TV Week 17/10/98
Murder Call's Lucy Bell and Peter Mochrie slipped out of their suits and into something casual for a laid-back chat about the dreaded X-factor, working together and cracking up under pressure...
David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson are a real life X-File of their own. Do they hate each other or not? It is currently one of television's greatest mysteries.
They are quoted as saying they respect each other's work and have a good working relationship on set, but that is as far as their relationship goes.
"I spend 14 hours a day, 10 months of the year with her," David said of his co-star in a recent interview. "When the work is over, she's the last person I want to see."
Their weekends are their own. They rarely come together outside normal working hours and have had more individual storylines on the show in the past year than ever before. But does all that really mean they actually hate each other?
Murder Call's Peter Mochrie and Lucy Bell are about as close as you are going to come to a David and Gillian-style working relationship on Australian TV. As Murder Call's crimefighting detectives, Tessa Vance and Steve Hayden, Peter and Lucy are constantly together, day and night, scene, after scene, after scene. When the pressure is on, they both feel it.
"I'm very proud to say that under what can be very tough working conditions we have a very fine and very professional working relationship," Peter says. "When they say 'Action', we are there for each other and when they say 'Cut', we know where each other's space is."
While they are reluctant to draw comparisons between themselves and the X-Files freak fighting duo, both Peter and Lucy can easily relate to the intensity of their working relationship.
"I really do doubt that they hate each other," Peter says. "If they hated each other then they would get out of the job. It's too tough to work with someone as intensely as they do, and as we have to, if you hate the person you're working with."
Lucy says while she and Peter also have a great working rapport, they have a similar philosophy when it comes to dividing their work and pleasure time.
"There is some kind of expectation that if you work so closely together that you must be great friends who hang out on the weekends," Lucy says. "But the reality is you spend so much time with each other during a long working week, that when you have time off there are other things and other people you really have to try to fit in."
Severe, suited and serious, there's never a smile exchanged between the two on screen. Murder Call is about homicide and it is a serious business.
But in real life, get them out of their suits and, as TV Week discovered, Peter and Lucy seem light years away from their po-faced on screen personas.
"My job is to make people believe that I'm Steve, and Lucy's job is to make people believe that she's Tessa," Peter says. "We would want people to believe what we do, but I would really hate people to believe that I'm as boring as Steve."
Neither of this pair is staid or boring in real life. They laugh and chat happily, smile a lot and share the kind of personal jokes that cause eruptions of laughter. Apparently when the cameras stop rolling, it is the same on set. "It is a very serious subject," Peter says.
Lucy adds: "And the way we deal with it, the cast and crew, is that at times we have to have some fun. We have to be focused to get the right feel for the show, but we have to have some fun to break it up a bit."
When Peter and Lucy talk about cracking up under the pressure, they don't mean a spoilt actor's tantrum or an embarrassing outburst of anger. They mean when it all gets a bit dark and dreary and when the hours are dragging by, sometimes they simply need to crack up laughing to relieve the tension and pressure.
"We pride ourselves on having a very relaxed set," Peter says. "That comes from Gary (Day, who plays Inspector Malcolm Thorne) doing a lot of jokes. Geoff (Morrell, who plays forensic scientist Lance Fisk) is good for a laugh, as are Jenn Kent (who plays police photographer Dee Suzeraine) and Lucy. I like to joke around with the crew. You have to do that when you're dealing with such dark stuff."
By Shane Sutton