William McInnes does a mean Johnny Cash. As director Shawn Seet prepares the next shot on Deep Water, SBS's new crime drama, the SeaChange star serenades his co-stars, expatriate Australian actors Noah Taylor (Game of Thrones) and Yael Stone (Orange is the New Black) with snatches from the Man in Black's songbook. That McInnes has the silver thatch and demonstrative girth of a senior copper only adds to the moment's unexpectedness.
"He's got a fine voice," notes Taylor, long a musician himself, as we wander a few minutes later through what was once the Malabar police station in Sydney's south-eastern suburbs. Officially decommissioned but put back together as a series of sets, the space matches a pair of programs that uses the true crimes of the past to deliver both a contemporary fictional mystery and a much needed corrective to the city's history.
Deep Water is not just a four-part series, beginning Wednesday, October 5, it's also a feature length documentary, Deep Water – The Real Story, which airs on Sunday, October 16, after the drama has concluded. The bloody present day murder that launches the investigation of Taylor and Stone's police detectives, Nick Manning and Tori Lustigman, has ties to a wave of gay hate attacks and murders in the 1980s and 1990s that echo real life events held up to scrutiny by the documentary.
"We really wanted to tell the story in the present day as a crime thriller, but unpick cold cases from the '80s and '90s," explains Miranda Dear, one of the show's producers and the head of drama at Blackfella Films (First Australians, Redfern Now). "Our reason for that was to hold a mirror up, otherwise it's too easy for audiences to say, 'that was then, and our society isn't like that anymore'. We wanted to ask if things had changed as much as people thought they had."
The turns of the investigation in Deep Water reveal links to a series of homophobic bashings and killings 25 years prior, which matches historic events in Sydney's eastern suburbs where attacks on young gay men, often in public spaces at night, numbered in the thousands, and resulted in dozens of death. In many cases the crimes were barely investigated, or not even reported by victims who feared discrimination. No one with any say wanted to know.
"That's the crux of the story. It's not directly pointing fingers, but the police and the media and parts of society were complicit," says Taylor. "Whenever there's something really troubling in any society the norm is to explain it away as something less than it is because otherwise you open a can of worms, and unfortunately it often takes a long time for those things to come out."
It was the story's historic inspiration, along with how impressed he was with Redfern Now and Blackfella Films, which brought the 47-year-old Taylor back to Australian television more than a quarter century after starring in the Kennedy Miller mini-series Bangkok Hilton alongside Nicole Kidman.
"It's pretty accepted these days that TV can be really great, and there's a real interest these days in transferring genre pieces internationally," says Taylor, whose recent international television credits include Peaky Blinders and Powers. "Content doesn't just have to cater to a local audience. If you make something interesting it will translate via an international audience."
"It felt like a real coup to get Yael and Noah," says Dear, and the pair have a peppery back-and-forth in their interaction on screen. Stone's Tori is attentive, motivated and naturally compassionate, while Taylor's Nick has an almost doleful calm. "Beaten to death around midnight," he notes in an early scene, deliberately suggesting a world weariness that's long permeated the police genre.
"I've always been a big fan of crime fiction and crime films and TV cop shows, but I wasn't interested in reinventing the wheel," admits Taylor. "I wanted to make Nick a middle-aged, slightly out of time character, somewhat at odds with how policing is now. In the old cop's world he was a new cop, and now he finds himself perceived as being slightly outdated in Tori's eyes."
Taylor, whose moustache for the role is as good at identifying Nick's profession as the character's badge, does "a little bit of running and a little bit of gunning", but he didn't want his performance to overwhelm the scripts and the salient points they make about how our worst intentions can readily flourish.
"I like to honour the genre and I'm not put off by cliches. People want to see a certain idea of the cowboy, the villain, or the policeman. When you make them too radically different they're almost a little bit disappointing," Taylor observes. "I wanted to be minimal – I like police detectives who are neutral, with the story expanding around them."
WHAT Deep Water
WHEN SBS, Wednesday and Thursday, 8.30pm