'The Tourist' thriller, South Australian-made and -backed with Stan and BBC One, wins most viewers in UK in 2022
Jamie Dornan (Belfast, Fifty Shades of Grey) stars in The Tourist Stan/BBC One series that opens in the South Australian outback. Inset – Top: The Dornan character in search of his memory with Luci (Shalom Brune-Frankin). Bottom: Adelaide's Damon Herriman plays a quirky detective inspector in The Tourist.
Images by Ian Routlege for Two Brothers Pictures.
South Australia-made and -supported series The Tourist became the United Kingdom’s most-watched television drama for 2022.
Filmed across South Australia in the Flinders Ranges, Adelaide city and the South Australian Film Corporation’s Adelaide Studios, The Tourist was produced by South Australia’s Lisa Scott of Highview Productions, based at the Adelaide Studios, with Two Brothers Pictures (Baptiste, The Missing, Fleabag). The biggest budget television series ever shot in South Australia, The Tourist started production in 2021 with $3.6 million in support from the Scott Morrison federal government’s location incentive programme backing it for being predominantly filmed in regional areas.
Jamie Dornan (Belfast, Fifty Shades of Grey) stars in The Tourist as an Irishman who wakes up with amnesia after an accident with a truck pursuing him while driving in the very remote outback. The character-driven mystery-packed thriller, full of shocking, surprising, funny and brutal turns, was set in a world populated by quirky, enigmatic characters as its off-beat black comedy punctuates high-stakes action.
Written by Harry and Jack Williams (Baptiste, The Widow, The Missing), the six-episode series twists and turns through the dusty outback of South Australia, to the frantic noise and lights of Singapore, and to the calm luxury white-sand beaches of Bali.
Among the supporting cast in the thriller, said to mix humour with the philosophical, was Adelaide-born actor Damon Herriman, playing a detective inspector. It was a change from Herriman’s run of villainous roles such as a scheming priest orchestrating coverups for the church in Lambs of God and the boss of a hitman in the first and second seasons of Mr Inbetween. He also was a misogynistic sergeant in the director Jennifer Kent’s harrowing period drama The Nightingale and played Charles Manson in Quentin Tarantino’s Once upon a time …in Hollywood and a notorious cult leader in Mindhunter on Netflix.
