Meet the Creators of THE NEWSREADER Season 2

Featuring Jo Werner, Nathan Lloyd and Angie Higgins

Friday 9 February

10:30am AEST

Winner of the 2021 AACTA Award for Best Drama Series, The Newsreader's second season launched earlier this year to audience and critical acclaim.

The Newsreader Season 2 travels from election night 1987, through the shocks of the Hoddle Street shootings and the Stock Market Crash, the complexity of the heroin crisis, towards the protest and pageantry of the 1988 Bicentenary. As a nation grapples with its identity, its past and future, Helen and Dale reach a crossroads, and must settle on who they want to be, to each other, and to the world...

Join some of the cast and crew of this production (already renewed for a third season!) and hear stories from the set and behind the scenes.

Featuring

Jo Werner

Joanna Werner is the founder, Creative and Executive Producer of her Melbourne based production company Werner Film Productions, which she established in 2008.

Joanna’s work has been defined by consistent acclaim, with multiple AACTA awards and Logies and three Emmy nominations. Joanna has amassed production credits on an array of internationally acclaimed work – most recently on AACTA and Logie winning series The Newsreader for the ABC, Netflix global top 10 hits Surviving Summer and Clickbait.

Other credits include Riot for the ABC, Secret City for Foxtel, Emmy- nominated Ready For this, as well as the two-time Emmy-nominated Dance Academy, which ran for three seasons and spanned a Feature Film version – Dance Academy The Movie.

In 2022 Jo produced the Logie Award winning drama/comedy tween series Crazy Fun Park. Most recently she produced Season 2 of The Newsreader and Season 2 of Surviving Summer, both premiered in September of 2023.

Joanna recently completed a six-year term on the Board of Screen Australia and served as the Chair of Screen Australia’s Gender Matters Task Force for six years.

Nathan Lloyd

With two nominations for this year’s Best Casting AACTA Nathan Lloyd has cemented his reputation as one of Australia’s preeminent casting directors. In addition to two previous ACCTA nominations, Nathan is a five-time winner of Best Casting from the Casting Guild of Australia.

Across two decades Nathan has brought together some of the industry’s most memorable ensemble casts. His commitment to putting new and diverse talent on screen has facilitated critically-acclaimed performances and career-defining roles. Among them, Sarah Snook, Milly Alcock, Keiynan Londalse, Charlotte Maggi.

Nathan’s most recent, award-winning credits include Werner Film Productions’ smash hit THE NEWSREADER, LOVE ME for Foxtel/Binge, starring Hugo Weaving, Bojana Novakovic and Shalom Brune-Franklin; Aisha Dee’s return to Australian screens in the compelling the SBS miniseries SAFE HOME, and Foxtel’s global phenomenon WENTWORTH, screened in over 200 territories.

In a busy 2023, Nathan completed work on HIGH COUNTRY (Curio/Binge) starring Leah Purcell, Ian McElhinney and Aaron Pedersen, FAKE (Kindling Pictures/Paramount+) featuring Asher Keddie and David Wenham and WINDCATCHER (Unless Pictures/Every Cloud/STAN) starring Jessica Mauboy, Kelton Pell and Pia Miranda- introducing newcomer Lennox Monaghan in the titular role.

Nathan has served on the Executive Committee of the Casting Guild of Australia, has been a member of the Casting Society of America since 2012 and holds a strong association with the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

Angie Higgins

Angie Higgins is one of Australia’s leading editors of drama and comedy. In a career spanning three decades, she has worked on a string of hugely acclaimed and widely seen series. From the indelible relationship dramas of Secret Life Of Us and Offspring, to the science fiction drama of Glitch and LaBrea, to the multi-award winning historical dramas Molly and The Newsreader. Angie has collaborated time and time again with some of the country's most renowned directors, among them Emma Freeman, Daina Reid, Kate Dennis, Shirley Barrett, and Kevin Carlin, for whom Angie has edited two feature films, The Extra and Boytown.

Angie commenced her career as an assistant editor on the landmark Australian drama The Flying Doctors, quickly making the leap to editor of the iconic serial Neighbours in the mid-90s. Since that time, Angie has edited over twenty television series. Highlights include multiple seasons of the enduring police procedural Stingers, and seventeen episodes of the beloved romantic comedy Offspring. Her work on the record-breaking miniseries Molly saw her nominated for an Australian Screen Editors Guild award, as did her work on Deadloch. a black comedy series for Amazon. She also drew an AACTA nomination for her work on series one of The Newsreader and has been nominated in 2024 for two AACTA awards; one for Newsreader series two, the other for Deadloch. (Winners announced 08/02/2024)

Most recently, Angie has edited Surviving Summer series two, High Country, and Fake starring Asher Keddie.

Ruari Elkington

Dr Ruari Elkington’s industry engagement and academic research has been driven by questions about how screen content connects with discrete audiences in markets increasingly under pressure through creative and commercial tensions. His screen industry experience centred on the acquisition, marketing and distribution of documentary, feature film and innovative digital content to theatrical and online audiences. In 2018 Dr Elkington was awarded a Churchill Fellowship to investigate new initiatives connecting Creative Industries students and online video creators in collaborative work. His real-world engagement is evidenced in his 2019 peer reviewed appointment to the World Economic Forum (WEF) Expert Network (Future of Information and Entertainment) building on his AMP “Tomorrow Maker” award and funding.  In 2023 he was awarded a Queensland Smithsonian Fellowship to work with social video creators to communicate cultural heritage collections to new audiences.

He is currently a Senior Lecturer in Creative Industries at the Queensland University of Technology’s (QUT) Creative Industries, Education and Social Justice Faculty and a Chief Investigator within QUT’s Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC). In 2022, alongside his Resilient Screen research colleague Dr Tess Van Hemert,  Dr Elkington co-designed and led the largest recent national audience survey of Australian cinemagoing in partnership with Palace Cinemas.

The Newsreader (S2) is a VicScreen supported production