Burning brighter
For the second season of Bay of Fires, Marta Dusseldorp revisits a series where she’s more than just the star. She tells DQ about expanding the show’s story, juggling multiple roles behind the scenes and catering for some unexpected visitors.
It’s a piece of advice Marta Dusseldorp isn’t likely to forget in a hurry. The Australian star was on the Tasmanian set of Bay of Fires, filming a season two scene that finds her character Stella and Toby Leonard Moore’s Jeremiah moving a body bag – weighing heavy with a corpse inside – onto a truck before picking up another.
Then during one take, they noticed a mysterious figure standing nearby, smoking a cigarette. “We keep acting, because we’re professionals, and this guy we’ve never seen before just looks at us and goes, ‘That’s a shit way to move a body,’ and walks out,” she tells DQ.
Sadly, that particular take didn’t make the final cut. “But it was just one of those moments where I went, ‘This place is solid gold. There’s nowhere else I’d rather be.’”
Co-created, written, produced by and starring Dusseldorp, Bay of Fires was Australian streamer ABC iview’s most watched local drama of 2023, enthralling viewers with the trials and tribulations of Stella and her two children when their lives are suddenly upended and they are forced to relocate to the town of Mystery Bay.
There, the locals – who dub the town ‘Misery Bay’ – are decidedly unwelcoming, and Stella soon discovers that they, like her, are part of a witness-protection scheme, and many are criminals themselves. Stella is then forced to adapt to her new town and its eccentric inhabitants while protecting her two children and avoiding detection from those out to get her.
At the start of S2, which debuted on ABC earlier this month, no one has tried to kill her for several months, she has a Thursday date night with Jeremiah and the town is prospering under her guidance as the Queen of Mystery Bay. But when she finds herself caught in the crossfire of an unhinged bee-keeping drug lord, a maniacal millenarian doomsday cult, the resurrection of a former nemesis and a growing civil war in the town, it dawns on Stella that she might be the cause of her own nightmare.
“The first season was about imprisonment, and in the second season we wanted to make it about freedom,” Dusseldorp says. “What’s interesting is we would always think of something and go, ‘So what would be the opposite of that?’ Not for the sake of it, but because life is hard and tough and a little bit shit sometimes. So what happens if you think she’s going to get freedom, but in the end she can’t?
“What I wanted was for Stella to be less reactive. Sometimes it means she has to let go of the things she loves, and other times she fights to the death. The amount of people she accidentally killed, it’s sad and it adds up. She buries people and she digs people up – [not just literally but also metaphorically] with her memories and her actions.
The creative team – Dusseldorp and co-creators Andrew Knight and Max Dann – were also careful not to retread familiar ground in S2. This was particularly true of Stella’s relationship with her children, Otis (Imi Mbedla) and Iris (Ava Caryofyllis). “It was like, ‘Let’s advance their relationships.’ Let’s have her listen to them. Let’s have her understand that partly who she is has made them who they are. That is who they are now, and their skills can benefit her,” Dusseldorp explains.
“Sometimes I wish Stella would just sit down and listen, be a little bit quiet, but that’s when we put in a Tasmanian devil noise, which sounds like a ghost meeting a pterodactyl and a rabid dog. It’s this crazy sound they make at night when they’re feeding, so whenever it’s relaxed in the show, I just put one of those in the background to remind people that, ‘Yeah, this ain’t gonna last.’”
There’s also a greater focus on members of the wider community, many of whom have their own storylines through the season, with each feeding back into the overall narrative.
“We wanted to delight the audience, and now that everyone knows who they are, I also wanted complicity,” the actor adds. “I wanted the audience to be complicit with us in the duality of our characters. I wanted them inside our secrets so they could delight in that as well.”
Opening with the titles ‘Part Nine,’ it’s clear S2 is very much a continuation of the first season’s story. In fact, it was put into development even before the show debuted in 2023, while a potential third run has already been mapped out in the hope of another renewal. Dusseldorp’s Archipelago Productions and Fremantle Australia produce the series, with Fremantle also selling the series to buyers including ITV in the UK.
Three new writers – Josephine Dee Barrett, Romina Accurso and Hannah Samuel – also joined the team for season two, bringing their “beautiful new voices and a very strong female energy” to the show.
