By Geoff Shearer
Courier Mail
07/06/2011

BLUE skies, placid seas lapping into the laidback luxury that is Mission Beach, a gentle breeze rustling the coconut palms ah, this is living.

If you were to tell anyone this little piece of heaven in northern coastal Queensland is the place where you shot a television series, you’d incur the jealousy of actors across the country.

But Sea Patrol star Kristian Schmid (pictured) says it’s not all beer and skittles.

“I know, I know, it doesn’t sound like hardship to be at Mission Beach,” he says with a grin, “but when you’re doing a 14-hour day, and the waves are pounding and everyone’s feeling sick because you’re breathing in diesel smoke …”

The 36-year-old father of two, who plays radio officer Robert J. Dixon on the series, throws his hands up in exasperation, only with the slightest hint of mockery.

“You just have to buck up,” he says, “and get on with it and that’s what bonds you as a cast, being stuck together.”

It was indeed a hard slog for Schmid and his castmates Ian Stenlake, Lisa McCune, John Batchelor, Nikolai Nikolaeff and the like as they filmed their exterior scenes in Mission Beach early in the year before moving to inside studios on the Gold Coast.

Most of their work on location is out at sea the not always friendly seas often having to transfer from speeding boat to speeding boat in professional navy boarding style. Several of the cast and crew have suffered serious injury filming these scenes (during filming of season four, 11 people were hurt, including two with neck injuries), but for Schmid remembering his first time on set in late 2006 the pain actually started earlier, on dry land.

“I’d just come off this movie about a year or so before called The Great Raid and we’d done 12 days of boot camp and it was just the most awful experience I’d ever been through,” he says, referring to the WWII-based US film from 2005 which starred Benjamin Bratt and James Franco and was filmed in Australia.

“And my manager rang and said, `OK Kristian, good news, new job, Sea Patrol, but you do have to go to boot camp’. And I said `sorry I’m not taking the job’. And they were like, `No, it’s only three days and it’s only Australian and it won’t be as hard’.

“But it was! I did nearly vomit after the speed beep testing. It was proper navy training and there also was strategic workout.”

And there was another downside …

“Then we took out time trying to learn how to march,” he says rolling his eyes. “I always wanted to put my same arm and same leg forward at the one time.

“It looks very odd when you walk like that.”

But he got through the training and, along with his castmates on the Hammersley, is looking slicker than ever in this, season five, the final series of Sea Patrol. Although, Schmid admits, the marching still needs some work.

He’s also hitting his stride, so to speak, in filming for the new series of Packed To The Rafters in which he reprises his role of cerebral palsy sufferer Alex Barton.

Schmid also works as a tutor at the film and TV school Screenwise in Sydney.

By Debbie Schipp
Sunday Herald Sun
April 23, 2011

SEA Patrol’s final season is its biggest and wildest even before it hits our screens.

On the Mission Beach leg of filming series five late last year, actors like Lisa McCune were given a taste of the sea and Mother Nature at their impetuous worst.

For a couple of weeks, conditions off Mission Beach in Queensland’s far north were the worst the Sea Patrollers had experienced.

Huge swells and wild weather made for spectacular shots each day, but left even experienced cast members a little rattled.

McCune, who plays the unflappable Lt Kate “XO” McGregor on the drama, was shaken from her customary cool as one afternoon, the day’s scenes complete, the transport boat lurched its way back to the mainland.

As waves broke across the vessel and it fought the swell, the whole deck was awash.

“Just for a couple of seconds there was water everywhere and I thought for a second we’d flipped,” she says.

“It was the first time in five seasons I’d been scared, just that moment of thinking we were upside down.”

Months later, residents of Mission Beach, who for the past five seasons have welcomed the Sea Patrol cast and crew, saw just how rough Mother Nature can be when Cyclone Yasi hit. The Sea Patrol cast and crew were on the Gold Coast by then, but felt the devastation almost as keenly as the locals who have embraced them year after year.

