The Longmire star is getting back to his roots in the new series premiering October 24.
He’s an Aussie guy, and he’s OK. Indeed, as much as he enjoyed affecting the appropriate accent to convincingly play a Wyoming lawman in Longmire, Australian-born actor Robert Taylor is happy to return to his mother tongue, so to speak, in Territory.
The lavishly produced neo-Western series, set to premiere October 24 on Netflix, finds Taylor perfectly cast as Colin Lawson, the defiantly tradition-bound owner of the world’s largest cattle ranch, Marianne Station, an Australian Outback spread bigger than the Yellowstone Dutton Ranch and the Ponderosa combined. Lawson rules the place with a whim of iron, resolutely maintaining the empire that has been his family’s for generations. But after the death of his eldest son and chosen heir, clashes over succession threaten to tear the Lawson clan apart.
Worse, there are outsiders chomping at the bit to join the fight. As the Lawson dynasty appears to teeter on the brink of collapse, powerful players from across the Outback — including rival cattle barons, desert gangsters, Indigenous elders, and billionaire miners — circle like vultures, eager to stake their claim. With billions of dollars at stake, alliances are formed and broken, and skeletons are ruthlessly uncloseted, as all factions compete for control.
And throughout it all, Taylor sounds — well, pretty much like you would expect a gritty and formidable Australian like Colin Lawson to sound.
“Yeah,” Taylor said with wide grin during a recent Zoom interview, “Colin does sound different from Walt. It’s the Australian accent, mate. Australians speak through their nose. They don’t move their lips. It’s all up here in the nose, mate. And they say ‘mate’ a lot, mate. And they swear a lot. Every second word is the F-word, the F-bomb, but it’s all right. That’s how they understand each other in the Outback.
“Sometimes you feel like, when you’re in Australia, everybody knows everybody.”
Taylor mostly refrained from F-bombs during our conversation, even as his distinctive Aussie accent rang strong and true. But his enthusiasm for his new project was unmistakable. He said he was drawn to Territory because he admired the substantial scripts — and keen on playing Colin Lawson, a sharp contrast to Walt Longmire.
“There was some good stuff there,” he said. “And, yeah, Colin was a different character. He was Australian. And there’s a similar kind of feel, I guess, to the American Western guy and the Australian Outback guy. Similar and different. Maybe a slightly different way of moving. All that comes from the environment and what you’re feeling. They move slowly over there, because it’s very hot. It’s unbelievably hot. It’s like opening an oven door. Yeah, it’s the same. Same but different.”
Better still, Territory has given Taylor the chance to work with two actors he greatly respects: Michael Dorman (Joe Pickett) as Graham Lawson, Colin’s well-intentioned but hopelessly alcoholic surviving son; and Anna Torv (The Last of Us) as Emily Lawson, Graham’s sympathetic but not entirely trustworthy wife.
Torv, whom he previously worked with on the Australian TV series The Newsreader, “is phenomenal,” Taylor said. “I mean, dude, I just adore her. I just love working with her, she’s so great. She’s got incredibly high standards, but all the while, being a lovely and generous person.
“She’s in the very top rank of actresses. I’ve seen a lot of them, and she’s as good as any of them. She’s just very simple, very quiet. Just delivers it. There’s just a lot going on with her. And she’s a dedicated mom. She’s got a little boy, Ewan, who’s always with her on location. Yeah, she’s a great person. I speak to her regularly. I really like her.”
And Michael Dorman?
“Michael Dorman is just a great human being,” Taylor said. “He’s just a big-hearted guy. And I think he’s a great artist, in the true sense of the word. It’s just great to be in his orbit. There’s just something magical about that guy, off set as much as on, just the way he is with people. He’s just a people person. He’s just fun to be with, to have a drink with. He’s fun to just tour around Adelaide or Darwin, or wherever the hell we are, or Los Angeles, and just see what happens.”
During the location filming for Territory, “We had a lot of fun, a little bit of mischief. Nothing illegal, mind you. But we were out there in the middle of nowhere, man, and it's hot, hot, hot thirsty weather. And they foolishly put us in these little apartments on the ranch, right next to each other. Rookie mistake. We called it The Swamp.
“And they kept saying, ‘Well, you can’t do this and you can’t do that. You better not do this, and you’re not permitted to do that.’ And we figured, ‘Well, maybe we should give that a try.’ Mostly Michael, to be fair. Mostly him. Yeah, like when they said, ‘Don’t go over there, that’s dangerous,’ we said, ‘We’ll just take a look over there.’ Like, it’s just a couple hundred man-eating crocodiles over there. So what?”
Looking back, Taylor said, “I didn’t have a bad experience on this show. Well, except for the time there was a large snake under my bed.”
Say what?
“Well, before that, there was a smaller one that I found in my sink. I got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. I’m fumbling around in the dark and I flip the light on, because I don’t know where I am, because I’m always somewhere different. ‘Where the hell am I?’ And I may or may not have had a couple of beers before I went to bed. And there was this snake. But it was just a little one. Three feet long or something. Just curled in the basin.
“And the little guy, he kept coming back. We got pretty friendly there. We were pretty good buddies. Called him Henry. Like, ‘What are you doing, Henry? Catch any rodents today?’”
“But you should have seen the one under the bed, dude. It was that fat. I’ve got photos of me with it on Instagram.”
No kidding.
Fortunately, neither famished crocodiles nor inconvenient snakes were insurmountable obstacles for the Territory cast and crew. Here is the first Netflix trailer for the series.
Photography: Tony Mott
