Brendan Cowell has embraced another role in which love, fear and moral compromise collide, playing a secretive father opposite Patrick Brammall in Apple TV’s new Australian thriller Last Seen.
The six-part series, which premieres on Wednesday, follows former police detective Ian Ridley, played by Brammall, as he becomes convinced that a distress call from a teenage girl has come from his daughter Maggie, who disappeared 11 years earlier.
Cowell plays Henry, a deeply religious man living with his wife Jenna, portrayed by Maxine Peake, and their teenage daughter Sarah on an isolated property in Victoria. When Sarah reaches out to the outside world, Ian’s search brings the two men into a tense collision.
For Cowell, the appeal lay in Henry’s uncertainty. The character is fiercely protective of his family, but his determination to keep them apart from society gradually exposes a darker and more troubling form of control.
“I get asked to come onto projects where you want to make monstrous men accessible, likable, or possibly understand what pain caused this reprehensible behaviour,” Cowell said.
“I can bring some humanity to people that behave in certain ways. I don’t know what that says about me, but you can’t judge it.”
The actor has built a career playing men whose apparent menace is complicated by vulnerability, including roles in Love My Way and Plum. In Last Seen, he said Henry’s devotion to his wife and daughter is genuine, even as it becomes inseparable from his need to conceal the truth.
“He’s got so much love, especially for his family, for the two women in his family,” Cowell said. “So much so that he’s hiding them from society, and has convinced himself that outside of this little valley are the enemies and the devil and all the sinners.”
The drama is adapted by Australian screenwriter Kris Mrksa from Ryan David Jahn’s novel The Dispatcher. It was directed by Christian Schwochow, whose credits include The Crown, and was filmed entirely in Victoria, including Warrnambool, the state’s high country and Docklands studios in Melbourne.
Cowell said Schwochow brought an outsider’s perspective to the Australian landscape and was particularly struck by the sounds of the wildlife during filming.
The series marks the first Australian production for Apple TV, and launches with two episodes before moving to weekly instalments through October 7. The streaming service describes it as a thriller about a missing child, but Cowell believes its strength lies in the absence of clearly defined heroes and villains.
“What’s brilliant about this is it’s so murky and grey, which is what you want in drama,” he said. “Many thrillers are good and bad and this is like everybody is implicit. Everybody is doing the wrong thing. Everyone’s hurting people.”
The production also reunited Cowell and Brammall, who last worked together on the 2015 film Ruben Guthrie, which Cowell wrote and directed. Their resemblance has often led to the pair being confused, a joke Cowell revisited after a woman in a sauna recently congratulated him on his performance in Brammall’s comedy Colin From Accounts.
“I said, ‘Thank you, but that’s not me. It’s my friend,’” Cowell recalled. “And she goes, ‘No, it is you.’”
In Last Seen, however, the casting deliberately turns expectations on their head. Brammall, best known for playing an easygoing everyman, takes on the role of a grieving father driven by an increasingly obsessive search. Cowell, meanwhile, occupies the more suspicious position audiences may instinctively expect from him.
“I was genuinely blown away by his performance because I hadn’t seen him before, that untapped rage,” Cowell said of Brammall. “His performance really helps me because it keeps flipping.”
Now 50, Cowell said he feels more creatively engaged than at any previous point in his career. Alongside Last Seen, he appears in the second season of Binge’s High Country and is due to feature in a new season of SBS’s Who Do You Think You Are?
He also joked about a shirtless wood-chopping scene that was cut from the thriller after he had spent weeks preparing for it.
“I’m just happy to be involved,” Cowell said. “It’s a tough job acting, and most people who leave it make the right decision because they have the kids and they get an adult life.”
