Underbelly: Razor S04E09

Crying. Lying. Pretending to kill someone. Getting naked in a room full of strangers. Anna McGahan has been paid to do all these things. When asked how she came to do all this, and more, her reply is simple: “I fell into it” she tells Caitlin Scarr...

The scent of brewing tea fills the apartment, and Buddhist prayer flags frame the doors, flapping in the breeze, as 23-year-old, flame-haired Anna, a professional actor, bounds into her Sydney living room, surprisingly thunderous footsteps offsetting her petite frame. It is hard to know what to expect when visiting Anna. She is many things. Passionate. Fragmented. Mischievous. Elegant. Left-handed. “Unco-ordinated”, she quips. These last two things may, or may not, go hand-in-hand.

Anna is less than six months out of actor-training school, and has had consistent professional work. This is rare in her profession. Her current job, as a lead character in a high-profile Australian drama, airing soon, has crossed a new acting frontier for her. Anna has, for the first time, been required to appear naked on-screen. But she is assertive about the artistic merit of the project. “…I find that it’s not gratuitous, and if it was, I wouldn’t be doing it… the character cannot be played without the required nudity. It’s an inherent part of her… I think it looks really beautiful, quite honestly…”


But is there a mantra that makes it easier? Something to repeat quietly when the lights are a bit too bright, and the work is that little bit daunting? Anna is philosophical when she responds, “someone once said to me that when they’re calling action, pretend they’re calling cut.” Now, as if being on-set full-time is not demanding enough, the self-confessed “stretchy” Anna is also pursuing a second, equally difficult, career. She is a budding playwright. Her most recent play is in the process of being produced and staged with an independent company in Brisbane, and seems to be eliciting an element of the perfectionist within. “I’m finding it very difficult to edit it without starting the whole thing again… If I plan it, it comes out contrived…”

Intrigued by her range of skills, I asked Anna how she identifies herself. Taking a moment to weigh up her thoughts, her response is calculated, and then surprisingly concise. “I’m an actor, and I’d like to also be a writer… I consider myself creative, but at the moment I’m being paid to act, so I’m an actor.” Despite Anna’s success, she admits that it is still a difficult profession. “…everyone asks you what your next job is going to be, even if you’re already in one. And I don’t like that, but it’s just part of it.” So, I ask the difficult question. What about the future? Anna answers firmly, adamantly, that she will be “wherever the work is”. It seems that confidence really is the key.

Television Series: Underbelly:Razor (S04E09- The Crash)
Release Date: October 2011
Actress: Anna McGahan
Video Clip Credit: Johnny Moronic










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Underbelly: Razor S04E06

Lincoln Lewis has described sex scenes in the latest episode of Underbelly: Razor as "intense". The Australian actor, who used to play Geoff in Home and Away but more recently played a vice queen's toyboy lover in Nine's graphic crime drama said that he tried to stay "relaxed" when taking his clothes off. "That was my second sex scene, but by far the most intense," he told Ok magazine. "I didn't know what to expect, but I tried to be as relaxed and professional as I could. Danielle Cormack, who plays Kate Leigh, was amazing, because she's done a couple of those types of scenes before. The plan was to just go for it and have fun, and I think in about two takes, we'd nailed it - quite literally!"

This is Lewis as you’ve never seen him before, getting up close and personal with an older woman – “the worst woman in Sydney” – no less. Lewis makes his anticipated arrival playing Kate Leigh’s new toyboy Bruce Higgs. "He is infatuated with Kate," says the actor who hit the big screen last year in Tomorrow, When the War Began, which is bad news for her right-hand man and sometimes lover Wally Tomlinson, played by John Batchelor. "He is pretty smitten by her," he told Access All Areas during a break in filming. "He is 22, he sees what she runs, he sees the group, the gang the mob, and he decides ‘I want in on that’. He is very motivated and doesn’t take no for an answer. If he really wants something, he will find a way to charm his way in. He is very witty and charms the pants off her."


Quite literally, apparently. A sex scene was the first thing Lewis recorded with Danielle Cormack, who plays sly-grog queen Leigh. “That was my first scene of my first day, I had met Danielle once and had one chat to her and she is the easiest person to get along with. I was excited and nervous but, as soon as we got on set, Danielle just made me feel very comfortable.”

Interestingly, co-star Cormack has recently been opening up about her own real-life toyboy lover, who is 19 years younger than her. The 40-year-old New Zealand actress said that she had "chemistry" with 21-year-old Pana Hema-Taylor as soon as they met each other two years ago. "There was undeniable chemistry from the start, but at the time I didn't feel it was appropriate to act on it," Cormack told Woman's Day magazine. "Pana is so charismatic. He's the sort of person who's magnetic to other people - they want to be around him. I was aware of that and then, for that to be directed at me - wow!"

Actor Hema-Taylor said that he "couldn't help but stare" at Cormack because she is so "beautiful" and knew that they had a future together, despite her reservations because of the age difference. Cormack added: "It all fell into place. That overcame any barriers I felt might have been there." Meanwhile, Lewis is currently dating Home and Away actress Rhiannon Fish, who plays April in the soap. He said that filming raunchy scenes for Underbelly was good revenge for all the romance scenes she has to do at work. "Every day I have to see her kiss someone," he said. "Now I'm finally coming up with some payback!"

Television Series: Underbelly:Razor (S04E06- Blood Alley)
Release Date: September 2011
Actress: Danielle Cormack
Video Clip Credit: Johnny Moronic










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Underbelly: Razor S04E04

The camera zooms in on a beautifully pedicured foot and pans up a shapely leg. It's Kate Leigh, ''Queen Kate'', reclining in the bath. ''Hang on to your hats,'' the voiceover says, ''it's not going to be pretty.'' Oh, but it is, writes crime author and TV host Tara Moss, when examining why female criminals are softened for their portrayal on screens big and small...

Before long, this formidable female crime lord steps out of the tub and shows us a beautiful flash of breasts. She stands naked before the man who offers her a towel. She is confident. She is tough, unquestionably sexy, the screen version of the female criminal. This recent incarnation of the ''deadly woman'' is found in Underbelly Razor, the latest instalment of Channel Nine's highly successful crime drama franchise. Razor (based on Larry Writer's fascinating nonfiction book of the same name) portrays two of Australia's most notorious female criminals - the sly-grogger Kate Leigh and the brothel madam Tilly Devine - as beautiful women at each other's throats. It's entertaining stuff. Though Razor is ostensibly based on real events, the lead actors bear little resemblance to the real Kate and Tilly, apart from their fetching pin curls, feathers and frocks.

The "ugly truth" behind the latest Underbelly war story is admiited by Nine bosses, who confessed they "tweaked the casting to put a prettier face on the femme fatale series". While mug shots of Sydney's most notorious criminals from the roaring '20s were used to hire actors resembling the hard men, the female leads went to Kiwi beauties Chelsie Preston Crayford and Danielle Cormack. Nine boss David Gyngell sold the sexier version to advertisers as part of the network's push to get Underbelly the right attention.


Photos from the time show real-life crime queens Tilly Devine and Kate Leigh were hardly the stuff of cinematic close-ups. While renowned for their indulgence in the latest clothing and dazzling jewels, they were as harsh looking as they were hard-nosed. Had Razor's Queen Kate looked more like the woman herself - heavy set, with belly and breasts thrust forward under a pleased grin, seeming to wear her extra weight luxuriously and with pride - that opening sequence in the bath would have been very powerful indeed, though in a very different way, thinks Moss.

The fact is, we prefer to see beautiful people on the screen. While male crime bosses can safely be depicted as old, brutish men with ravaged faces and pot bellies, we aren't quite ready to see the female version of this. ''The criminal woman is a true monster,'' criminologist Cesare Lombroso wrote in La Donna Delinquente (The Criminal Woman) in 1893 and for many, more than a century later, that gut reaction still holds. The hard, criminal woman unsettles us. She is an aberration and one we'd rather not examine too closely. Softening the edges of the female outlaw is all too irresistible.

We soften them physically, giving them eye-pleasing curves and even features. Sometimes we soften their temperaments, too, as evident in the portrayal of Razor's pretty Tilly running off quietly into the backyard to have a cry by herself when she catches husband Jim Devine in bed with one of her young prostitutes, Nellie Cameron. A very human response, yes, but arguably improbable from a woman with such a famously vicious temper that she literally shot both of her husbands in quarrels.

We like our female criminals to be beautiful and preferably fit the mould of the seductive femme fatale - an archetype born from Eve and Salome and popularised by glamorous bad girls of 1920s detective novels and the American film noir of the '40s and '50s. As historian and curator Nerida Campbell writes in her book Femme Fatale: The Female Criminal: ''Pulp fiction artists created a picture of incredible glamour, beauty and wickedness. The women were frequently depicted carrying out their nefarious activities, often with a smoking gun in hand.'' A weapon in the hands of a striking woman is a powerful and sexually charged image - the blade or the pistol as phallic symbol, the shooting bullet as metaphor for the obvious.

Mae West quipped, ''Is that a gun in your pocket or are you happy to see me?'' The fact is, we are happy to see the femme fatale. Men are drawn to her because she is not only beautiful but also sexually voracious and available. The heartache afterwards is an afterthought. Women like me love the femme fatale because of her untamed freedom, subverting the obvious cliche of the female victim - a cliche because it is still true too much of the time. Ours is a world where there are still alarming levels of domestic violence and more than 80 per cent of violent offenders are male.

When it comes to crime, the woman is often the victim so it is unsurprising that there remains something bold, novel and undeniably appealing about a gorgeous, razor-wielding bad girl, a` la Razor, a film noir Veronica Lake or Barbara Stanwyck, or a gun-toting Thelma and Louise. They rebel. They rebalance. They even make driving off a cliff look good. In reality, a life of crime and violence isn't so pretty. Take that most rare and terrifying of criminals, the serial killer. In popular culture the female serial killer is perhaps most famously portrayed by Sharon Stone as Catherine Tramell in Basic Instinct, a bisexual beauty who beds her male victims and then stabs them to death with an ice pick.

Her real-life equivalent would be Australian Katherine Knight, a victim of appalling sexual abuse as a minor who grew into a violent woman and, in 2000, at the age of 44, had sex with her partner, John Price, then stabbed him repeatedly in bed, skinned him, decapitated him, hung his hide on a hook and put slices of his buttocks in a pot in the oven to cook. Katherine was found asleep at the blood-soaked crime scene and never had the opportunity to kill again.

US prostitute Aileen Wuornos, on the other hand, did. She murdered seven men and was put to death by lethal injection, aged 46. Like Knight, Wuornos was not rich or dangerously alluring like Stone's Catherine Tramell. She was raised in an atmosphere of grinding poverty and abuse and ultimately became a Monster as the title of the Oscar-winning 2003 film based on her life suggests. Screen beauty Charlize Theron played Wuornos, albeit with significant weight gain and unflattering make-up. Wuornos and Knight are not glamorous femme fatales. They are the ''monsters'' of Cesare Lombroso's view. Not the kind of fatal woman we had in mind.

As far back as the 16th century we find a tale of female serial killer, Countess Elizabeth Bathory de Ecsed, dubbed ''The Blood Countess'', who was charged with torturing and killing hundreds of her servant girls and was walled into her castle as punishment. Her actual guilt is debated but that hasn't stopped her from becoming a legendary femme fatale in myth. She is often depicted as a lesbian or bisexual sexual sadist, bathing in the blood of her virgin servants to maintain her great beauty. We just can't help attributing beauty, vanity and an intriguing sexual appetite to even our most terrifying historical female killers.

In addition to labelling the criminal woman a monster, Lombroso also asserted that women's ''evil tendencies are more numerous and more varied than men's, but usually these remain latent. When awakened and excited, however, these evil tendencies lead to proportionately worse results''. This echoes the old Italian proverb: ''Woman is rarely wicked but when she is, she is worse than a man.'' But just what qualifies as worse results is subjective. For every one Tilly Devine, Kate Leigh, Katherine Knight or Aileen Wuornos, we have many more examples of equally vicious deeds committed by male criminals and killers. But perhaps the idea of a woman committing such crimes at all shocks us as much as the crimes themselves. It challenges our perceptions of women as innocent daughters, loving wives and nurturing mothers - the ''fairer'' and ''weaker'' sex.

For centuries female criminality was primarily regarded as that of sexual immorality; women who led men astray with their feminine wiles, a danger to the fabric of a good and functioning society. Despite a 4 per cent increase in female offenders in Australia in the past decade and a general move towards gritty realism in crime dramas, we still have trouble imagining a criminal woman who isn't sexually alluring. Or if we can imagine her, it seems we don't particularly want to.

