Young Aussie Underground stars go nova

 

Channel 10's Underground: The Julian Assange Story stars Jordan Raskopoulos, Alex Williams and Callan McAulliffe. Pic supplied/Channel 10. Source: Herald Sun

The Daily Telegraph reports

The magic dust surrounding the hit Aussie TV movie Underground: The Julian Assange Story continues to sparkle for its young cast, with all three male leads snapped up by major US talent agencies.

Callan McAuliffe, Benedict Samuel and Alex Williams (who played the title role) have all nabbed Hollywood representation from agencies CAA, WME and IFA respectively.

The big breaks come fresh from the TV movie's critical and commercial success both here and abroad, with the Channel Ten flick recently drawing rave reviews at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Its actors subsequently earned their fair share of praise, with the three young male leads said to have instantly caught the attention of some Hollywood heavyweights.

Benedict - a NIDA grad - also has a stint on Home and Away under his belt as well as the mini-series Paper Giants: The Birth Of Cleo and will now be managed by WME's Boomer Malkin, who also counts Christian Bale, Joaquin Phoenix, Jude Law and fellow Aussie Rachael Taylor amongst his clients.

Having raised his profile on the back of being cast as a young Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby, McAuliffe has joined CAA under talent agent Tracy Brennan (who also manages Jennifer Lawrence) while Williams recently inked a deal with the Ilene Feldman Agency (IFA), which also looks after Ryan Gosling and Josh Hartnett.

McAuliffe also starred in 2011's sci-fi thriller I Am Number Four and in Rob Reiner's romcom Flipped in 2010.

Meanwhile, Benedict's older brother Xavier Samuel has also made a big impression Stateside with roles in the final two Twilight sagas as well as the upcoming drama Two Mothers (formerly The Grandmothers) opposite Naomi Watts.

Q&A with Rachel Griffiths

Rachel Griffiths in Underground.

Paul Kalina, The Sydney Morning Herald, reports

What did you make of Underground when you read the script?

It's really quite a critical study for me. Apart from the giant question, which was there from the moment Julian stepped onto the world stage - which is ''What makes a man like that?'' - it's very clever. It's not trying to tell a big story. It's a fragment of a biography. It focuses on a critical point.

What did it tell you about how much activism has changed?

For me, sociologically and historically, what's interesting is the schism in time between an organic and analog activism, represented by Christine parading outside an embassy trying to draw attention to what she feels is a wrong, and reaching what Julian sees, in the movie, as a certain kind of futility, the energy of the baby-boomer optimism waning in its ageing years - the voices aren't as clear, the feelings between people to create protest aren't as strong. A point where he recognises a new activism of information in a digital age.

You have protested yourself against gambling in Melbourne.

I did an incredibly analog protest at Crown. It couldn't have been more analog. [That was] old-school protesting. It goes back to the mediaeval girl on a white horse, naked, protesting a tax. It's ancient and it's very female because it requires community. It uses voice and body and organisation. But in this moment, in Julian's mind's eye, the future that he can see is one where the power to protest lies in disseminating information and using it against those that want to keep it.

Do you think it works?

If we move forward to the Arab Spring, to how Twitter is being used in Iran, to non-traceable satellite phone technology being used so massacres in Syria cannot be kept from either the West or their own people, it's been a more powerful tool. It's destroying secrecy. How many boys are being liberated because they're finding out they weren't the only one being molested by their parish priest? I think that is so positive. It's very masculine, it's digital, unemotional and it's the strength and weakness of Julian. I don't … believe all information should be in the public arena, but who decides? Who has that power?

Portrait of a teen hacker

Alex Williams, who plays Julian Assange in Underground, won the part in his first audition after graduating from drama school.

Paul Kalina, The Sydney Morning Herald, reports

Everyone, it seems, has an opinion about Julian Assange. While the producer of Channel Ten's feature-length biopic chooses her words carefully as she shows the Green Guide around one of the Melbourne Underground locations that's doubling as hippie outpost Emerald circa 1979, actor Anthony LaPaglia just can't help himself

Immersed in a dog-eared paperback in his private trailer, LaPaglia is happy to share his views about the controversial WikiLeaks founder. He believes that far from being the traitor that many world leaders insist him to be, Assange is a beacon of light for exposing sensitive military secrets the public has the right to know about.

The Adelaide-born actor, who has spent most of the past two decades working in the US, proffers his own list of traitors who deserve to be put on trial for war crimes. It's a list that includes senior figures of past and present US governments.

LaPaglia says he would love to meet and talk to Assange; so, too - albeit for entirely different reasons - does Detective Ken Roberts, LaPaglia's character in Underground: The Julian Assange Story.

Roberts is a shaggy cop who's about to discover just how ill-equipped he is to tackle the new frontier of cyber crime. The irony of playing Assange's would-be nemesis isn't lost on LaPaglia.

With a blockbuster movie still years away - last year Steven Spielberg acquired the rights to WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy by Guardian journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding - Matchbox Pictures was interested in developing a quick-turnaround film about Assange.

To circumvent the thorny legal issues that surround Assange, who is holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, the producers decided to focus on a pivotal two-year span of his teenage years, a period defined by momentous events in Assange's personal life and his initiation into the clandestine world of computer hacking.

As documented in Suelette Dreyfus' 1997 book Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier, Assange, using the pseudonym Mendax, first came to the attention of authorities in the late 1980s, when he and a posse of international hackers infiltrated what were supposed to be secure websites.

As the film tells it, their modus operandi was to look around but not steal anything. But having stumbled upon military intelligence that anticipated the civilian casualties of the first Gulf War, the experience galvanised Assange into his next act.

Writ large in this small slice of Assange's life are the larger themes that dominate the current debates about him and WikiLeaks.

For LaPaglia, Underground is an opportunity for audiences to engage with a perspective that challenges the one-sided profiles that have emerged since Assange went into hiding following the publication of classified Pentagon material and allegations of sex offences in Sweden, for which formal charges are yet to be made.

Playing Assange is newcomer Alex Williams, who landed the role after his first audition since graduating from the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts at the end of last year. With his cleanly parted fair hair and soft voice, Williams bears an uncanny resemblance to Assange.

To portray him, Williams wanted to understand as much as he could about Assange's activities as a fledgling hacker. But he also wanted to detach himself from the contemporary figure.

''There's another 20 years of hacking and going around the world, dealing with journalists and governments,'' Williams says. ''He's much freer in this. I didn't want to play a 20-year-old or 40-year-old Julian Assange, I just wanted to play him as a teenager.''

Assange, he says, was ''an intense dude'' who saw the internet as a ''whole new frontier of exploration''.

Unlike the stereotype of computer buffs as nerdy, friendless misfits, he and his fellow hackers were regarded as cool - the punks of their day.

Rachel Griffiths, who plays Assange's mother, Christine, has little doubt of the defining role his mother played in nurturing his rebelliousness and moral backbone. Assange's itinerant childhood was anything but conventional or cosseted, and Griffiths believes the young Assange was inspired by the activism of his mother, who was a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War and the nuclear arms race. She, in turn, was impressed with his developing political conscience.

''There's part of her that's the true believer, but the argument that [attending rallies] is not a powerful way to lobby must have crossed her mind,'' Griffiths says. ''I think she's in awe of the possibilities … of a world where you can tweet a revolution, and in which it's becoming increasingly hard for people to hide what they're doing.''

Griffiths has a clear memory of what she thought the first time she heard of Assange: ''That guy must have an interesting mother.

''I viewed him with this kind of psychological curiosity. What makes a man like that? I thought, that man doesn't have a father and must have an interesting mother because there is some intrinsic molecular revulsion of authority in that man. It's compulsive. It's in his DNA.''

Unsurprisingly, in light of the headlines that the Assange matter continues to generate, Underground has attracted considerable interest around the globe. Unusually for a telemovie that was made in only five weeks on the smell of an oily rag, it was invited to screen at the recent Toronto International Film Festival, where it was well received by critics.

For Channel Ten, it promises to be a much-needed salve from the drubbing its latest batch of low-rent reality shows have received, while for viewers, it's a challenge to the widespread perception of Assange as a cold, callous - and possibly immoral - whistleblower with a chequered past.