“It’s so, so sad,” McCune said. “One minute it’s paradise and the next that community is defenceless.

“We’ve all made great friends up there in the past five seasons. You feel for them.”

The Sea Patrol cast will make one last visit to the stricken community, treating the locals to preview screenings of the final season.

The decision to wrap the drama at series five follows the end of financial assistance for 65 episodes under government rebate. Season five, titled Damage Control, will wrap at episode 68.

For McCune and co-star Ian Stenlake, who plays CO Lt-Commander Mike Flynn and McCune’s love interest, it will be a bittersweet ending.

They are original cast members and firm friends and the on-screen couple laugh easily as they share memories.

“It’s become like family,” McCune says. “There have been engagements, marriages and births off-set and on-set that sense of family has been the centre of the show.

“How great was it that (producers) Hal and Di (McElroy) managed to get a show that’s really outside the norm of shows we make in Australian television and get such great access and assistance from the Australian navy and do five series?

“It’s not a cop show or a medical show. It did combine both of those things but it’s more.
“Personally, I’ll take out of it a lot of good friends.”

Stenlake agrees.

“I’m glad it’s taken them this long to work out,” he says, when, taking in Mission Beach on a perfect summers day TV Guide remarks its a great location, but the gig is finally up.

“Already I know that when I look back on my career I know five of the best years — these,” he says.

“My approach to work, whatever the role, is always the same — enjoy the hell out of it,” he says. “But this one’s special. I’ve had two kids, become a family and worked with producers who run the show like a family.”

McCune says farewelling XO feels natural.

“It’s not with sadness that I see it finishing. I think it’s life,” she says.

“In some ways, if it were to go on it wouldn’t be realistic, because in the navy life changes a lot — that’s why it’s lent itself to cast changes, because the ship is the star, the navy is the star.

“I don’t know where Kate could go — she’d have to come back in charge of her own ship, or she’d have to marry this man and have baby Flynns.”

Neither will be drawn on how audiences will say goodbye to the show’s HMAS Hammersley and her crew.

The only hint came the previous night, when Di McElroy joked that another long-time cast member had begged for a big exit so an explosion may well be in the offing.

McCune is looking forward this season to again showing XO’s vulnerable side as she and Stenlake’s Flynn continue their relationship.

“We got to play nice stuff that contrasted with the life on the boat last year,” she says.

“The scenes where she got to be vulnerable in her love life, I revelled in — they were such a change from barking out orders.”

McCune and Stenlake laughingly catalogue the injuries of five seasons on a show that has an amazing safety record despite the complexity of its stunts and the fact that much of it is filmed on water.

Another original star, Kristian Schmid, still gets bagged about last season’s man overboard incident when, as Stenlake puts it, “Schmid walked on to a boat that wasn’t there”.

“Those calm days going back after lunch were when you relaxed and took mis-steps,” McCune says.

Stenlake takes up the topic with relish.

“Our safety fellow did a knee stopping: a director going overboard,” he says.

“John Batchelor hit his head on a stationary boat and ended up with stitches.

“Someone got a fish hook through his arm. JLT (Jeremy Lindsay Taylor) did his calf muscle and went down like he’d been shot.

“I’ve got off scott free. It’s safe on that air-conditioned bridge.”

The closest they’ve seen to potential casualty this season was off-set, when Conrad Coleby (Dutchy Mullholland), insisted on hurtling home downhill on a skateboard after barbecues at the McElroys’ Mission Beach house.

If there’s any sadness that this is the last series, it’s not in evidence here.

SEA PATROL, Tuesday, 8.30pm, Nine

TIFFANY FOX, The West Australian
April 22, 2010

Deciding what to watch in the evening can be a bit like selecting a meal from a restaurant menu – sometimes our tastebuds feel like a special, gourmet experience and other times we just have a hankering for mum’s home cooking.

Sea Patrol star Lisa McCune has no illusions as to which category the high-seas action adventure fits in to.

