Last Seen follows the story of former detective Ian Ridley, played by Patrick Brammall (Colin from Accounts, The Devil Wears Prada 2), whose life falls apart when his three-year-old daughter Maggie disappears without a trace. A decade later, Ian’s frenzied search leads him to Sarah, a sheltered teenager living under the watchful eye of her deeply pious parents. Driven by grief, hope and obsession, Ian stops at nothing to find Maggie and reunite his broken family, no matter the cost.
As a father of two daughters, Director and Executive Producer Christian Schwochow felt a strong pull to the narrative. Beyond its thriller format, Schwochow was drawn to its exploration of the wounds that shape people’s lives. “Every character has been traumatized and [the story asks] how people deal with trauma in very, very different ways.” In Last Seen the emotional fractures of each character are the engine that drive the entire series, Schwochow says.
Based on Ryan David Jahn’s original novel, The Dispatcher, which was set in East Texas, the creative team of Last Seen decided the geography of the story’s backdrop needed to support the premise of a child “missing in plain sight.” Executive producer Hakan Kousetta said they very quickly landed on Australia with its vast landscape supporting this central tenet of the story. Kris Mrksa, lead writer and Executive Producer explained “the series was mostly shot on the west coast of Victoria, the so-called Shipwreck Coast; an incredibly dramatic, rugged, slightly haunted landscape, which seemed so resonant with the story I wanted to tell.”
Capturing an Australia rarely seen on screen was also a key goal for the creative team. “We didn’t want to portray Australia in a way we’d seen so many times before,” Kousetta said. “We didn’t want this to feel like an outback story…One of the first things we did in development was hire a location scout and we were taken aback by the variety of landscapes from the interior to the coast. It actually helped formulate the direction of the development of the show.”
The fictional town of Port McKenna was built by combining locations across Victoria — including Portland, Warrnambool, the Upper Yarra Valley, Somers, Warburton, Avalon beach, Warrock, multiple suburbs of metropolitan Melbourne and more — into a single, cohesive world. Executive Producer Joanna Werner explained the approach as “cherry picking incredible locations around Victoria…to create this world that’s believable and raw.”
Drawn to the emotional depth of Ian Ridley’s character, Patrick Brammall, described stepping into the role of Ian as both a professional privilege and an intensely personal journey. “When you get to play a lead character like this, in a series with this scope and scale, you’re in an incredibly privileged position because you get to show all the elements and all the facets of this character,” he said. “I have a three-year-old and a five-month-old myself, and I don’t think I could have approached this job the same way if I weren’t a father. My own experience of fatherhood is all through this performance.”
The state of Victoria, with support from VicScreen, helped make the scale of this series possible, Kousetta said. “Fantastic facilities, competitive incentives, incredible locations and first-class crew made filming here a really easy choice. [We’re excited] to have it serve as a showcase for what is possible to achieve in Victoria.”
Last Seen is now streaming exclusively on Apple TV. The six-part series was supported by VicScreen’s Victorian Screen Incentive and the Australian Government’s Producer Offset.