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The temperature in the remote mining town of Coober Pedy, South Australia, is often so scorching that many residents live in underground dugouts. Actor Liv Hewson was born and raised in Canberra, known for its cold and frosty winters, but felt right at home in the world’s opal mining capital while filming the new ABC-TV series Treasure & Dirt.
“I really loved it,” recalls Hewson, who plays rookie detective Nell Buchanan in the adaptation of the 2022 novel of the same name by Chris Hammer. The creepy noir murder mystery, set in the fictional town of Nulla, sees an opal miner beheaded, and while its tone leans into David Lynch and True Detective territory, there’s an idiosyncratic, wry Australian wit in its distinct physical landscape.
Hewson calls the series “funny and sad and strange and weird” and notes that both Nell and her detective colleague Ivan Lucic (Michael Dorman) are used to working alone and not being able to trust anybody. “So much of the central tension of the show is: Can you trust? Is it safe? What is the best way forward?”
Despite the dark nature of the series, Hewson says filming in Coober Pedy last year was “incredibly physiologically relaxing”, given the rich, stunning desert was teeming with life.
“I’d never been anywhere so flat – you can see in every direction,” Hewson recalls. “The closest I’d come to that before, the degree to which you can see out to the horizon, was being on the ocean. It was profound, especially given how easily I get sunburnt. I was beautifully surprised by how much I loved being there.”
Performing was … a space in which I could play with ideas and concepts and characters and also gender expression.
LIV HEWSONSuch relaxation is hard won. Asked to nominate what they do to unwind outside acting, Hewson says, “I like to read. I like to be outside – those are the two big ones. But I often think I’m actually not that good at unwinding. I’m trying to get better at it.”
At 30, Hewson has been busy since shooting to prominence in 2017 in two productions. The first was playing Drew Barrymore’s daughter Abby Hammond in the Netflix comedy horror series Santa Clarita Diet, while the second had them in the role of American college student Claire Duncan in the US-Korean co-production Dramaworld.
Today, Hewson is speaking to Sunday Life via video link from coastal Vancouver, where they are filming the fourth season of Yellowjackets, a series following a high school girls’ soccer team whose plane crashes in the Canadian wilderness. Hewson confirms that the dual timelines of the show continue in this final season, which shows what happens to the survivors in the 1990s. (Viewers already know that Hewson’s character, Vanessa “Van” Palmer, survives into adulthood, then dies.)
“I’m grateful that we knew going in that this would be the final season,” says Hewson. “That’s a luxury you’re not always afforded in television, so I think we are lucky to go in knowing that this is our final lap around the track, and to be really present and intentional and close it out as strong as we can.”
Growing up in the leafy suburb of Hughes, Hewson joined the Canberra Youth Theatre at 14, becoming part of its actors’ ensemble for several years and writing for the company. “That became my education in performance, really,” recalls Hewson. “I didn’t go to university. I didn’t go to drama school. I wanted to start working, and I felt able to do that because of the training I’d received there.”
I ask Hewson if performing was a way of modelling the person they wanted to become. “I don’t know that it’s so literal as that,” they reflect. “There’s a lot of overlap and performing was always a mode of creative self-expression, a space in which I could play with ideas and concepts and characters and also gender expression and gender performance and physicality and shape.”
Hewson finished year 12 in Canberra before going to Los Angeles for an acting workshop. “I’d never thought about going to LA, but I thought, ‘OK, I’ve got nothing on and I’ve got some money saved up, so I’ll do it.’”
In LA, Hewson met the woman who became their manager, then found representation in Australia, and started auditioning for roles in both places. Winning the breakthrough role as Abby in Santa Clarita Diet meant Hewson was eventually splitting time between North America – including Canada for Yellowjackets – and Australia.
Today, east Los Angeles is their base. “I think I was really in denial about living there for a long time because going to the US had never been part of the plan,” says Hewson.
Would they choose to live in LA if it wasn’t the centre of their industry? “It’s not a place I would choose to live if I was doing something else for a living,” Hewson admits. “But I’ve found the parts of town I like to live in, and I have some very dear friends there I love being close to. It’s a place where I’m comfortable and which I know how to navigate, but figuring that out took a long time.”
A big part of Hewson’s modus operandi has been taking on roles with strong feminist credentials, including student police liaison officer Detective Ivy Shepherd in the ensemble feminist comedy series He Had It Coming, which streamed on Stan (Stan is owned by Nine, publisher of this masthead).
Hewson says feminism is a central part of how they move through the world. “It certainly informs the work that I do, because it’s the kind of work I care about doing, and the kind of work I want to see. That’s all I know how to do. It’s very important to me.”
I ask whether their teen years were particularly impactful, given it was a time when they were on the cusp of discovering feminism and queer history. “Yeah, it was very profound,” they recall.
After discovering the term “non-binary” and reading into it more, Hewson gained a clearer perspective of their identity. “I came to an understanding of myself. I told my friends first, and then it was a number of years before I told anyone else.”
As for enfolding life into art, Hewson has previously revealed they’d been writing a script inspired by their own experiences. “I used to write plays in my late teens,” Hewson says. “It was the first thing I made money doing creatively. Then I came to the US to work and I put it on the backburner
“So it’s been a long time since I’ve written, but I would like to, and I think about it a lot. It’s funny, I think that impulse gets channelled into my work as an actor, in terms of improvising or making offers as part of larger projects. It’s part and parcel of the same creative drive in the end.”
Treasure & Dirt premieres on ABC-TV and ABC iview on July 19.
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