Now in its fourth season, the series follows the fortunes of the small navy patrol boat, HMAS Hammersley, and its crew as they take on people smugglers, terrorists and drugs off Australia’s coastline.

Honesty, integrity, honour, courage and loyalty are the crew’s watchwords, as they race around the ocean and round up the bad guys.

It is fast-paced, family-friendly Australian television that has attracted its fair share of detractors over the years but McCune says Sea Patrol’s broad appeal should not be seen as a bad thing.

“I think we can get kind of highbrow about our film and our television and sometimes we just want to eat mashed potatoes,” McCune says.

“There are a few dead bodies but you are not looking at anything challenging, you can get up during the commercial breaks and you can watch it with your family. We don’t need a delicacy all the time.”

Audiences obviously agree. The first three seasons drew an average audience of more than 1.3 million viewers nationally per episode and the new series has been extended to 16 episodes, up from the usual 13 of previous years.

Filming can be a hard slog for the cast and crew, who have to spend up to five months on set and weeks at a time on the boat but for McCune the role of coolly professional Lt Kate “XO” McGregor was too good to let go.

“I love it because as a woman in my 30s I was not being put in the kitchen and being made a mother, I was out on the high seas and being put in charge of a crack team of navy guys,” she says.

While she is reluctant to give any plot twists away, McCune says some turbulent romance is on the horizon for HMAS Hammersley’s tough executive officer.

“The last series was interesting because we wanted to focus on the navy side of this and we missed out on the character’s personal development because she was always on the boat,” she says.

“But there is more of that this year, which is terrific because I really like playing that. This series we start talking about women in the navy and when they are starting to make a choice between making a life as a mother or a wife, or whether or not they want to have a career.

“Sea Patrol has a huge teenage boy following, so it is interesting to deal with a character like that who is asking those questions.”

Former cast mate Martin Sacks will also make a guest appearance in a move sure to delight fans of the duo’s Blue Heelers’ characters PJ and Maggie. McCune says the series will move away from the overarching story-lines it has focused on in the past in favour of more stand-alone episodes. The shift in focus will be a test for fans used to the action-driven story-lines but McCune hopes the characters will continue to strike enough of a chord with audiences to see the series come back for a fifth season.

In the meantime, she is working with the Melbourne Theatre Company and spending some time learning how things work behind the camera with the hope of branching out as a producer

“With drama, particularly when you are only making a certain number of episodes a year, you just wait until you see how they are going before you dive in again,” she says.

Sea Patrol airs today at 8.30pm on Nine and 9pm on WIN.

By David Knox (TVTonight.com.au)
April 15, 2010

When it comes to promoting Sea Patrol, Lisa McCune could almost be photographed at the front of the HMAS Hammersley in a style used for the movie Titanic. Such is her enthusiasm for making Australian drama, and such is the reliance of the network on her star-power to propel the series.

But McCune, who studied as a teenager at the WA Academy of Performing Arts, is defiant in championing the industry and it is her true spirit that has connected her with audiences since becoming a star on Blue Heelers.

She understands her appeal meets a broad demographic, equally as much as she understands footage for promotional campaigns will make the most of her popularity.
“When the Channel Nine Marketing Department get it my face is up the front and I get that,” she tells TV Tonight. “That’s just what happens when you market a show.

“But on a day to day shooting basis I’m there all day most days, and I can’t make that show without the other nine actors or the crew or the brilliant guest actors we have.

“I’m not in it for personal glory. I would have taken my career in a different lurch if I had wanted that. I like working as part of the team.”
McCune says she accepted Hal McElroy’s invitation to join the series at a time when Australian drama needed endorsing.

“I was really insistent on it being an ensemble piece,” she says. “The star of the show is the boat and the navy. And the great thing about the show that keeps it rolling on is that in navy life, characters do transfer on and off boats. So this character could be transferred off and the show still keeps running. So I guess I felt really strongly that it would be a company show.

