Second act
From learning lines to writing them, actors Andrei Alén, Genevieve Barr, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson and Leah Purcell discuss their individual journeys behind the camera to become screenwriters, and how they have used their unique experiences and perspectives to shape the stories they want to tell.
From writing scripts and making homemade films when he was a young boy, Finnish actor Andrei Alén’s career has now come full circle after he created and wrote military drama Konflicti (Conflict) – and he’s not alone. Actors from all corners of international television are now stepping away from the set to write scripts for series that are entertaining, challenging and everything in between.
“I made a few short films in my teens but then I moved to acting,” Alén says. “I’m not sure if it was the vanity of youth that drove me to that side when I was younger. But [writing has] always been a part of my artistic process, and being at youth theatre in Finland, we’ve always been encouraged to write, as actors, and understand the content more intimately through the means of doing a bit of writing ourselves. It’s always been a part of what I do. Maybe now, again, it’s one of the main things I do in terms of work.”
Alén says Conflict, which debuted in Finland in December, is “by far the biggest thing I’ve created.” He was also one of the main writers on a series that became increasingly topical as development progressed since it was first conceived in 2016.
Commissioned by MTV3, it explores the consequences of a proxy war when an unidentified enemy invades a picturesque Finnish peninsula, leading the US president and other allies to urge Finland’s newly elected president to take action as she faces the risk of all-out war. Alén (Roba, Rig 45) created the six-part thriller with director Aku Louhimies. Produced by Backmann & Hoderoff and XYZ Films, it is distributed by Keshet International.
“I really like being hands-on with many aspects of making a TV series or a film, or I’ve learned to be,” Alén says. “But it’s fascinating from an actor’s perspective to understand you are part of a massive chain of other things that have to come into consideration. Then at the very end, it’s you standing there and delivering your lines. I do love the whole chain and the whole process. It’s just wonderful.”
Australian actor Leah Purcell is recognisable from on-screen roles in Redfern Now, Wentworth, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart and 2024 crime drama High Country, in which she plays a detective investigating the case of five missing people. It is produced by Curio Pictures for streamer Binge, and distributed by Sony Pictures Television (SPT).
But Purcell, a First Nations woman from the Goa-Gunggari-Wakka Wakka Murri tribe, has always been a teller of stories from her Indigenous heritage. She initially worked as a consultant on the sets of Indigenous projects, ensuring they were made with authenticity, but always backed herself to become a writer alongside her acting work. “Of course, being a First Nations person comes with a lot of political responsibility,” she says. “[But] it wasn’t about pushing the agenda of politics. It was about telling my family’s story from the heart through their personal stories, which reaches people and audiences far better than if I came at it from a political viewpoint.”
Purcell has written on projects including Redfern Now (on which she worked with British writer Jimmy McGovern), Ready for This and legal drama The Twelve, while she also wrote, directed and starred in The Drover’s Wife, the western drama she initially conceived as a play before adapting it as a novel and then as a feature film through her own production company. “It is testing and tiring. But I love it. I love what I do,” she says.
“It’s really interesting because it’s a different muscle from the acting muscle,” Icelandic actor Ólafur Darri Ólafsson says about writing for the screen. “I don’t think I’ve ever had moments where I have to go to bed or have to stop writing because my brain is actually hurting from trying to keep everything together in the story. I really enjoy it. It’s always good to find a new muscle you haven’t used before.”
Known for local series including Ófærð (Trapped) and Ráðherrann (The Minister), Ólafsson has become an international star thanks to roles in The Missing, Emerald City, NOS4A2, The Tourist (pictured top) and Severance. His latest on-screen role is as a high-end chef in Reykjavik Fusion, a series described as Breaking Bad meets The Bear that is produced by his own ACT4 production company for Síminn Premium in Iceland and Arte in France and Germany.
Ólafsson is now also stepping into showrunning for the first time with another ACT4 project, Big Brother, a crime thriller based on the book by Skúli Sigurdsson. “Traditionally we don’t really have many screenwriters that work full time [in Iceland], so as an actor, you are involved if you want to be,” Ólafsson says. “I have a lot of writer friends, so I’ve read a ton of scripts, so I’ve always been a little bit into writing. I’ve certainly been involved in writers rooms, but this is the first time I’m helming a project, which is terrifying but also fun.”
He describes Big Brother, which is being developed with Germany’s ZDF Studios, as a vigilante thriller about a newspaper reporter who is investigating a series of attacks in Reykjavik, the Icelandic capital.
“I’ve realised that, as an actor, I am very arrogant towards the writer sometimes. And now, as a writer, I’m like, ‘I’m just going to write this, and then the actor can just throw it in my face,’” he jokes. “I’ve learned quite a bit as an actor [about writing]. I don’t want to drown the actor in information about who the character is. I love when I’m trusted with that as an actor. So that balance is really interesting to me.”
But when he sits down to write, Ólafsson tries not to write characters with himself in mind, believing it’s a “really valuable skill” for anyone in the television industry to be able to read a script without “pushing your will into them.”
“That is a talent I developed many years ago. It really helps me because it’s important for me to be able to write without prejudice towards the characters,” he adds. “I might write something for myself down the road, and I really respect actors who just take it into their own hands and say, ‘I’m going to write this for me,’ but it’s important to be able to not push your will.”
British actor Genevieve Barr, meanwhile, made her name on screen in series such as Call the Midwife, Liar and The Accident. But more recently, she has established herself as a writer, with credits on Then Barbara Met Alan and Ralph & Katie. For her first original series, the Channel 4 commission ID, she also plays the lead role of Emily, a young deaf woman who witnesses a neighbour taking pictures of her. This leads her to explore what she might have done to warrant this unwanted attention, while beginning a dance with a stranger that is as exhilarating as it is dangerous. Eleven is producing, with SPT distributing.
Barr, who herself is deaf and identifies as a member of the disabled community, didn’t come to acting with any dramatic training when the casting team on 2010 BBC drama The Silence was looking for a deaf person to play the lead role. “I was a teacher and I auditioned for that and I got it, so I was kind of thrust into the world of television,” she says. “But over the course of that 10 to 12 years, I found it quite a struggle. I had a bit of an identity crisis. Writing came to me at the point when I didn’t really know what to do with myself, and I felt a little bit lost in who I was. There is something about acting when you are taking on the persona of somebody else, and sometimes you lose sight of who you are within that.”
She also admits to feeling “like a bit of an imposter,” having grown up in a hearing family before being thrown into “this deaf world I’d never known.”
“There aren’t a lot of roles out there for deaf actors and deaf characters. There is a big problem with visibility of disabled people in this industry, so I didn’t really know what to do with that,” Barr says. “Sometimes, as an actor, you can be naturally empowered to become a producer, to become a writer, to become a director and make your own projects. And sometimes as an actor, you get told by your agent to just sit at the end of an email and these parts will come your way.
“I sat for a very long time not being sure if this was what I was meant to be doing. I was really lucky – I got some really great parts along the way – but writing came at a point when, weirdly, I’d just had a baby and I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m a mother. I’ve lost my sense of self.’”
That moment was also a crosspoint between the lack of visibility of disabled people on TV and lack of risk-taking in portrayals of deaf characters. ID represents Barr’s attempt to “push the boat out” with a story that authentically represents the experience of a deaf person.
She describes it as “a Rear Window version of having a deaf protagonist,” referencing Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1954 thriller. “My husband tells the story of never letting me sit in a restaurant looking at the room. He will always put me with my back to it because otherwise I’m lip-reading other people’s conversations – and I suppose [in the series] I wanted to play with the fun of being able to be nosy and inquisitive and what you learn when you’re watching a private conversation.”
