Thirteen years after graduating from NIDA, Caroline Brazier has arrived. To television, at least. Though she’s been delivering powerful performances for the likes of the Melbourne Theatre Company, Bell Shakespeare, B-Sharp over the years, it’s only in the past few that she has been gracing the small screen regularly.

For the first two seasons of Packed to the Rafters, she played Chrissy Merchant, a much-loved character who dated the much younger Carbo.

Then she appeared in the highly acclaimed series Rake playing Cleaver’s ex-wife Wendy. That was with Richard Roxburgh.
And now she has the pleasure of working with another of those Rolls Royce men of Australian film, TV and theatre, David Field. In Wild Boys, Brazier plays Catherine Bell, the schoolteacher with whom Gunpowder, played by Field, is besotted.

“And all of my scenes are with David, really,” says Brazier, “And it’s brilliant. He’s so generous and passionate about what he does and the show and our storyline and he’s just an absolutely terrific person.”

Though Brazier is loving playing the conservative school teacher Catherine on Wild Boys, she’s still bemused as to the quality the casting director saw in her which made it apparent she was the right person for the role.

“Repression?” she laughs. “It’s quite strange, because I’d done Packed to the Rafters for a few years and I wore huge amounts of makeup and always had really big hair and leopard skin outfits, and cleavage, and fake tan. It took a long time to get me ready to go on set, whereas Catherine is a school teacher and quite God fearing and modest, always wearing the same brown frock and barely a stitch of makeup. She’s really the absolute opposite of Chrissie.”

And so too is the relationship between Gunpowder and Catherine the opposite to that of Carbo and Chrissie.

“The storyline between them is very sweet,” says Brazier. “But their attraction is constrained by the conventions of the era, and almost forbidden, which can sometimes be even sexier than the stuff that is more overt. A glimpse of an ankle can be incredibly exciting. All that suppressed desire and unresolved sexual tension...”

So how will things progress between the two? “It’s a slow burn. There’s some really cute stuff where we take our shoes off and dangle our feet in a lake. It’s building towards something. But it’s going to take a while.”

Who’s your favourite Wild Boy?
Gunpowder, of course!

Though he’s more a wild man than boy ...