“I think there’s a real danger about a show being based around one person too much, unless it’s like a Halifax-style show where the show is about that person.
“We’re all in it together, the main cast, and we’ve got a really strong guest cast as well.”

The fourth series has 16 episodes, 3 more than previous years. The first series had FFC miniseries funding which required an ongoing storyline arc. But at 16 episodes this approach has been more challenging to sustain. According to McCune, the end result is more focus on characters, to the benefit of the finished product.

“I think our character development hasn’t been as strong before as this series,” she says. “We see the personalities and the light so much more this time around.”

At the McCune acknowledges that Sea Patrol is a broadly-appealing commercial work, which aims to draw Australians families to Australian drama. As she accelerates her own interest in production, she has also engaged in discussions with Producer Hal McElroy on scripts.

“I said to him ‘I think sometimes it’s a little bit obvious.’ And he’s really smart, he said, ‘This time of night when the family is pretty busy, you just sometimes have to explain a little bit more when the audience is younger.’

“Interestingly too on the flip side of that, our televisions are becoming bigger. And the bigger they become sometimes the less we need to say because it becomes almost filmic.

“I’ve got a family here, and they’re a little bit young, but at 7:30 they’re watching something that’s a little bit more obvious. You haven’t the focus completely of someone who’s just sitting down to watch television,” she says.

“I think for adult drama we’ll have to say less and show more. Which is kind of scary because it’s digital now so when you’re seeing it close you’re seeing it really raw.”

McCune is already pursuing interest in becoming a Producer, developing a project with writers Tony Morphett and Gus Howard. Children’s producer Jonathan Schiff is also mentoring her on another project.

“Now that I’m a bit older and confident I’m a bit more willing to take a risk. I’ve optioned a book, and there’s a play that I’d like to option. I’ve got a lot of people who are giving me good advice. No matter what comes of it, it adds to my sensibilities as an actor to know what goes on on the other side of the camera,” she says.

Such passion for Australian drama even extends to ideas on programming. McCune isn’t at all surprised to see shows like Underbelly pulling big audiences following the end of Daylight Saving.

“When it’s Daylight Saving I can’t get my kids into bed before 9. I look forward to the day when we have a 7pm news bulletin and we can start producing drama from 8 to 9 and then 9 to 10pm. And I think that will help solve the Daylight Saving problem that we have for 6 months of the year, for those states that have it,” she suggests.

“There’s no way I can see a 6pm News. 7pm would be great for me. I know you’ve got it on the ABC, but I think programming on the hour would be great because at the moment when you see a 9:30 drama it doesn’t end until 10:30, but they bleed it over until 20 to 11. So from 8 to 9 and 9 to 10 you can still be in bed by 10 and see a good bit of drama.”

As for the future of Sea Patrol, to which she is clearly pivotal, McCune says its destiny lays with viewers.

“Ultimately something has to work on commercial television. I’m a strong believer that things can artistically work as well as commercially work. Perception is very important. I just hope when people review Sea Patrol, ie. journalists, that they review it as someone with a broad demographic rather than saying ‘I love this kind of television, or that kind of television.’ Sea Patrol is family viewing.

“But at the end of the day the audience decides. They are the power in television and we have to remember that. If they want more Sea Patrol then they’ll watch and we’ll make more,” she says.

“I don’t believe television is dead. We have a strong industry and there’s a lot being made at the moment. It’s very exciting.”

Sea Patrol airs 8:30pm Thursdays on Nine.

Show Swap
TV WEEK
25 August 2009

With Sea Patrol docked until next season, Kristian Schmid took time to appear in this week’s episode of Packed to the Rafters.

Kristian plays a cerebral palsy-sufferer – and brother of new Rafter’s hunk, Jake (James Stewart).

“I wanted to be sure that I got it as right as I possibly could, so I spent some time at the Spastic Centre and talked to a lot of people with cerebral palsy,” Kristian tells TV Week.

