A TV series follow-up to the 2019 box office smash hit Top End Wedding, Top End Bub is a heart-warming eight-part series that sees Miranda Tapsell (Love Child, The Sapphires, The Artful Dodger) and Gwilym Lee (Bohemian Rhapsody, The Great) reprise their roles as Lauren and Ned.
The couple are living their best lives in the city, which is tragically interrupted when Lauren’s sister, Ronelle, dies in a car crash in the Top End. Rushing back to Darwin, Lauren and Ned are thrown into the chaos of Top End life with Lauren’s parents, Daffy and Trevor, and confronted with another curveball when they unexpectedly become the guardians of Ronelle’s lively and cheeky young daughter, Taya.
As the series streams on Prime Video, Peter Gray spoke with both Miranda and Gwilym about returning to these characters in a different format, how it was for Miranda, as a writer, to interrogate newer aspects, and when it was they knew they had “something special” on their hands during filming.
Lauren and Ned’s love story was front and centre in Top End Wedding, whereas in the show it’s themes of family, responsibility and grief. How did you both recalibrate your performances to reflect the tonal shift without losing that rom com warmth that audiences fell in love with the first time around?
Gwilym Lee: The beauty of a TV series means you can explore other characters and other stories, and elaborate on that side of things. It was really nice to find out more about Daffy and Trevor (Ursula Yovich and Huw Higginson’s characters), and some new characters that are introduced to the story, and how Lauren and Ned have to fit into that. Obviously the film was very much a romantic comedy, and it played around with the tropes of the rom com and all these recognisable moments within the genre. I don’t see (Top End Bub) as much of a rom com, more of a family comedy, and so it’s playing with those tropes now. I suppose a little bit more. I’m really glad that when I read the scripts for the series that it wasn’t just a direct continuation of the film. We catch up a chunk of time after the film, and it’s unexpected in its setting as we see they are a couple that don’t want kids. The obvious thing would be catching up and they’re married in the next stage of their life where they’re trying to have a baby. I love the fact that we didn’t go down that route.
Miranda Tapsell: Absolutely. I think we’ve seen the series where people are trying to keep the romance alive, and they’re trying to keep things spicy with the marriage. That was never the case with Lauren and Ned. They clearly are very loving and devoted to one another. But it’s the life that they want that has been disrupted, I guess, by the fact that this family tragedy has come along and they have to take care of this eight-year-old girl.
One of the things I love about Lauren’s arc is that it’s always been about balancing personal ambition with family and culture. How did writing Top End Bub allow you to interrogate that tension in ways that you couldn’t just as an actor in Top End Wedding?
Miranda Tapsell: Yeah, it was just at a different point in my life. I was considering not having kids at this point in time. I was wanting to push it back, because I wanted to go over to America and try things out in Hollywood, and all of those things. But I really started to learn there is never a right time to have a kid, and I’m never going to have my ducks in a row, so I might as well just chase for that, you know? Just accepts the chaos that comes with being a parent, and accept this new life. I had grown up in a community where we do work as a school of fish. A family unit really does move as one. And I’ve lived away from Darwin enough to accept that I’m always going to be grappling with my own personal ambitions with the needs of my mob and that it’s okay to straddle both.
Was there a moment on the page or on set that stopped you in your tracks emotionally in a way that you didn’t anticipate?
Gwilym Lee: I think the setup for the whole series is this kind of family tragedy, and it’s a very unusual way to start a family series, which is a family comedy, with such gravitas and weight, but that’s the kind of foundation of it all. In the first episode, where we have the funeral of this family member, it was quite a profound experience shooting. We had the local community to play a part in that scene, and we had this beautiful Tiwi choir singing as well. And then all of our own cast members (on set), and it was a very emotional experience. You realise that everyone was bringing their own experience with them, and there was a real depth of feeling that day that made you realise, first of all, there’s an emotional heart to this story which is going to carry through the series and make it something quite special. But it also made us realise how much everyone was invested, personally, as actors and as the community in the story. It had that feeling of we’ve got something really meaningful and powerful here.
Top End Bub is now available to stream on Prime Video.