Television Series: Underbelly:Razor (S04E04- The Damage Done)
Release Date: September 2011
Actress: Danielle Cormack
Video Clip Credit: Johnny Moronic










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Underbelly: Razor S04E03

Razor, the latest in the Underbelly saga, is a mordant fable of avarice, violence and death, writes the Australian's Graeme Blundell... Brilliantly realised, the new series traces the booze and cocaine-fuelled sex trades dominated by madam Tilly Devine (Chelsie Preston Crayford) and sly grogger Kate Leigh (Danielle Cormack) in late 1920s and early 30s Sydney. Swift, lean and stunningly conceived, Razor relishes the shenanigans of the gangs of slashers and shooters who protected these infamous women as blood spreads in terrible, satiny puddles across the inner city's back lanes. It tells how once upon a time there were two rival queens who waged war on each other for so long their stories became intertwined. Then one day they realised that while they couldn't live with each other, they couldn't live without each other either.

And as you would expect from the Underbelly team, the new series is almost decadently hip, enthralling and produced with show-stopping bravado. Tony Tilse's direction of the first context-creating episodes is rich in detail and teeming with incident. This is simply riveting storytelling delivered at rocketing pace and terrifying plausibility, leavened by a witty script by Peter Gawler and Burkhard Dallwitz's stunning musical score. Gawler wrote the feature-length first episode, his characterisations pithy and sharp. His dialogue has a wonderful ironic hardness about it, a self-defence mechanism used by these criminal Sydneysiders to protect themselves against the harshness of their environment.


If you've watched Nine only briefly recently you'll know the synopsis for this remarkable series: Throughout inner Sydney in the 20s and 30s, the fabled vice queens battle for underworld supremacy. And you'll know it is violent, lurid and sexy as the promotional clips have featured a libidinous parade of lingerie-clad actresses in smoky small Darlinghurst rooms and swarthy bare-chested men sharpening their razors. As has been the case from the beginning, the latest series is staggering in its brazenness, continuing the wonderful tabloid intermingling of the mundane and the biblically heinous delivered by the first series. And again, there's that oddly affecting portrayal of the breathtaking stupidity that propels most homicidal actions, which is so characteristic of Underbelly.

The new series is set in the inner Sydney suburb of Darlinghurst, also known as Razorhurst, Gunhurst, Bottlehurst and Dopehurst and features, as well as our skimpily clad ladies of the night, a wonderful cavalcade of razor slashers, dope pedlars, sneak thieves, spielers, bare knuckle boxers, gunmen and every kind of racecourse parasite. There is prostitution, sly grog, the sale of cocaine, opium and morphine and the standover from which to make easy money. As in the previous three Underbelly series, this is an epic narrative with countless stories spinning out of the central tale of a female gangland rivalry of Dickensian complexity.

It's 1927, and the new Pistol Licensing Act means automatic jail time for anyone caught carrying a firearm, so Sydney's crooks armed themselves with the cut-throat razor, that deadly straight shaving blade. Tilly Devine, born into poverty in London and a prostitute at 15, runs the biggest brothel network Australia has seen. Her husband, "Big Jim" Devine (Jack Campbell), leads a team of hired muscle to protect their lucrative business.

Tilly's rival has capitalised on the new law forcing pubs to cease trading at 6pm, and opened numerous saloons to provide liquor to punters after hours. Protected by her own combative nature and a team of bashers and gunmen, Kate Leigh is one of the wealthiest, and most flamboyant, Sydneysiders. When Tilly steals Kate's Pomeranian dog, the women become sworn enemies. Driven and seemingly incorruptible, Detective Inspector Bill Mackay (Craig Hall) polices Darlinghurst with Detective Sergeant Tom Wickham (Steve Le Marquand) for back-up.

School-aged beauty Nellie Cameron (Anna McGahan), described at the time as a "redhead with a ripe figure and provocative china blue eyes", ignores the advice of Australia's first police woman, Lillian Armfield (Lucy Wigmore), and cheerfully becomes a prostitute for Tilly. Her relationships with Sydney's gangsters (and their deaths) lead to her becoming known as "the Kiss of Death Girl". Nellie is the jewel in the crown for the men of Razor -- powerfully sexy, curiously innocent, and effortlessly classy and brave -- a sensual mix of loyalty and pragmatism. Sins never stain her soul.

At the start of the series, the vicious Melbourne gangster, standover man Norman Bruhn (Jeremy Lindsay Taylor), one of gangland boss Squizzy Taylor's top men in that city, a beater of women, a thief and a pimp, arrives in Sydney. His plan is simple: with a talented cast of supporting enforcers he will take out Tilly Devine and Kate Leigh and become the new leader of Sydney's underworld. The acting throughout is authentic and authoritative, especially Taylor, who has a malevolent athletic grace to him and a fury that radiates. But good though the men are, the women quite properly dominate the screen. Preston Crayford and Cormack are awesome: glamorous, ferocious, tough, passionate and, for all their beauty, convincingly careworn. Both have a capacity for aching resolve. These are fierce queens with no time for exasperation. Anna McGahan's Nellie is breathtaking in her portrayal of almost frightening sexuality and amorality. McGahan is to be congratulated too, for not shying away from several displays of dazzling art deco harlotry.

The series slides through many marginally interconnected narratives and the taut, ironic narration is again a significant device in the new series. The voice is still that of Caroline Craig, who played senior detective Jacqui James in the first series and voiced the one that followed. Again her witty, evocative narration provides just the right sense of continuity, joining scenes and introducing characters, and wryly commenting on the mayhem. We feel we know the woman behind the voice who represents the world of generations of copper insiders; hardly objective but full of a knowing sadness. The narration emphasises this is real storytelling based on actuality, yet suggests there is something archetypal about the stories.

The Underbelly producers and writers have taken on themselves the task of examining untidy truths about slices of our past cultural history, nudging and sometimes caressing them into a pleasing shapeliness that for the past four years has been highly addictive. Some international critics have hailed the earlier series as Australia's answer to The Sopranos, given that they document the history of brutal skirmishes among rival drug gangs. It was hailed as not merely a saga of coked-up trashy hoods, but a modern-day parable on loyalty, betrayal and the corrupting influence of power.

But Underbelly has always been pulpier, more lurid and even more noirish than the American gangster classic, its narratives wandering sometimes haphazardly as it has followed the course of actual events. Some British critics thought it closer in form and quality to a high-end cable crime docudrama that can afford reasonably good actors for the extensive re-creations and re-enactments. But that undervalues the writing and editing skill that is able to tie so many well realised characters to so many real events in such a coherent way.

Again in Razor, the producers brilliantly lock us in a small box of a world crammed with insecurity, doubt, accident, corruption, amorality, suddenly vanishing alliances and violent murder. Underbelly is not simply a fiction that borrows plot patterns from real events, but rather a highly dramatised narrative whose effect is partly dependent on the viewers' awareness that past events are to some degree being reconstructed. The producers do this by employing a dense texture of contemporary historical detail, which gives their terrible stories a shocking specificity. Look at the haircuts, the guns, the suits, the lingerie, the vehicles and the clever use of computer-generated imagery to build the Sydney Harbour Bridge before our eyes across the episodes. This is some of the slickest, most astutely engineered commercial drama we've seen, fast and gaudy but highly intelligent: throw out any doubts, sit back and suck up the excitement.

Television Series: Underbelly:Razor (S04E03- Cat Amongst The Pigeons)
Release Date: August 2011
Actress: Anna McGahan
Video Clip Credit: Johnny Moronic










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Is The Fairytale Over?

Once upon a time, in a lounge room far, far away, people would have fainted at the sight of nudity on television. But as our culture progresses away from T.V.’s modest conventions, are we becoming more and more accustomed to adopting jaw-dropping sex scenes as our source of entertainment rather than finding it in a well scripted plot? asks Tea Tripping...

These days it seems most shows are trying to scream out ‘screw all those right wing, conservative knobs, let’s be edgy and show as much sex as possible!’ And if a show isn’t screaming that out (or at least showing one pair of breasts per episode) it’s considered a little mundane, a little underwhelming and a little cultureless; that, or it might actually have to rely on it’s script, what has the world come to!