“It’s terrifying taking on a role like this because there’s also the danger of offending people. I’ll be giving the guys at the Spastic Centre a call to make sure that they were happy with what I did.”

Kristian Schmid on Rafters

David Knox
TV Tonight
26 August 2009

There are quite a few stars popping up on different networks at the moment.

Next week we’ll see Kerri-Anne Kennerley’s appearance on Talkin’ ‘Bout Your Generation.

An hour later Sea Patrol’s Kristian Schmid has a role in Packed to the Rafters, as the brother of Jake (James Stewart).

“I’m playing a character with Cerebral Palsy and he is the brother of Rachel’s boyfriend,” he told TV Tonight. “It brings up a whole lot of ‘how am I going to deal with this?’ subjects.”

“The cast are really friendly, as are the crew, and they make the guest artist feel very welcome, so I’ve been having a ball.

“It’s really got some fantastic writing on it as well, which makes my job a lot easier.”

It airs 8:30pm Tuesday on Seven.

Temporary Rafter

Daily Telegraph
31 August 2009

SEA Patrol’s Kristian Schmid recently returned to civvies to film a six-part guest role for Seven’s Packed To The Rafters from this week (Tuesday, 8.30pm).
Schmid debuts as Jake’s (James Stewart) brother Alex, who suffers from cerebral palsy.

“The function of the character is not just to explore what it’s like to have cerebral palsy but to show how it affects the people around him,” Schmid explains.

“It raises questions for Jess Marais’ character (who is seeing Jake) and how she deals with it.”

While Sea Patrol actors Jay Ryan, Jeremy Lindsay Taylor and Saskia Burmeister have left the series, Schmid confirms that he will set sail on the program’s next voyage, which starts filming in and around Mission Beach this month.

Sunday Telegraph
September 2009

Closer – Vanessa Santer talks about the old days with Kristian Schmid.

Many remember him as Tod from Neighbours, but Kristian Schmid is all grown up and set to join another of TV’s most popular families. He joins the cast of Packed to the Rafters tonight as a guest role.

Q Are you on set at the moment?
No. I’m at the park with my son. We’re having a nice day together. I’m about to start work on Sea Patrol (where he has a recurrent role) in September. We film in far north Queensland. I take my family with me, but we’re in Sydney otherwise.

Q You had such an iconic role on Neighbours. Do you still get recognised as Todd?
It’s a strange one. Yes I do, but also Neighbours was associated at the time with growing up and was a really positive time in life for people. So I get a lot of “did I go to school with you?” or “did you go to this whatever?” Sometimes I say yeah, sometimes I say no, it depends on what sort of mood I’m in.

Q Yours was surely one of the best deaths ever on a soap opera. Was it a good way to gout of Neighbours?
It was very traumatic for many people. Being hit by a van is pretty good – it’d have to be up there.

Q Were you a fan of Packed to the Rafters before scoring the role?
Yeah, I think it’s a great show. I watched the first series and there are very talented people working on the show. To be honest, I’m a big fan of all the new Australian dramas. I think they’ve cast it (Rafters) really well with people who like working with each other, so there’s a bit of magic there and it’s really good writing. It looks at interesting issues without getting too heavy and dark.

Q You play a character with cerebral palsy in Packed. How challenging was that?
Look, it’s interesting because normally you’re just focused on the acting and hitting the right emotional keys, but when you’re playing someone with any sort of disability or physical trait there’s something else to think about. After talking to people with CP, it’s about muscle spasms that you don’t have a lot of control over. I’m generalising, but usually they have to concentrate extremely hard to control any twitches. There are so many things going on you get a similar look of concentration.

Q Why acting?
It changes all the time, but the easy answer is because I can. I truly like telling stories and there’s an element of me that likes to be the centre of attention. And it’s a great that as a male you get to embrace a lot of the emotional side of your like that some others may hide away. I get to play for a living. I don’t consider it work; I really enjoy what I do. When I’m doing 14-hour days that’s something to rejoice in.