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 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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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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