The Tourist spoilers incoming.
When I interview Shalom Brune-Franklin, the star of one of BBC’s hottest new shows, The Tourist, I’m on a serious adrenaline high, having binge-watched the gripping, six-part cat and mouse mystery-drama in preparation. That makes two of us; Shalom – fresh-faced and glowing on our Zoom call – has been on edge for weeks while awaiting the public response to the show, which represents her biggest acting role yet. “It was so scary! Nerve-wracking. Because it’s such a kooky show – and a strange mix up of genres. One minute, you're laughing one minute, the next you're tearing up. You just don’t know whether people are going to like it or not.”
Thankfully, it seems “kooky” is a formula that has paid off for The Tourist. Since the show’s release on New Year’s Day 2022, it’s gained a five-star review from Luke Buckmaster for The Guardian, an 83% positive approval rating on Google and a lot of hype on social media, while Radio Times dubbed it: “An unpredictable, edge-of-your-seat mystery that startles you with laugh-out-loud moments of ridiculousness”.
While Ethan is a character often deployed for laughs in The Tourist, his actions, behaviour and language are almost a textbook depiction of an emotional abuser.
The action centres around protagonist The Man (played by Jamie Dornan), who wakes up with amnesia in an Australian hospital, following a car crash, and has to piece together his identity and past life. Shalom plays Luci Miller, a waitress who becomes entangled in The Man’s journey – and may even hold mysterious links to his past. The actor is no stranger to Australia, where the show was filmed, having moved with her family from St. Albans in the UK to Mullaloo, a northern coastal suburb of Perth, when she was 14. Despite having a Hebrew name, Shalom doesn’t have Israeli roots (‘My mum just really liked the name’) – instead, she is the product of a Mauritian mother and Thai-born English father.
Initially, Shalom had career aspirations to be a broadcast journalist – and won a place to study the subject at Edith Cowan University in Western Australia. Her entrance into acting happened as the result of an administrative error, where she was wrongly enrolled as an international student – which saw her kicked out of her course and asked to re-enrol the next year. Instead, she was taken on by the course tutor at Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA), a highly-selective, elite drama school that just so happened to be based on the same campus.
While Shalom won a drama prize at school, she had no family background in the performing arts, and it had never occurred to her that her teenage passion could be an academic and career path. Yet when she started at WAAPA, everything fell into place. “It was like watching kids roll around and have loads of fun, screaming at the top of their lungs. And I was like, that's exactly how drama was for me in year 12. It's weird that you can get a degree in it.” She was later awarded a prestigious scholarship in her final year – founded by none other than WAAPA alumnus, Hugh Jackman, who came to talk to her class (“he's a kind, amazing person”).
Starring Kristen Bell and Michael Ealy.
Through her acting career, Shalom has been able to satisfy the two factors that drew her to journalism in the first place: to “tell stories” and to “travel”. Plus, in the six years since she left drama school, she’s played a whole host of impressive roles, including DC Chloe Bishop through season six of the hit BBC police drama Line of Duty, and Maisie Richards in Our Girl. And, of course, starring alongside Fifty Shades of Grey heartthrob Jamie Dornan.
In an exclusive interview with GLAMOUR, Shalom opens up about filming The Tourist in the Australian outback, navigating gritty roles and sex scenes, and coming to terms with being “spotted”.
Happy New Year! And what a way to start it – with your most high-profile television role yet being aired on television. How have you been navigating that?
It’s such a weird feeling, I haven't really kind of wrapped my head around it. I hadn’t had the experience of people stopping you or anything like that before, and then I was at a pub yesterday and the group of people at the table next to me was like, “It’s Luci with an ‘i’!” But it’s really cool. I’m just glad people like the show.
Have you been rewatching it yourself?
Not yet! I need to watch it back on BBC iPlayer. It’s still pretty fresh in my mind as I’ve watched it two or three times now – and I just love seeing all the different things that even I haven't picked up on in the show – particularly in the storylines that I’m not in. So I'm definitely going to watch it again.
We're here for this drama Down Under.
The show was filmed in the Australian outback. As you watch back, what do you remember about the reality of filming in that environment?
