to have on our doorstep and NCIS headquarters is on a pier”.
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Viewers can also expect Australian humour, however this is “very different from American humour” Hazel warns.
So different in fact that there was an on-set coach to help with the difference in comedic timings between the two dialects.
“We had a dialect coach on set who actually is American, she helped with comedic timings -. just those little differences on how Americans set off a joke, like the cadence of how they talk and how they set up comedic timings is very different to ours”.
Another new language Hazel had to learn was the famously technical language on the show.
Her character Blue – or Bluebird – is somewhat of a genius, so capturing than fanatical obsession with technical detail was very important Hazel said.
She asked herself “What do I geek out on like, what do I get nerdy about?” and the answer that came out was “fragrance”.
“I love fragrance. And I love perfume – I used to work at a perfumery. I’m fascinated by the process of extraction and distilling and tradition”.
“That’s the level of passion that I need to have when I’m talking about these things,” Hazel says of Blue’s insatiably fascination with forensic crime.
Whilst NCIS is known as being quite tough and harsh, actor Tuuli Narkle (Mystery Road: Origin, Bad Behaviour) said the reality was very different.
“This is the biggest job that I’ve had to date. And I was quite scared stepping on [set]. But I just felt like all of the cast just immediately clicked together. And we got to the first read through and we were all kind of nervous, and we were sharing this energy, but it was beautiful. Because you could see how much it meant to each of us individually, to get to be a part of this crazy, incredible franchise”.
British actor Sean Sagar (The Covenant, Fate: The Winx Saga) said the script and the environment really helped settle his nerves at filming in Australia.
“It’s the best experience that I’ve had hands down in my career. I feel like coming over here was nerve wracking because it was leaving home, leaving family, so to come here and be so welcomed by the cost and the crew and also filming in such beautiful locations was great. And the script has made it easy. Everything that Morgan [Morgan O’neill] put down on paper and all the rest of the writing team just was so easy to flow off the tongue and just made life a lot easier for us to become these characters”.
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