''What I like about doing this film,'' Williams says, ''is that most people won't see any of this portrayed in the news or by a journalist writing a story.''

Rachel Griffiths has revitalising new role

Rachel Griffiths starred in Six Feet Under and Brothers and Sisters. Picture: Channel 10 Source: National Features

Colin Vickery, The Daily Telegraph, reports

It is time for Rachel Griffiths to spread her wings. The award-winning actress has spent the past decade starring in two highly acclaimed TV shows - Six Feet Under and Brothers and Sisters.

Those two shows have brought Griffiths widespread acclaim and a healthy pay cheque, but they have also restricted her acting options.

Playing the same characters - Brenda Chenowith and Sarah Walker - for five years at a time has its downside.

Now Griffiths is starting afresh. Last October, she made her Broadway debut in the stage play Other Desert Cities.

And on Sunday, she stars as mum Christine Assange in Underground: The Julian Assange Story.

Underground is the first of what Griffiths hopes will be a string of one-off film and TV roles that will revitalise her acting.

Griffiths and husband Andrew Taylor had just returned to Australia when the Underground producers came knocking. 

The couple have three children - Banjo, 8, Adelaide, 7, and three-year-old Clementine.

Griffiths had planned to have time off, and Taylor is keen to resume his career as an artist.

"It (the Underground offer) came out of the blue," Griffiths says.

"I was really just coming back to Australia to chill out for a while. I didn't expect to work.

"I've been really lucky to do two big five-year shows but now I'm really loving doing these smaller projects."

Channel 10 is banking on Underground to turn around its 2012 ratings fortunes.

The Aussie telemovie heads up Ten's "Take a Fresh Look" campaign, which also includes a swag of fast-tracked US shows.

Ten is unleashing US sitcoms The New Normal and Ben & Kate, as well as dramas Vegas and Emily Owens M.D. plus the second series of Emmy-winning Homeland.

It comes after the network's horror stretch with ratings duds.

Underground is the jewel in Ten's crown. It has an outstanding pedigree.

Writer/director Robert Connolly's credits include The Slap and Balibo.

Best of all, it stars Aussies-made-good-in-Hollywood Rachel Griffiths and Anthony LaPaglia.

Underground charts the early years of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Newcomer Alex Williams plays the teenage computer hacker, Griffiths is mum Christine, and LaPaglia is detective Ken Roberts.

Signing Griffiths was a coup for the makers of Underground.

Underground shows that Christine Assange is as interesting a person as son Julian.

Christine is constantly on the move in fear of being tracked down by a former partner who has links to a cult. She is also a political activist, but one whose methods seem way too old-school for her hi-tech son.

"Christine has that activism; she's an artist, she was unconventional," Griffiths says.

"She was also very much a tiger mum when it came to defending Julian and protecting him from the dark powers in their lives."

Griffiths admits she knew little of Assange's teenage years before she read the script to Underground.

Christine protests by waving banners and building puppets. Julian can see that hacking top-secret US government websites is a far more effective way to cause havoc.

"I think a lot of people are intrigued about what made Julian (the way he is)," Griffiths says.

"When I first became aware of Julian I thought, 'That guy did not grow up with a father'.

"He had no legitimate source of authority in his life.

"This (Underground) is the moment where he became Julian Assange with a capital J and a capital A."

A week ago it was announced that Griffiths had signed to new Disney movie Saving Mr Banks, starring Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson.

Griffiths will play Mary Poppins author P.L. Travers' aunt.

"I've had an amazing experience in Hollywood and I've worked with some incredible people," Griffiths says.

"I've never been told I'm not pretty enough and I've never been told I'm too fat - despite putting on 60 pounds (22kg) with my second child.

"I've only ever been empowered and celebrated and rewarded." 

--- Underground: The Julian Assange Story, Channel 10, Sunday, 8.30pm

----

* A REVELATORY PROTEST *

RACHEL Griffiths is no stranger to protest.

The Oscar-winning actor made headlines in 1997 when she flashed her breasts at the opening of Melbourne's Crown casino.