Though most audiences are looking for something quirky and a little out of the ordinary in their shows, do we really see these programs with an abundance of boobs, sex and violence as doing something on edge? Sure controversy has always been a good tool for the publicity of a show; make it as grotesque and erotic as discerningly possible and people will watch, and we already know sex sells; but does this mode of address actually encapsulate ‘the fan’ when so many cultural spheres would find it tasteless?

My beef is that much of the time I find that shows with a lot of these explicit themes are compensating for lacking in the script and narrative department. The new Underbelly Razor is a perfect example of a show using this kind of ‘re-directing attention’ tool. It’s easy to see through the snappy one-liners, flamboyant costumes and dangerous nudity that attempt to bring Underbelly together, and while the basis for a good story might be there, the charm and wit that come with true creativity is not.

Deadwood, on the other hand, manages to incorporate violent and sexual themes without that same desperate reliance. It is T.V. shows that depend on such themes in place of a good script that really annoy me, not the idea of them altogether.

In saying that, however, there are probably more brilliantly written shows out there now than ever before. It is the blossoming of transmedia that has really made it necessary for some shows in the T.V. biz to use outrageous, risky and unashamed styles, as with such a vast array of mediums and platforms that television can now be received on, maintaining and capturing an audience is harder than ever.

Obviously there are many cultures that would still never allow shows such as True Blood and Californication (two American dramas both very adept at making soft core porn for television) to be aired, so how do these shows reflect the tastes of their audiences? Do the people who watch shows like Underbelly and Spartacus (that show in which you can see ten pairs of breasts and one hundred men brutally slaughtered in the first two minutes) watch it purely for the naked people and disturbing violence, or do they honestly enjoy the program’s ‘qualities’?

The most brilliant of scenes are the ones filmed with suggestion rather than crassness. T.V. shows should be admired for their ability to leave their audiences dangling, not by making the plot and characters blatantly obvious.

Whatever happened to leaving some things to the imagination? While nudity and sexual references can be a tool adding to the culture of some shows, like it does with Deadwood, using those themes just for the sake of getting attention or making up for drab content is lazy and reeks of try hard rebellion.
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Underbelly: Razor S04E01/02

When it comes to naked ambition, Underbelly's latest belle, Anna McGahan, has it in spades - revealing she relished the opportunity to disrobe for the cameras in her role as infamous Sydney prostitute Nellie Cameron. That said, the Underbelly: Razor star admitted that the first time she stripped off for the show was "terrifying". The 23-year-old Australian actress said that she thought she should do nude scenes while she was still young. McGahan told The Sunday Telegraph: "The first time was terrifying. But I honestly relished it. It's just a body, if I can't do it when I'm 23 then when can I do it? Nudity is a part of [the] character."

Nudity has become a signature of the hit Nine crime series. McGahan's body of work follows those of Charlotte Gregg, who appeared topless in the steamy first season, Anna Hutchison in Underbelly: A Tale of Two Cities and Emma Booth last year in Underbelly: The Golden Mile. McGahan says appearing naked in Underbelly is like Australia's answer to being a Bond girl - but she maintains the titillating scenes are crucial to the storyline.


"There's no nudity or sex for sex's sake... the Australian audience isn't stupid and they don't want to watch gratuitous sexuality. It has a purpose. As Anna McGahan I would feel incredibly uncomfortable getting naked. But as Nellie Cameron, I didn't feel that at all because it is a costume, even in its barest state." So would McGahan go nude again in a heartbeat, if a role required it? "Totally, without a doubt," she smiled.

Even though the fallout has hit much closer to home. An online search of McGahan's name brings up numerous images of the actor on the show, many of which show her naked. She is aware photos of her on the show are widely available on the internet. And so is her family. "My grandmother gets Google alerts of me and she gets porn sites coming up every week that have uploaded this stuff," she said.

Underbelly: Razor has done well in the viewer ratings since it premiered last month, but has also been slammed by psychologists, who say that it is too "provocative" for children. The show's producers have hit back at critics, saying that they include a content warning before the show airs in its night-time slot.

Television Series: Underbelly:Razor (S04E01/02- The Worst Woman In Sydney, Whips And Scorpions)
Release Date: August 2011
Actress: Anna McGahan & Danielle Cormack
Video Clip Credit: El amigo

Anna McGahan










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Danielle Cormack










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