As the fortunes of McCallum Real Estate rise and fall, so do the beats of life in Tasmania for perennially fretful Daniel McCallum (Luke McGregor) and his devil-may-care best bud Emma Dawes (Celia Pacquola) in Logie Award-nominated Rosehaven.
TV WEEK caught up with the pair as season three gets underway.
In the first episode, Daniel freaks out when the agency’s website gets a negative review. Have you ever posted a bad write-up?
LUKE: There have been a couple of times when I’ve been to a restaurant and had a bad experience and looked to write it up, but I always chicken out. I remember I had an Uber driver once who crashed into a car. He was changing lanes, didn’t look properly, and scratched against a car. And I still gave him five stars!
CELIA: I think I’m chicken too. What if it backfires? What if they write back, “You know, I had a real bad day…”
Rosehaven stars Luke McGregor and Celia Pacquola (Image: ABC).
A key prop in the second episode is the late Janine’s “favourite chair”. Do you have a prized piece of furniture?
C: My favourite chair in my house is my bed. I do “bedmin”, which is admin, but in bed. I sit on my bed with a coffee on the side like it’s a desk. Imagine an office filled with beds rather than cubicles. Wouldn’t that be the best?
Later this season, a pig appears. Who’s better with animals?
C: I basically got into showbiz so I could be near animals because I’m not responsible enough to have animals in my own life. I’m going to say I’m at better working with animals purely based on the fact that Ned the pig did once sneeze in Luke’s face.
L: He was resting his head on my shoulder and I turned around and went, ‘Aww!’ and he sneezed right in my mouth.
C: Mind you, that was very funny – so maybe Luke is actually better at working with animals!
“I basically got into showbiz so I could be near animals,” Celia says (Image: ABC).
What’s it like to shoot in Tasmania? Isn’t it usually cold in the winter?
C: Look, two pairs of thermals is never enough. You know? If I was down to one pair of thermals, it was a win. Heat packs as well, tiny hot water bottles hidden everywhere. But um, it’s nice. At least we’re prepared, we’re dressed. We don’t dress like it’s hot, so in our show, you never see anyone’s arms. We’re always covered, head to toe. But this time around, it wasn’t the cold that bothered us. We had issues with wind and fog. So Tassie really messed it up for us. It gave us no rain, but it gave us wind and fog.
L: Really beautiful landscape but all you can see is sort of grey.
C: It’s like you just put your head inside pillowcase, kind of.
Three seasons in, do the locals take you for granted or is it still novel for everyone having you involved in shooting?
L: We had one guy who drove past in a ute and he yelled out. ‘Get a real job!’ Which hurt our feelings!
C: But we also had a scary looking man making judgement, so older, from the country, he did look a bit scary, right? He’d come up and go, ‘You know what I like about your show?’ ‘What?’ ‘It’s a real celebration of platonic love,’ and that was brilliant, but I feel like they like us more because the first series, they were sort of suspicious of us because you know, they didn’t know what we were making and ‘Are you here to make fun of us?’ And then the second time around it was like, ‘Oh, there are those guys from that show. They’re all right.’ And then the third time around, they’re like, ‘They got nominated for Logies. They must be pretty awesome!’
L: You can go to Geeveston now and get yourself some unlicensed jam.
C: Actually, this was the first time where we had only one day, which was the one where we were filming in Geeveston, like people watching, which has never happened before. Usually they just don’t give a shit. Other than, like, ‘Can you please let us through so we can get to our place.’ This is the first time where we actually had people peeking out of windows and so…
L: We felt like real people on a set.
Celia and Luke rugged up on the set of Rosehaven (Image: ABC).
In the show, Grace, Danny’s girlfriend tries to tell Emma a secret about her past relationship but Emma warns her that’s not a good idea. So in real life, are you able to keep secrets from each other or is that just impossible?
C: Anything you want to tell me?
L: If someone tells me something about Ceals, something that involved you in any way, you’re going to hear about it. But if someone says, ‘Don’t tell anyone this,’ I’m pretty good at keeping it.
C: You’re just trying to protect yourself, let’s face it.
L: I don’t know. Usually and I don’t know what the rule is because I don’t know if you’d be betraying someone else by doing it, but I feel like Ceals and I have a lot of stuff where it’s just like, ‘Listen, this is a secret, but I’m going to tell you!’
C: Yeah!
L: If any of our friends are reading or listening to this, just know that if you tell me something, I’m probably going to tell Ceals!
C: And that’s the thing. It’s very even. And we’ve got a lot like we could really bring each other down. But we’d know one of us is going down.
L: And you know more about me than anyone else. I just don’t think you have any evil files.
C: It’s that and I also have a horrifically bad memory. So maybe it’s, a lot of those files might not exist anymore. That’s the thing about having a really bad memory, is that when you tell me stuff, it’s like I’m hearing it for the first time. Yeah, I don’t think we’ve got any…
L: Anything negative.
C: Yeah. That thing about secrets is like one of his good qualities is he would tell me everything, which also can be like, I know that there’s no issues or something because we talk about everything and it’s all up front and then so there’s no issue. It’s all upfront and then we deal with it so that it doesn’t feel like there’s any…It’s really freeing. I’m not paranoid about, you know, is he having a good time, do you want to be somewhere else or this kind of stuff, so it’s just full trust is a very endearing thing.
“You know more about me than anyone else. I just don’t think you have any evil files,” Luke says of his co-star Celia (Image: ABC).
Rosehaven airs Wendesday, 8:30pm, on ABC, COMEDY.
