Top Of The Lake: Thomas M Wright

Who is Johnno?

Johnno is someone who has spent the last 10 years of his life in prison and obviously that’s going to affect your psychology irreversibly, and he’s turning back to the place where he grew up but he doesn’t return to his family or necessarily to the community. Then he’s confronted by the return of Robin as well. Johnno and Robin were one another’s first love and first real relationship and now they have been thrown back together.

What really landed me the part in the end is I’m completely obsessed with that relationship, with the momentary eccentricities of it and the little games and the pain and the play in it, and these two people that sort of just peck away at each other until they get to the core. We all know what it’s like to have a relationship with someone that’s tearing you apart or that you feel impossibly compelled to that person. We all know what it is to be frustrated or to try and communicate truthfully with that person that you’re in a relationship with. And these people happen to be really broken people with phenomenal stories behind them.

Even though Johnno has returned to Laketop, he remains distanced from his father and his brothers?

It’s obviously a deeply damaged relationship. Matt is deeply damaged. Mark and Luke are just brutalized and they’re completely emasculated because they have this towering figure in their life. Both Matt and Johnno have a lot of anger sitting beneath. However, they’ve found a way to function in society which, for both of them, is to function outside of it. Matt in a far more controlling way and Johnno in a far more isolated way. Johnno’s fallen out with his family but it took him eight years in prison to make that fall. I think the web of the Mitcham house is pretty strong and pretty far-reaching.

You had starring roles in Van Dieman’s Land and Balibo and when filming finishes here you are heading off to Timor to work on Savages – are you drawn to projects set in wild, remote places?

Absolutely. I don’t feel particularly comfortable in groups and or with people telling me what to do, or institutions and I certainly don’t feel comfortable in cities. I’m much more comfortable out here in the wilderness around Queenstown. I think this is as good as it actually gets for me.

At the beginning of the year before last, I spent a month walking by myself in the Himalayas and I did the highest mountain pass in the world with no porter or guide. I walked for 30 days and I lost 16kgs by the time I got back to Australia. I’m certainly drawn to more difficult circumstances and circumstances where I can have a lot of time to myself or be alone. Having said that, I am also someone who’s very reliant on other people very much and I have a very small community of really close friends that I keep very close. I work more with my friends that I do with anyone else.

How does the landscape of Southern New Zealand shape the series?

There’s something tyrannical about this landscape. There is something about it which determines the way people are going to live here and which determines people’s characters. It’s a broken landscape, it’s a really violent landscape and as much as its paradise it is somehow a prison for the people who live there as well.

Laketop is like a living thing, it has an order to it and Johnno believes that that order will prevail. Johnno’s great realization in the final scene of the entire series is that that order has utterly collapsed from beneath him and that something has happened that he couldn’t understand, that no one understood, that went beyond anyone’s expectations about what could happen out at this place and that Laketop has become a kind of raging creature. Something far more violent than any of them had anticipated.