At 18, Madeleine Madden is making the transition from child to adult actor. So it’s little surprise when asked what drew her to the new teen drama Ready for This, she admits to initial reservations about joining a “children’s show”. That changed when she read the script and was reassured by the show writer, Adrian Wills, the characters were “young adults, not children”.
Billed as the “story of six teenagers, all elite within their own field, who have come to live at Arcadia House to pursue their dreams”, the show premiering on Monday on ABC3 is a Blackfella Films and Werner Film Productions (Dance Academy) co-production.
All but one of the teenagers are Indigenous Australian and the show deftly knits together Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture with the trademarks of every great teen drama: grand coming-of-age adventures, friendship, rebellion and an endless supply of eye rolling and raging hormones.
Madden stresses, more than once, the show is “sophisticated, and really mature”. She is both excited by how the drama puts her culture “on display” while remaining accessible to a wider audience. It is a template used to great effect by Blackfella Films in many of their recent hits, including the high-quality television drama Redfern Now and the clash of the civilisations reality doco First Contact.
Darren Dale, of Blackfella Films (who confirms a second season of First Contact is in the works), says the company is driven by the belief that television is a powerful agent for changing social attitudes and says Ready for This is “another tool in our Blackfella toolbox”.
“What the series does, and really a lot of the work we do, is celebrate our shared humanity instead of focusing on our difference,” he says. “Wouldn’t it be great to reach a new generation of young Australians? Because that’s where opinions are formed. Imagine Australians growing up with Indigenous kids as part of the fabric of mainstream television.”
The show premise puts the teenagers, selected from across the country for their exceptional skill in sport or the arts, in a Sydney boarding home called Arcadia House. Dale says getting the characters away from their family homes, so they would have “their own agency and autonomy – their decisions play out and there are repercussions” was critical to the show (and old hat in the young adult genre, see: Harry Potter, Hunger Games, Tomorrow When the War Began, etc, etc).
Of course the kids aren’t completely left to their own devices. There are two guardians, played by Christine Anu (as the irascible Vee) and Lasarus Ratuere (Mick). In a bit of art-imitating-life, Anu herself stayed in a similar house in the inner-western Sydney suburb of Leichhardt when she was a young dance student.
Over email Anu tells Guardian Australia she spent those three years adjusting to student life, to living and studying with so many people from all over Australia, to the physical, mental and emotional demands of dance and “getting out of the small-town mentality”.
“Thinking back to those years, I can see how young people just want to belong, be acknowledged, feel safe and find who they are while ‘growing up’ in the big city,” she writes.
In the show Madden plays Zoe, an aspiring professional runner. Much of Zoe’s life will feel familiar to your average teen: a zeal for competition, desperate attempts to stake a prime position in the high school social hierarchy. But other small touches feel more uniquely Aboriginal, such as when Zoe discovers the boy she’s been flirting with belongs to a rival Aboriginal clan – and tensions between the two have long been of Montague versus Capulet proportions.
In another scene the group suspect a ghost is haunting the attic room of Arcadia House. After a series of comic mishaps, Vee takes charge and confronts the troubled spirit with a traditional smoking ceremony. In silence, each teenager scoops up the smoke billowing from the burning plants and douses their body with it.
For Madden, the show’s elegant celebration of Indigenous Australian culture is a large part of its appeal. She grew up in a family that takes strong pride in their identity – her grandfather was the Aboriginal activist Charles Perkins. His daughter, and her mother, is curator Hetti Perkins, and her aunt is film-maker and Blackfella Films managing director Rachel Perkins.
It is a big year for Madden, who has also begun work on the highly anticipated big-budget television adaptation of John Marsden’s teen rebel fighter series Tomorrow When the War Began. Madden says in the novels her character, Corrie, is non-Indigenous and a redhead. “Casting me in a non-Indigenous role is proof of how progressive the industry in Australia is becoming,” she says.
Madden shares with her Ready for This character a hungry ambition and the talent to back that up. She has a wealth of acting experience, picking up her first gig when she was eight in a short film directed by Deborah Mailman called Ralph. Since then she has featured in The Code, Jack Irish and Redfern Now.
Would she like to one day crack the US market? “Totally,” she says. “There’s so much work coming out of Australia at the moment that I want to soak it up as much as I can. But the goal is to get overseas and try to make an impression over there. There’s no rush at the moment to get out of Australia, but it is on the cards.”
• Ready for This premieres on Monday on ABC3 at 6.20pm