Griffiths ripped off a kimono and paraded around in a loin cloth and a crown of thorns in front of a crowd that included then-Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett.

Griffiths' strip-protest reportedly had nothing to do with any anti-gambling stance.

Instead it was motivated by the lack of transparency about the casino deal between the Victorian Government and Crown. Griffiths said the Government had "succeeded in raping our state of its dignity, compassion and sense of community".

When she was asked why nudity was the best way to express her feelings, she said: "If I didn't flash my t--s, you wouldn't have put me in the paper."

Fifteen years later, Griffiths says she is proud of taking a stand.

"Maybe 100,000 naked women wouldn't have made a difference to that casino going up, but it is important to have a voice of dissent," she says.

"I don't believe there is a reason for a government and a private entity to ever have agreements that voters should not be able to peruse."

LaPaglia dumps Tarantino for Assange

Anthony LaPaglia has pulled out of Quentin Tarantino's new film after it conflicted with shooting for the Julian Assange biopic Underground. Source: AdelaideNow

Neala Johnson, News Limited Network, reports

Aussie actor Anthony LaPaglia has dumped heavyweight director Quentin Tarantino for an Australian TV movie.

LA-based LaPaglia, home to launch his new Australian film Mental, was to play a small part in Tarantino's upcoming film Django Unchained, which stars Jamie Foxx as a freed slave-turned-bounty hunter.

But when his one day of shooting with Tarantino was continually pushed back, threatening his commitment to local production Underground, about Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, LaPaglia faced a "tough decision''.

"For me to pull out of Underground would have hurt it,'' LaPaglia said in Melbourne yesterday. "They'd raised the money partially on me and Rachel Griffiths (being involved). They were about to start shooting and it would have created mayhem and may have shut the film down.

"The people at Django, their attitude more or less was, 'Just dump the other film', but I couldn't do it out of respect to (director) Rob Connolly, out of respect to the material, out of respect to the commitment I'd made.''

Following speculation in Hollywood that Tarantino may not complete Django Unchained in time for its Christmas Day release in the US, LaPaglia, 53, wondered if he could have had the best of both worlds.

"The (Django) production was just out of control, over-budget it was everywhere. I had to formally withdraw. They recast it and they still haven't shot anything. I could have said nothing and just hung out I could be there shooting it now.''

A producer on Django posted online that the film finished shooting on July 26.

"I'm just happy I got it,'' said LaPaglia, who had rehearsed his part with Tarantino and Foxx. "I had as much fun being a part of the film, probably more fun, than even shooting it. Quentin is brilliant and I love him. That's just the way it goes.''

Underground will screen on Channel 10 later this year. Django is scheduled to open in Australia on January 24.

Griffiths, LaPaglia for Assange telemovie

Rachel Griffiths has joined the cast of Underground.

The Age reports

A telemovie about the early life of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange starring Rachel Griffiths and Anthony LaPaglia will begin filming around Melbourne shortly.

Network Ten announced newcomer Alex Williams has been cast to play the young Assange in Underground, with Griffiths taking the role of his mother Christine Assange and LaPaglia a policeman investigating Assange's hacking abilities.

"Everyone has an opinion about Julian Assange," said Ten executive producer Rick Maier in a statement.

"This film will deliver a compelling insight into who Julian is, and how he became one of the most talked-about figures of our time."

Written and directed by AFI Award-winning filmmaker Robert Connolly (Balibo, The Slap), Underground will be screened on Ten in the second half of 2012.

Movie to open window on young Melbourne hackers

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Picture: Lefteris Pitarakis Source: AP

The Herald Sun reports

AWARD-winning Aussie director Robert Connolly is writing the script for a Channel 10 telemovie based on the teenage years of celebrity computer hacker Julian Assange.
Underground will be based on the novel of the same name.

Connolly said he was astonished by Melbourne's 1980s "hacking community".

"It was an incredible time and ... Melbourne was pretty much the world's centre for computer hacking."

The Balibo director said he was approached to work on the Melbourne-based drama after directing episodes of successful Aunty series The Slap. "It feels like a golden era of television again and it is great to be a part of it."