Interview by Rafy Mediavilla – “Troppo” (Freevee) S1 – Actor/Producer Thomas Jane & Actress Nicole Chamoun talk on surviving the Wild-lands. Out Now On Amazon Freevee. #Troppo
Troppo is the story of Ted Conkaffey, played by Thomas Jane (The Expanse, The Vanished), an ex-cop falsely accused of committing a disturbing crime, who has escaped to hide away in the tropics of Far North Queensland. As he tries to avoid discovery, he’s drawn into investigating a wild murder and a missing person, alongside a complicated woman named Amanda Pharrell (played by Nicole Chamoun), with dark secrets of her own. Adapted for television by creator Yolanda Ramke, Troppo is based on the book Crimson Lake, the first novel of a gripping contemporary crime series set in Queensland, Australia, and written by #1 New York Times bestselling author Candice Fox.
Criticólogos:
I am completely freaked out by snakes, alligators, and even small lizards. So I want to know, would you guys survive in an environment like this, what are you’re scared off?
Thomas Jane:
Well, it’s, you know, I guess that feeds into the title of the show, which is Troppo, which is an Australian slang for literally being driven crazy by the tropical heat. And it’s it takes they are made of strong stuff. The Australians, especially the Australians who live in the northern part of the country, they are a different breed. They do. They are tough. They are tough people and they have to be in order to just survive up there. I mean, every other animal could kill you. And I like them. I love the Australians, probably in large part because of that, because they’re just tough sons of bitches and their great sense of humor, too.
Nicole Chamoun:
Yeah, I wouldn’t survive. You do. Your Thomas is absolutely right. Like you have to be you have to have your wits about you all the time. And that’s exhausting. And I like that. I’m happy. I mean, it was so much fun to play with the animals and but to know that we were safe to do so gave me the freedom. And it was like the snakes and the God. The lizards and the geese and the dogs. And it was awesome. It was like being in a zoo every day.
Thomas Jane:
I mean, I got to play with the geese. But Nicole, it all seemed like every other day she was surrounded by snakes always. Venomous snakes like snakes that will kill you.
Nicole Chamoun:
Yeah. Yeah. The King Brown.
Criticólogos:
In your opinion, what are their motivations? What does your character have to prove through this investigation?
Nicole Chamoun:
I think I think my character’s just trying to find her identity and find out who she is outside of this really awful experience that that happened. Yeah, I think I think her relationship with loss is really important by solving that story. I think, it means a lot to her and her story, but I think it’s about identity and just finding a place in the world. I think she was taken out of it at a really young age, going to jail at 15. But, you know, her sense of self was completely shattered. And so I just think she’s trying to find out who she is.
Thomas Jane:
There’s a number of different mysteries in in the show that Candice Fox is really expertly woven together to form the first novel, Crimson Lake. And you know, it’s an interesting question because when you’re trying to solve a mystery, in my opinion, if it’s in any good stories, any good, you’re actually trying to solve the mystery of your own life. And these two have been broken by traumatic experiences.
Very different, very different people, very different experiences. But the outcome was the same for both of them. They have been shattered, their lives have been shattered, and they deal with it in different ways. And really, they’re so different as characters, but they have that one thing in common. And so that becomes the thing that really they can’t even really talk to other people because they haven’t been they haven’t been through that trial by fire.
Criticólogos:
Question for Thomas: You are producing now, when you put the producer hat on, how important is it for you to stay as faithful as you can, given the constraints of TV obviously, to the source material?
Thomas Jane:
Right, there are very different mediums, you’re already up against it trying to adapt a novel into a film or a graphic novel into a film. They’re already up against some challenges because you do have to reshape the story a little bit in order to just simply make it fit into a window that, you know, we’ve got, you know, an hour to tell this story and we got 8 hours total and we got to cram that novel into there so that you’re already up against it. I think it’s for me, very important that I try to protect what we love most about the novel. You know, what we love most about the material, the characters, the main events that have happened to these characters and the story Overall. Do you really want to protect that and do? And there’s a lot of different cooks in the kitchen. You know, there’s producers who are watching the clock. There’s different actors. There’s directors who bring so.
Why it’s fun. And when we started our company, Renegade, in 2019 with Courtney Penn about because we wanted the opportunity to protect the original material that we see get adapted so many times. You know, in the I mean, there’s countless novels, countless graphic novels, countless movies are then re adapted. And we want to, you know, we have our opportunity to plant the flag and say, this is a damn story and we’re not going to change it.
Nicole Chamoun:
The Australian fans of the novel who have seen it, love it like it’s been. It’s been so overwhelmingly positive. It’s made me very happy, very high.
See the interview below:
