The Airport Chaplain

listening to Thursday Night's Arena.

For generations of film lovers, Hugo Weaving is instantly recognisable.

Whether that's delivering ice-cold terror as Agent Smith in the Matrix trilogy, commanding the outback in Pink Chiffon in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, or playing ruthless anti-heroes, like Harkness in Apple TV's Slow Horses.

Irish audiences will also know him for his phenomenal work made here, hunting deserters through the bleak famine landscape of Lance Daly's Black 47 and dominating the stage at Dublin's Gate Theatre in the blistering production of Thomas Bernhard's The President, in which he starred alongside his friend and collaborator Alwyn Foray.

Hugo, how did it feel to be working back in Australia again? I know that you work, obviously, internationally and at home a lot, but what was it like doing this series at home?

Well, I actually mostly do work here.

So most of the work I do is either on stage in Sydney or perhaps in Melbourne or filming in Australia.

So...

shattered.

Did I tell you that The Airport Chaplain's very good on Netflix? Yes.

You did, yeah, you did mention that.

I'm going to check it

You might still hear that in my voice.

So I was binge-watching in a way that I hadn't binge-watched before, including the Airport Chaplain, the Australian series that's on SBS, which does include some customs and declaring, but that has Hugo Weaving as an airport chaplain.

And it's good.

I'm really enjoying it.

Um, it is a terrific, um, podcast.

The other thing I've been, um, really enjoying of recent days is an SBS show called The Airport Chaplain.

Oh, I've watched some of that too.

Yeah.

Um, it's got a really good bu- good buzz around it at the moment too.

So Hugo Weaving, uh, is I guess the main star.

He plays the airport chaplain at a, it's called Melbourne Airport, and they work for an airline, which I forget the name of the airline, but it's not, you know, it's a made-up airline.

And his job is to basically deal with all sorts of unusual crises that are happening at the airport, and then there's a cast of characters around him.

I watched the new Australian drama on SBS and available on SBS On Demand called

The Airport Chaplain.

Oh, this has got Hugo.

It

in the show.

Airport chaplain.

So it is Hugo Weaving is the airport chaplain at Victorian... fictitious airport.

Yes, okay, Victoria.

Thank you.

I mean, I went for five series, which is unheard of in this day and age when audiences are so fractured.

But within that show, I feel like we really held the hand of the audience.

We connected with the audience.

And if, for instance, when I was I luckily had two weeks available when they called me up about Homebodies for SBS, which is low budget.

It's only $1 million.

It's meant to be a talent escalating initiative that just is a web series that isn't even on their main platform.

And very little pay.

It's an amazing series and definitely worth checking out.

But beyond Alone Australia coming back, we haven't heard if the airport chaplain's coming back.

It's currently airing, I acknowledge, on SBS and is on their on-demand platform.

I would have thought that they would have said it's happening now.

It's on SBS.

It stars Hugo Weaving and it's called The Airport Chaplain.

It's great.

You were a Hugo Weaving fan? Yeah, he's a very good actor.

He intervenes in... domestic violence disputes.

There's a very, very tense episode about a woman, a pregnant woman and her young child who are trying to leave the country, and she's very tense.

And suddenly the husband arrives and says he needs to give the child a Ventolin inhaler, but the airport chaplain and his trusted colleague, who's played by Claudia Kavan, who comes into it, As another airport worker, they suspect that something is wrong.

There is an Irish girl, an Irish student, who is violent and who takes over the prayer room for two days.