“I think the women in this season have really come up,” Dusseldorp says, particularly in relation to Magda and Heather, played by Pamela Rabe and Roz Hammond, respectively. “I wanted to understand who they were to each other, why they were together and what would make them possibly fall apart, so we really examined that.
“We don’t just go into plot, driving through each of the tasks Stella has to go through. We also look at what that does to people and what are the ramifications. Retribution is our overall arc – what is it when you make a decision in your life that you need to rectify?”
High off the back of a hit first season, Dusseldorp admits she had forgotten quite what an effort making the show was when she returned for S2, particularly with the weight of her multiple roles. “It was like when I went into labour with my second child and felt that first contraction. I went, ‘Oh no, I’m not doing this again.’ Only four-and-a-half hours later, it was over and she was gorgeous. Now she’s 15. So it was a little bit like going back into labour,” she jokes.
“It was a much colder winter and I did need to have a bath every night to defrost, but also to stay calm. The stakes are high. But my coproducer, my co-creators and my co-actors, all the HODs, they know exactly what they’re doing. I probably don’t need to stress.”
Dusseldorp was able to lean on fellow producer Fiona McConaghy for support, with the understanding she didn’t need to stay on set after a 14-hour shoot. “But then there were days that I had off and I would just go in as a producer and sit with the director, see that everyone was OK, make sure people had what they needed – and our catering was amazing. So I got a free meal as well, which was awesome.”
The crew returned to the western Tasmanian towns of Zeehan and Queenstown to shoot Bay of Fires, with the Gaiety Theatre in Zeehan just one of the iconic locations in the series. Dusseldorp says she was “really pushing” the locations this season, so characters rarely sit at home. “I’m not interested in that at all,” she notes.
Yet some fictional locales attracted more than just the characters in the series, with a pop-up bakery and butcher’s shop drawing unassuming visitors hoping to buy things from these new stores. “We built these shops and put all the fake bacon in the window and all the incredible cakes in the cake shop. People would turn up from an hour away; they’d seen on Facebook that a cake shop had opened, or a new butcher, and they were there to buy bacon,” Dusseldorp recalls.
She would have to tell the visitors these weren’t real shops. “Then I’d race to the caterers and go, ‘Do you have any biscuits or do you have any bacon we can sell to these people? They’ve literally driven an hour to buy an eclair.’ So that was pretty funny managing that.”
But welcoming visitors to the set – invited or otherwise – meant making S2 was a much more “satisfying” for Dusseldorp than the first season, which was shot in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic, forcing her to hide away whenever she wasn’t filming to avoid falling ill and bringing production to a halt. “We were actually able to socialise and get to know each other as humans as well as actors and characters,” she says of making S2. “We cooked a few meals together and we celebrated a bit. It was nice. It was really good. Everyone was back to do their best and celebrate a little.”
As well as the return of Bay of Fires, Dusseldorp is also championing two feature films she has made with two female directors: road trip movie With or Without You, from Kelly Schilling, and Caterpillar, Chelsea Preston Crayford’s debut feature about the impact of dementia on three generations of women.
Archipelago Productions also has one feature film it is close to fully financing, and is developing a trio of television series, including one US coproduction.
“I’m just reading a lot [of scripts] and taking my time, developing slowly with some really great partners and learning through them about how they do business. I’m talking to a lot of producers about just doing an acting role and staying out of their way, I promise,” Dusseldorp says.
“I’m open to all of it. I feel a second, third… maybe I’m in my fifth wind. I don’t know what happens when you’re 52. I’m as excited [as I’ve always been] every time something comes in to have a read of, and I probably look more at the team [behind a project] than I ever did – who wants to play? – and make sure I can bring something to that. But I’d love to work in the UK. That’s something I’ve never really done.”
There’s also the possibility of a return to Mystery Bay for a third season of Bay of Fires. But Dusseldorp will leave that in the hands of the viewers. “If they tune in like they did for S1, I’m sure we’ll be back in the room,” she says. “If they don’t then we’re working towards loving other things into existence, but it really has taught me so much and I’ve been very lucky. I’m often reminded by my EP, Greg Sitch, who says, ‘To get one season up is good, but two seasons is just fabulous, so just relish it and enjoy that the audience wanted more.’”
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tagged in: ABC, ABC iview, Archipelago Productions, Bay of Fires, Fremantle, Fremantle Australia, ITV, Marta Dusseldorp