The Twelve is back, with new cast, new crime, old Trojan horse tactics

For the second season of Foxtel’s award-winning drama The Twelve (three AACTAs, three Logies for 2022’s first season), the location and most of the cast are new. But the central premise – a multitude of micro-plots revolving around a central courtroom drama – as well as Sam Neill as the criminal defence barrister Brett Colby, remain.

The action, this time, takes place in a remote town in Western Australia, to which Colby has been flown to defend one of two people accused of murder. He represents Patrick Harrows (Erroll Shand), an itinerant farmworker who may or may not have had a role in the death of his employer, Bernice Price (Kris McQuade), a crotchety old landholder with no shortage of enemies in the tiny town of Tunkwell.

Also accused is Bernice’s long-suffering daughter Sasha (Amy Mathews), who happens to have been Patrick’s lover, much to her mother’s disapproval. Representing her is another blow-in lawyer from the big smoke, Meredith Nelson-Moore (Frances O’Connor).

“She’s someone who has dedicated a lot to her professional life,” says O’Connor, who is based in the UK but relished the opportunity to work for an extended period in her home state, where she was for once within striking distance of her family. “She puts a lot of importance into that, and probably a lot of ego into that, and I think through the years she’s started to neglect her personal life.”

Well, that’s an understatement.

When we first meet Brett and Meredith, they are hard at it. Only more in the biblical than the legal sense. Which is to say, they’re bonking.

What happens on circuit stays on circuit, observes the judge (Keith Robinson). Only Meredith’s husband, Chris (Gerald Lepkowski), seems not to have got the memo and unexpectedly turns up to continue in person the arguments they’ve been having over the phone.

There is, I note to O’Connor, a delicious frisson in the fact that Lepkowski is her real-life husband.

“I know,” she exclaims. “We haven’t acted together for a long time so it was actually really fun to do some scenes together, and good therapy for the marriage. Our characters are always arguing, and we never argue now. We’ve been together so long we’re kind of fine. We just enjoy each other’s company, we’re like best friends now.”

Though Neill gets top billing and O’Connor helps sell the series internationally, the reality is The Twelve is a genuine ensemble piece and an incredible opportunity for a wide range of actors to sink their teeth into some meaty material.

Among them is Tasma Walton, who plays local woman Thelma Connell.

Thelma has always assumed, in rather an abstract way, that she might have some Indian heritage. But when her husband and a fellow juror urge her to take a DNA test, it turns her sense of self on its head.

“It rocks her foundation,” says Walton. “It’s got a lot of complexity – and remember, this is just one offshoot story. That’s what is so wonderful about this series – they don’t shy away from exploring through all of the different ensembles some really interesting, complex and detailed stories.”

Walton grew up in Geraldton, WA, and was well aware that her mother’s family was Aboriginal. But because children deemed to be “mixed race” with Indigenous blood were still being taken away to be raised as “white” as late as the 1960s, her grandmother told people their background was Maori. It was a way, she says, of exempting the family from the impact of the Aborigines Protection Act, “a protective mechanism that was not uncommon”.

Walton’s grandmother passed on cultural knowledge inside the home, but outside, she says, “it was just not spoken”.

There’s something of the Trojan Horse about The Twelve. Its structure – with individual character-driven storylines spinning off from the central hub of the courtroom drama – allows for various topics and themes to be smuggled in. But for an actor cast as a juror, it can sometimes be a little disorienting.

“You can sometimes feel like you’re operating in your own little world, and it’s sort of running parallel to other stories,” says Walton. “As a jury member in these courtroom scenes you are participating, but it’s listening and absorbing and processing information. I keep saying my eye acting is getting very well exercised. It’s a fascinating process.”

As prosecution lawyer Jude Persand, Fayssal Bazzi is rather less restricted, getting to exercise all of his body in pursuit of dramatic impact.

“It’s fun, but it’s also very challenging,” he says of playing a barrister for the first time. “What you don’t realise when you step into it is that a large part of it is public speaking. So, on my first day in court, during my opening argument, the court was full. We had the jury, we had the extras playing the media, we had the witnesses, the people in the courts, we had the judge and all the staff. So we maybe had about 150 or 200 people, and you’re trying to give your address and going, ‘OK, stay in character’. Acting and public speaking – it’s not the same thing.”

Which is not to say there isn’t an overlap between acting and lawyering, he concedes.

“There is a lot of theatrics. If you watch a lot of the good lawyers, it is like delivering monologues and stagecraft, which is great. So once you get the hang of that, and you start approaching it that way, it’s easy.”

Bazzi, who won a best actor AACTA award in 2020 for Stateless, is currently one of the busiest actors in the country, with roles in Prosper, Total Control, The Artful Dodger, Shantaram and half a dozen others since the COVID shutdown. But it wasn’t always thus for the Lebanese-born son of a dentist.

He has never had a job apart from acting in his 23 years in the business. “When I finished school, Dad was like, ‘You can be an actor, but you can’t do anything else – you can’t be a bartender. It’s either gonna work, or it’s going to fail. And if it fails, then you do something else.’”

But for a long time, that work was away from the screen, in theatre, in training videos, and in army role-playing exercises, in which he inevitably was cast as a suspect being interrogated.

“In the early 2000s, they were all just tropes and ideas of characters instead of actual characters,” he says of the parts he was offered and, more often than not, turned down. “But in the last eight or nine years, things are starting to develop. People are seeing all sides of human beings, not just the white kinda side.”

It’s a mark of how far things have come, he says, that there was nothing in the script about his character to mark his ethnic or cultural background.

In the past couple of years, he says, “I’ve tried to do jobs that are just about character, and not necessarily about background or ethnicity, this one included. I think that’s an important way to go for longevity of career. People just love putting people in boxes. But if you try to push yourself out of that, they just have to see you as an actor.”

Of course, there’s a risk of a different sort of typecasting emerging – having only been asked to play people on the other side of the law until now, he’s already been offered his second role as a lawyer.

“There’s always room for improvement,” he says. “But hopefully, in the next generation or two, we’re the United Colours of Benetton.”

The Twelve is on Foxtel and Binge from July 11, with new episodes dropping weekly.

Contact the author at kquinn@theage.com.au, follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and Twitter at @karlkwin, and read more of his work here.

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