The coldness, for a start! I’m really surprised watching back at how hot the show looked. We were constantly being sprayed down with water and sunscreen on set, to make us look sweaty. But we were absolutely freezing! And the flies... Danielle [Macdonald, who plays local police officer Helen Chamber] and Jamie [Dornan] had a tougher time than me – they were swallowing a lot of flies during takes, I don’t know how they did it. When you watch the show back, there’s a lot of me doing this hand thing on the show, what they call the Australian wave… which is basically just batting flies away. I also remember the amount of dust and dirt – every day you’d be coming home and cleaning dust out of everywhere. I kept finding dust months later when I was living back in Sydney. It just gets everywhere.
And they say acting is a glamorous profession! Do you ever wish you could just get the full hair and make-up treatment, rather than being covered in dust and grease?
It's so funny – for the parts of the show that I get to be a little bit more glam [Shalom has a couple of notably more dressed-up scenes in the latter half of the series]. I was like, oh, this is so nice. Not having water thrown on you at 6:00 AM and the hair and make-up team putting dirt underneath your nails! I also worked on a fantasy series [US Netflix drama, Cursed], which involved a long, extravagant hair process with this braided hairstyle, and you’re staring at yourself in the mirror as it happens – it’s a nice way to get into character. Hopefully I get a bit more of that, one day!
You’re no stranger to unglamorous roles. Previously you played DC Chloe Bishop in Line of Duty, and Private Maisie Richards in Our Girl… is there something about these grittier parts that attracted you?
They were just the roles that came, to be completely honest. I’ve been really lucky. With The Tourist, the script was the thing that got me involved instantly. For me, the main thing is working with great teams and writers, like Harry & Jack Williams [the fraternal writing team behind The Tourist, together with The Missing, Baptiste and Liar], regardless of how big or small the role is. I’d rather have a tiny part with someone I wanted to work with, rather than a huge famous part with a team I don’t.
You and Jamie Dornan’s character form a romantic connection on the show. Was it daunting, filming sex scenes with a well-known Fifty Shades heartthrob?
It’s funny – I’ve been asked this before, what it’s like doing a sex scene with someone like Jamie because of the gaze that’s put on him, from the films that he’s been part of. But in a way I felt the least nervous to be doing the scene with him because he’s also partially naked. In a room full of other people who are fully dressed, you feel most supported by your other actor – and he went above and beyond to make me feel comfortable. Of course, it’s a strange experience. But everyone on the team was so professional – and we had an intimacy coordinator on set, which is such a good process to put in place. At the end of the day, we're just portraying another part of these characters and, and how they interact. And so it didn't really feel too different from any other scene – apart from the fact that you're partially naked.
What was it like working with Jamie?
It was so great. He's such a lovely person, so down to earth… every day working together was just so much fun. We were just laughing the whole time. And he's an amazing actor as well.
Did you bond with the cast and crew, behind the scenes?
Definitely. Jamie, Danielle, Damon [Herriman, who plays Inspector Lachlan Rogers]… everyone. It was when there were still Covid restrictions in the UK, but none in Adelaide, where we were filming – because there were no cases. So we were in this bubble of freedom. You could go out to bars, you could go to restaurants, like you could completely live freely. And I think for pretty much most of the cast and crew, we were all coming from areas where you couldn't do that. We all just wanted to be out and be around people and be doing things again. So it was a really social experience: having dinner together every single night, games nights, going to pubs in the Outback. It made everyone really close, like a travelling circus. A film family!
The four-part series should hit screens in 2022.
Finally – acting is a very nomadic profession. You’re based in London, with UK representation, but your job has taken you all around the world in recent years. Do you think your family moving from the UK to Australia when you were younger helped set you up for this part of the profession?
When you move to another country at that age, you immigrate and you go through all that work and you feel like you're never going to have a life again, you're never gonna find friends again, and that it's all just gonna be awful. But it ends up being one of the best things that ever happens to you. It gives you this sense of not feeling so attached to a place, and in a good way: you're not afraid to travel. It’s bittersweet: I do sometimes long and wish that everyone was in the same place and we all came from the same town. But it’s given me the tools to set myself up no matter where I am, and create a little bit of a home, for the three, four, five months that you might be filming.
You can watch Shalom Brune-Franklin in all six episodes of The Tourist, which are available to watch now on BBC iPlayer.
