GAYDUK: You’ve done a few period pieces throughout your career and I read that you enjoyed studying history. What attracts you to the subject?

DORMER: It was always my favorite subject at school, other than English and drama. But I don’t see them as disparate things: history and drama are about cause and consequence. It’s storytelling. Well, you could argue, some history is storytelling anyway, it’s the storytelling of the victors. But it’s about the human condition. It’s about exploring the human condition and the choices we make and their ramifications. In that way, history is the same as good drama.

So my first big job was with The Tudors, it was a pairing of my two favorite loves, acting and history, but I wanted to be able to turn Picnic at Hanging Rock down [at first] because I don’t need another corset to my name. I’m trying to fight to get out of this pigeonhole. But after I read the first cut of Bea Christian’s script and after I spoke to Larysa for 90 minutes on the phone, I was like this is such an opportunity to work with such a talented core team, creative team, and I was really intrigued by the idea of Australia wanting to prove that they could make prestige television. The cable television that Americans and Brits are all so okay with making…I was intrigued by this idea of this nation going, oh hang on, we can play this game too and we’re going to do it with this story, it’s really their national treasure story, it is the jewel in their crown, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Joan Lindsay’s novel and obviously people are aware of Peter Weir. They study it at school. It’s in the cultural consciousness, that story, and people don’t know if it’s true, they don’t know if it’s historically a real story of whether its not.

So I was so impressed with Larysa when I spoke to her, and so impressed with Bea’s writing, it didn’t read like a costume drama. And I was intrigued by the idea of going to the other side of the world–the impact Australia has on you the first time you see it! For all those reasons, I went sure, oh shucks, I think I’m getting in a corset again. Have you seen any of it?

GAYDUK: The first two episodes.

DORMER: You tell me but to me it feels incredibly modern in its sensibilities.

GAYDUK: For sure—I didn’t realize how much of a fantastical element it would have. Everything surrounding the disappearance felt very mystical.

DORMER: Yeah. It’s got a magical realism, a surreality to it. And that was on the page on the scripts—Larysa gave references to David Lynch in pre-production and there were photographs that edged towards that surreality. There was something of Lewis Carroll, there was something of David Lynch. There was something magic, surreal. That’s the beauty of Picnic, is this mash of genres and we get away with it, it’s like a comedy in places, it’s high melodrama in places, it’s a thriller. I think Larysa calls it an enchanted thriller, but it has all this mishmash of different genres, and it has gothic edge to it as well. It gets away with it all. We could all feel that on the shoot, so there was a lot of playing to work out what would stick, and I’m really proud of the result.