But going from acting – where you look for every clue in the script that can inform your character and your performance – to writing, Barr found she didn’t appreciate how sparse scripts actually are. “You suddenly find yourself writing paragraph after paragraph of character description and saying, ‘This is their backstory.’ It’s all stuff you want as an actor just coming out on the page, but writing is about being able to do a lot with a little. That’s been a really interesting shift,” she says.
Like Purcell, Barr is striving to support stories from and about a specific community both in front of and behind the camera. On Then Barbara Met Alan, a TV film Barr wrote with Jack Thorne (Help, His Dark Materials) about the passing of the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act, there were 12 cast members with different disabilities, plus around 60 people with disabilities on the crew.
“That was a unique experience,” Barr says. “The TV industry is inaccessible for a lot of different reasons, so that was a real challenge and it was quite pioneering. The second thing I did was Ralph & Katie with the brilliant Pete Bowker [The A Word], and that was also an all-disability-led writers room. I was lucky because I got to have the confidence to dip my toe in the water as a writer, but with well-established writers and a support network of people around me. Everybody had permission to tell their individual story, but they were also politically and socially motivated. Sometimes you have to have the balls to do that.”
But what particularly excites Barr about stories about diversity – “because we haven’t found a more interesting way to describe it” – is where they connect to genre, “and where the new spaces are to go with that,” she says. “Sometimes having a unique POV or experience is a privilege because it means you look at the world in a certain way and you’re going, ‘What are the other ways of looking at the world that we haven’t seen before?’”
Redfern Now, which debuted on Australia’s ABC in 2012, tells the story of six families living in the Sydney suburb of Redfern and provides an insight into the contemporary issues facing Indigenous Australians. Purcell notes that the series was “First Nations produced, [with First Nations] writers, directors and lead actors down to the grip on set.”
“It was an opportunity to give the First Nations sector a chance of proving what we can do, and it went through the roof,” she says. “That stuff is my heart and soul. I love writing about that. There’s still a lot more work to be done in bringing about that understanding, so if I’ve got a vehicle and an opportunity to do that then I’m there.”
The actor has unapologetically “thrown” herself into writing, though she admits it’s a challenge. Alén agrees that getting anything made in the current television climate, where broadcasters and streamers are tightening their commissioning belts, is the hardest part of the job. “Do you class yourself as a writer if none of the stuff you’ve written has ever been produced? I think you should,” he says. “It’s just really hard to get things done. I guess we’ve all been fortunate that we’ve broken through at some stage in our lives.”
Big Brother marks the first time Ólafsson has been “responsible” for creating a series, sharing that vision with his team and ensuring they are all heading in the same direction. He says his challenge is “letting go” and allowing himself to turn in a “bad” first draft before the rewriting and editing process can begin: “Every time you read a first draft, you’re like, ‘This is shit.’ That doesn’t mean I will be a shitty writer. It just means I have to go through that process. That’s probably the most difficult thing all of us go through.”
But the “glory” of being a writer is that it’s a skill that can be utilised constantly, says Barr. “It can be the first thing you do when you wake up or [the last thing before] you go to bed,” she continues. “I was lucky when I got into writing; I came off shooting The Accident and said, ‘I think I want to be a writer,’ and I turned to a writer and said, ‘What do I do?’ They said, ‘Well, write.’”
Purcell also values the practice of learning through others’ mistakes. “I sit on set to see how directors work, or I’ll see the script supervisor or the writer might be talking about stuff and then I’m sitting there going, ‘OK, what can I take from what they’ve done and then go back and apply it?’”
After a career as an actor standing “at the very end of the long chain of other events” it takes to make a TV series or film, Alén now marvels at being involved from the start and creating the things other people are going to see. “When you have experience from doing that [acting], it does show in your writing because you know someone actually has to get up and do it, be it dialogue or why someone crosses the room. Would they actually fall asleep here? When you’ve done it, it does give you a very different kind of perspective.”
tagged in: Andrei Alén, Genevieve Barr, Leah Purcell, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson