Getting Cracking in a Killer Mystery-Comedy (and Getting Excited About Season Two): Kate Box Talks 'Deadloch'

When your name is Kate, you make a series with a heap of other Kates — "I think there was nine of us working on the show," Kate Box advises — and the streaming hit with all that Kate energy is the brainchild of Australian comedy queens Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan, accidentally punning on Deadloch's creators, aka The Kates, is probably inevitable. Ask Box about getting started on the award-winning mystery-comedy's upcoming second season, as Concrete Playground did, and the Rake, Wentworth, Stateless and Boy Swallows Universe star drops the perfect response: "I can't wait to get cracking on it".

"Oh my god, they've taken over my body," she laughs about referencing one of the TV series before Deadloch that helped cement McCartney and McLennan's status as comedy greats, as sharp and smart satirists, and as creators of the very best comic television that viewers could ask for. Unlike morning TV spoof Get Krack!n, however, or cooking show sendup The Katering Show before it, McCartney and McLennan left the acting to others on Deadloch. Earlier in 2024, Box deservedly won an AACTA Award for Best Acting in a Comedy for co-leading the series as small-town cop Dulcie Collins. She's also rightly up for a Logie for Best Actress in a Comedy.

The character of Dulcie is one half of Deadloch's lead double act, and also one part of a TV cop show staple: the odd couple. The Senior Sergeant was once a Sydney homicide detective, then moved south with her vet wife Cath (Alicia Gardiner, The Clearing), finding more solace in the routine and rules of the job than in a quieter Tasmanian life. Donning sandals and Hawaiian shirts, loving swearing as much as Dulcie loves structure, and incapable of containing her emotions for a moment, Eddie Redcliffe arrives from the Darwin Major Crimes division to complete the series' key duo. As the new colleagues investigate why the bodies of dead men have started piling up in the show's titular town, cue pairing Box with The Breaker Upperers, Baby Done and Our Flag Means Death's Madeleine Sami, and giving the small screen an instant-favourite chalk-and-cheese twosome.

Imagining anyone else as either Dulcie or Eddie is impossible, but Box was initially in line to play the latter role. When the project came the Offspring, The Daughter and Fucking Adelaide alum's way, that's what she first auditioned for. Envisaging anything about Deadloch's first season differing from the eight excellent episodes that hit Prime Video in 2023 is equally inconceivable; however, knowing what might've been sparked some on-set fun. "I mean, I gave Mads quite a lot of shit when we'd get to the scenes that we were shooting that I'd done in my audition scene," Box explains. "I was like 'ohh, are you going to do it like that? Yeah, I wouldn't have when I was doing it'."

It doesn't come as a surprise for a second that Deadloch's first season was a delight to make; as it charted Dulcie and Eddie's investigations, expertly parodied its genre, made a killer feminist statement, and always proved both a hilarious watch and a gripping crime series, the end product certainly was a joy to watch. It might've taken its streaming home a full year to greenlight more episodes of a show that The Kates originally gave the working title Funny Broadchurch, but that a second season is on the way is similarly understandable — and eagerly anticipated.

As set up at the end of season one, Deadloch's return will take Dulcie and Eddie to Darwin, looking into the death of Eddie's former partner — plus beyond when more bodies pile up again. We not only chatted with Box about what she's excited about the second time around, but also the response to the show so far, why it has resonated with viewers, working with The Kates, auditioning for both Dulcie and Eddie, how she prepares for stepping into former's shoes not once but twice, what gets her interested in a project and more.

On the Enormous Response to the First Season of Deadloch

"Obviously it's been so wonderful. It's a project that I feel so deeply proud to be a part of. There's this really wanky thing, I suppose, in the industry where you're like 'don't say it was like a family' — but it really was.

It felt like an incredible bunch of artists who all really were looking out for each other and looking out for this incredible new life that would be Deadloch.

I think that everybody who worked on it had such great passion for it — and when you see something that you love reach so many people and have the response that it did, it's a pretty great feeling."

On Why Deadloch Has Struck Such a Chord with Viewers

"It's so funny, isn't it — you never know what's going to stick, really. But I think The Kates write such brilliant characters, they write such tight plots and their voices are so incredibly unique. 

I think watching Deadloch was that beautiful feeling of danger and surprise, because all of this feels very new — but also of real safety in trusting that the show was going to deliver the goods in terms of great characters and great politics. 

And once you got into the show and you got used to the fact that it was a fairly new genre — in the way that it was trying to balance these very dark topics with this very wild humour — I think there's that feeling of joy that you get in watching something that is so unique, that is really universal, that you're witnessing something new and wonderful.

The Kates just managed to bring that genre to the world in such a smart and generous and joyful way."

On How Box Reacted When a New Project by The Kates Came Her Way

"I auditioned for Eddie, so when I got sent the first script or the first scene, that was to put down a tape for Eddie. And I read that character — and I'd been a bit madly in love with The Kates for a while now, and had watched their work and had always found them to be exceptional — and then I read this character and I was like 'who is this woman? This is a role that I don't see come across my iPad very often'.

I was kind of gobsmacked by that. And I spent the first week preparing Eddie and just having the most-amazing time doing that. It was one of those things I was so excited to go into the audition for and just put the tape down. I just really wanted to play in that world. That's a really good sign, because it doesn't feel like it's a job interview — it feels like an opportunity to just relish a very cool human.

Then, before I sent the tapes in, they said 'oh, can you also put something down for Dulcie?'. I'd grown so in love with Eddie and I hadn't read much of Dulcie's material, and then they sent the stuff through for Dulcie and I was like 'well, this is a different hat to put on' — and I had to really recalibrate how I imagined living in that world.

Obviously Eddie and Dulcie approach the world in very, very different ways. But it was actually such a great start to being a part of Deadloch, because I got to inhabit the the madness and the straightness of what they were trying to create with this dynamic. It was really wonderful."

On Working with Madeleine Sami as Eddie

"I think nobody else could play Eddie except Mads. She's the perfect fit for that sandal, and so I was standing opposite her and just watching this cyclonic force of comedy — and Eddie had such big kid emotions and Dulcie is an incredibly restrained adult. 

Watching Mads was just a comedy masterclass, and my task was to try to stick to the words on the page and to the crime that needed to be solved, and just manage this whirlwind of madness around me.

It was just fun. It was very, very fun — and really hard to keep my shit together in a lot of scenes."

On How Box Approaches Playing Dulcie

"If you look at who Dulcie fell in love with, they're not a buttoned-up, repressed, tight-lipped human. Dulcie's love for Cath speaks volumes in the kind of energy that Dulcie may thrive off internally as well.

So while there's all this kind of madness around her, I think her love for Cath indicates that she is drawn to the parts of her that she can't access, which is that chaos and big emotion. And so I think in playing Dulcie, I was always really wary of giving her this massive internal life of responses. 

I would look at a scene and imagine the screaming and shouting and tantrum-throwing that Dulcie would be doing internally, and then shut the lid on that and play the  professional, straight, repressed version of that — which was a really fun task. 

I think that the chaos of the show and the brilliance of the show is that it is able to hold this incredibly dark and serious storyline, and tackle some pretty rough and intense and vulnerable issues, but it also does it in a way that is wildly funny and absurd. And so finding that balance within Dulcie of somebody who can feel all this stuff but hold everything in felt like the right match for the piece."

On the Preparation Process for Stepping Into Dulcie's Shoes the First Time Around

"Because the script is so extraordinary, so much of your information is handed to you because The Kates are so specific and so excellent.

I chatted to a few folks in the police force, a few women in the police force, and had discussions with them about what it was like working in a pretty dick-swinging environment. And I just watched the way in which they would talk about it. Often the women that I met had taken on a lot of the mannerisms of what you would imagine that really heavy testosterone environment is like. 

That was really interesting to watch, because I thought 'I don't think Dulcie's gone that way'. I think Dulcie doesn't play the game in that way. I think what she does is she follows the rules, and she does that hopefully to the point where she can't be thrown off or criticised because she's done everything by the book.

So I chatted to quite a few yeah folks in the police force. And I rewatched Broadchurch, because that was such an amazing inspiration for it. And I tried to just get incredibly precise in my note-keeping, which is very different to me.

Like me, Kate, my notes are chaotic. My brain is a bit messy. I'm not a particularly ordered person. And so as I was preparing for Deadloch, I tried very hard to keep really neat notebooks and to have little codes as to what certain things in the scripts would refer to. I tried to get into the mind of someone with that much precision. Unfortunately it didn't stay.

And I'm a big fan of writing personal history for characters, so I have notebooks filled with imagined events that had happened to Dulcie in her life, like the first time she met Cath and the day of their wedding, and when she graduated from the police academy — all that kind of stuff. I journaled."

On Returning to the Character Again for Season Two

"I feel like I've got access to so many of Dulcie's memories because I wrote them down, but otherwise I may have forgotten. 

You know when you're moving house and you open that box of letters and photos and you're like 'oh my god, that!'? I feel like I've got Dulcie's box of letters and photos in my desk drawer, all ready to pull out and get going again."

On What Box Is Most Looking Forward to with Deadloch's Second Season

"I cannot wait to be in Darwin. I spent primary school in Darwin, and I've gone back there quite a lot in my life, and I love it. So I'm really looking forward to spending some time up north in the heat. And hopefully as we get closer to wet season, watching those clouds roll in and waiting for that rain to break at the end of the day. 

I'm looking forward to all of those things that the place dishes up so beautifully, the sunsets and the markets. So I'm looking forward to the lifestyle — not that I'll get out much because I'll be on set all the time.

And obviously just being around Mads and Alicia and Nina [Oyama, Utopia] and The Kates again. I just adore them as humans. They are really good mates, and people that I feel really joyous around and really lucky to be in their company, so I'm looking forward to being in their orbit again."

On What Gets Box Excited About a New Role at This Stage of Her Career

"I think I'm at a point in my life where the greatest joy is the people that I'm working with. I get really excited about having opportunities to work with people who I love and whose work I find thrilling and challenging and smart.

I think I get most excited about collaboration, to be honest. I get excited about building humans alongside other people who have great insight into humanity, and into how folks think and feel and walk through the world.

The good thing about being at this point in my career is I feel like I'm able to come into conversations much earlier on than I was when I was younger. I feel like when I was younger, I'd enter projects at the final stage of everything and not trust my voice enough, either, to be able to help fill out those characters through conversation with the writers and the directors.

So I think what I love now most is that I trust myself a lot more. I have some excellent relationships with artists who I admire wildly, and that collaborating with those people feels like a real two-way street rather than me getting a script and just trying to give somebody what I think that they want. The inventiveness that comes with working now, I find really thrilling."

Deadloch streams via Prime Video, with no release date announced as yet for season two. Read our review of season one, and our interview with Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan.

Deadloch images: Bradley Patrick / Prime Video.