Top Of The Lake: David Wenham

What is Top Of The Lake about?

Top Of The Lake is a world that spends half its time in darkness, half its time in light. It’s a very true reflection of the world we live in, with all its strange intricacies and complexities and bizarre things and oddities that Jane Campion seems to be attracted to. But also they’re the things that I think from a viewing perspective make it really, really fascinating. The strange occurrences, the things that seem to be normal but have a strange twist in them.

In very general terms Top Of The Lake is about good and evil. It’s a deep dark mystery. It also deals with lots of fascinating human relationships and it’s also about the battle of the sexes.

Tell us about your role

I play DCI Al Parker. He enjoys his cushy position as the head of the Queenstown Police Station. He loves the lifestyle, he enjoys the skiing, he enjoys the outdoor life. He sees himself as a man who helps the local community by his scheme at his coffee club. He runs his own coffee shop and he’s put in place this scheme bringing in disadvantaged youth and training them up as baristas and giving them a certificate at the end and hopefully changing them and giving them a path in a new direction. He’s respected in the community for doing that.

He’s an old school policeman, he enjoys the power of position, the boys’ club atmosphere of a police station. His policing work is not just black and white, he doesn’t mind operating in grey areas. He’d have no problem with that because he’d still effectively get stuff done.

What happens when Robin comes into Al’s world?

It opens up a new potential avenue in Al’s personal life that he hadn’t really considered up to then. He’s someone who has played the field, but here comes somebody that for the first in probably a long time he seriously considers as a contender to be wife material.

Robin represents everything that Al is not. In terms of police work, if Al is old school, Robin is certainly new school. She would never consider operating in grey areas of the law, even though Al would get things done. I think his relationship with Matt is an interesting case in point. We did a scene where Robin and Al are on the way to raid Matt’s property and Robin asks Al if he’s a friend of Matt’s and I think this line sums up: he said “Look, I don’t think anybody is really a friend of Matt’s but I’m close enough to regret it.” I think that sort of helps explain how Al operates. Whereas Robin would be much more cut and dry.

What does the landscape of New Zealand bring to the story?

It’s very easy to see instantly locations like Paradise because it’s very easy to put that name on those incredible places and forest areas that Adam and Eve could wander through and a gingerbread house could occur. The other side of it is that it is actually a sunken landscape here as well. We’re surrounded by really, really tall mountains so if you’re stuck in there, you are surrounded by these huge things that at times you actually can’t escape, you can’t get out and when it starts to cloud over, as well, a darkness descends over this place. So it offers both ends of the spectrum from the darkness to the light.