Marta Dusseldorp on the serious business of creating comedy

She’s one of the country’s most celebrated and most-awarded actors, best known for roles in gritty dramas; serious shows, where she plays serious people, doing serious things.

So it comes as something of a shock to see Marta Dusseldorp front and centre in ABC’s new series, Bay of Fires, a new eight-part black comedy which she also co-created and produced.

In the show, she plays Anika, a mother of two whose life is instantaneously turned on its head when she becomes the target of a hit.

She’s rushed into witness protection, ushered to the middle of nowhere, given a new identity as ‘Stella’, and forced to live with her two children in the appropriately-named tiny town of Mystery Bay, a small town on Tasmania’s West Coast, full of inhabitants who seem to be hiding secrets of their own.

While promo shots make things look like some sort of intense scandi-noir, it’s far closer to recent Prime Video series, Deadloch, which also explores what life can be like in quirky small-town Tasmania.

And it’s ripe for comedy.

“We wanted to create a tone that we hadn’t been involved with before,” says Dusseldorp, who is nominated at this year’s TV Week Logie Awards in the most outstanding actress category for her work on The Twelve.

“(Co-creators) Andrew Knight (Jack Irish) and Max Dann (Spotswood) and I really pushed it into as dark as we could go, but also with incredible levity and entertainment.

“Post-pandemic, we figured no one wants to sit there and be bludgeoned over the head (with negative things).

“I love dramas, but I have done a lot of them, and Andrew had always said to me, ‘You are very funny, Marta. And we never get to see it.’”

There’s something wholly relatable about the way Dusseldorp’s character handles things when she’s thrust into her strange new situation.

Stella and her two children, Otis and Iris (played by Imi Mbedla and Ava Caryofyllis, who give some fabulous performances), are forced to adapt on the run as some truly surreal events play out around them.

Though thoroughly out there, Stella’s story is not beyond the realms of possibility and Dusseldorp says she drew on real-life experiences, as well as her own as mum to two daughters (she is married to fellow actor Ben Winspear), to help ground her performance.

“We got to chat to an undercover policeman who had to pull someone out (of their life), actually,” she explains.

“I don’t want to talk about it too deeply because it gives things away, but it made me think, ‘What would you do if you were in that position?’

“I really wanted to present (my character) as the mother that I am, which is chaotically in it.”

It’s heaps of fun, as is the show’s exceptional ensemble cast, which boasts fantastic comedic performances from Hunt for the Wilderpeople’s Rachel House, Kerry Fox, Yael Stone, Pamela Rabe — who shot the series fresh from her stint on Deadloch — Matt Nable and Stephen Curry.

“It’s such a beautiful ensemble cast — I couldn’t have been happier,” says Dusseldorp, who admits she wrote parts for House, Rabe and Nable, friends who all, blessedly, said an enthusiastic yes to being involved.

Unlike Deadloch, which filmed on Tasmania’s better-known south coast, Bay of Fires filmed entirely out west, basing itself between Queenstown and Strahan.

The countryside provides a devastatingly beautiful — and at times suitably menacing — backdrop to the action.

“I knew that no one would have ever really been there,” says Dusseldorp, who owns a holiday home in the area.

“And if they had, they probably just would have passed through. So this is our love letter to Tasmania, but also the West Coast — I am deeply in love with this place.”

So too the cast, who fell hard for the towns they called home during 16 weeks of filming through a very cold winter last year.

“It was fantastic. Everyone was on realestate.com, saying ‘Maybe we could get a place out here?’” Dusseldorp laughs.

“We didn’t get one red light — actually, there are no lights! And we didn’t have one plane overhead. We didn’t have to stop ever for anything — even with the weather.

“It was such an incredible crew and cast, and everyone kept going.”

All in all, it was the perfect first foray into producing for the established star, who stepped up as associate producer on Janet King and A Place To Call Home, but who had never worn the producer hat in its entirety before.

“Greg Sitch, an extraordinary, wonderful man — he’s the EP — he said, ‘Marta, you should produce it and learn all about that side of things. You know it better than anyone.’

“So I got it financed (through my company, Archipelago Productions) and then yeah, produced it, and was in it.

“And it was really great — just an extraordinary experience.”

Something tells us audiences are going to love it just as much.

Bay of Fires starts Sunday, July 16, at 8.30pm on ABC.