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Clip description
In a week’s time Daniel Sims (Chris Lilley) will donate his eardrum to his hearing-impaired twin Nathan (Chris Lilley) in a world-first operation. A magazine journalist (Nicole Brady) interviews Daniel on his family’s property in rural Dunt, South Australia.
Curator’s notes
We Can Be Heroes is at times both comic and acutely perceptive. With the twins and their environment, Lilley and team capture a particular Australian rural milieu with startling clarity. Not limited to Lilley’s spot-on performances as Daniel and Nathan, it’s a portrait carried through into every detail by the production team. Locations, casting, production design, costumes and make-up all contribute to the believability of these characters – from the trappings of their home environment, to the run-down local train station where they hang out with their friends, to their friends themselves, to their photo albums, which feature places and people seen nowhere else in the series. In this clip the farm environment strikes a familiar, slightly desolate note.
The twins themselves show a type of bottled-up teenage boy energy and inarticulateness that Lilley is wonderful at observing: in his later series Summer Heights High (2007) we see him revisit this with his character Jonah (see clip three). What’s really remarkable is that although the twins demonstrate characteristics common to their age group, cultural and social milieu, Lilley has also reached beyond this to create two distinct personalities – and a relationship between them. It’s quite an achievement, considering he is playing identical twins.
The contrast between Daniel’s heartfelt earnestness with the reporters and his harsh words to his brother is a source of comedy – it’s also an interesting observation about codes of behaviour within families and between teenage boys.
Nicole Brady is a real magazine journalist, who followed up her appearance in this scene with an article for The Age newspaper’s ‘The Green Guide’, in which she commented on the improvisational nature of the shooting process, among other things.
