Swimming with whale sharks on Western Australia’s Ningaloo Reef is sublime, says 16-year-old actor Alyla Browne – and she should know. Browne performed all her own underwater stunts in the new family movie Whale Shark Jack.
“You feel small, and it feels very fast-paced,” the actor says during the lunch break at her Sydney school, where she is in year 11. “On one side, it’s blue – and you don’t know how far the blue goes on for. Then you look to your other side, and you see this massive creature with spots all over it. It gives you this perspective. It makes you feel so small and insignificant, but in the best way possible.”
Such descriptive insight isn’t unexpected from the extraordinary child actor. Browne played the younger version of Anya Taylor-Joy in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Nicole Kidman’s daughter in Nine Perfect Strangers, and the young Alice in The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart.
Now she stars alongside Abbie Cornish, Michael Dorman and Rachel Ward, as Sarah, a 12-year-old wildlife warrior who has grown up on her parents’ research boat. This production, the first feature film from children’s author Kathryn Lefroy, also marks the first time Alyla has had her own mini-me on set: Emmi Williams plays little Sarah, who first encounters an injured baby whale shark she names Jack.
“Emmi is so cute and sweet,” says Browne, who also made firm friends with two other child actors making their film debuts, Luca Miller and Giselle Philogene.
LA-based Dorman, who plays Sarah’s father (Cornish is her mother), was impressed with this new generation of Australian talent. “They’re rooted to the truth,” he says. “It’s magnetic. It’s like lightning in a bottle.”
Despite having played some hardy characters – the titular lead of neo-Western crime drama Joe Pickett; the alcoholic heir to a cattle dynasty in outback drama Territory – Dorman had to confront one of his greatest fears: the ocean.
“In free diving, you’re trained to hold your breath longer than you can, to oxygenate your blood,” Dorman explains. “You submerge yourself and become comfortable and absolutely at peace under there. Even when you feel like you need air.
“It was an interesting way to meet everybody because there’s an element of trust to it,” he says. “It unified us from the start – the three of us trusting each other when you’re underwater, just limp, trying to go as long as you can. Alyla can really hold her breath!”
The action on land includes the “boat-schooled” Sarah’s first encounter with the playground jungle; discoveries with Rachel Ward’s kindly scientist known for her bizarre toastie combinations; comical evasions of the marina officer (Wellington Paranormal’s Karen O’Leary); and a moving scene with a school mum, Hazel (Ursula Yovich), who sings a Baiyungu healing song, courtesy of associate producer and traditional owner Hazel Walgar.
“I think everyone [on set] felt touched by that song,” Alyla says. “It was a very reflective morning.”
Underwater, she also met a playful young whale shark that turned out to be of great significance to the teams tracking the endangered species by the unique patterns on their backs.
“We had a spotter plane that searched for whale sharks. Then we’d dart around trying to find them, and by the time we got to one, it had dived under. We had lots of footage of whale sharks, but we didn’t have one which stayed at the surface for a long period of time. But on the last day, in the last hours of filming, we encountered this whale shark who just wouldn’t go away.
“He stuck with us and kept trying to eat the camera … He was chasing the boat’s bubbles. It was actually sometimes annoying! But that whale shark hadn’t been identified yet, so we were able to call this juvenile male whale shark “Jack”. So there’s a real Whale Shark Jack out there.”
Whale Shark Jack is on Stan from March 26. Stan is owned by Nine, the owner of this masthead.
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Bridget McManus is a television writer and critic for Green Guide. She was deputy editor of Green Guide from 2006 to 2010 and now also writes features and interviews for Life & Style in The Saturday Age and M magazine in The Sunday Age.
