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Jacki Weaver feels right at home at Parliament House apparently. Back shooting the second season of Secret City, she got a private tour from her ex-husband, Senator Derryn Hinch, and didn’t look out of place in the corridors of power. As the character Catriona Bailey, now Minister for Home Affairs, she makes real life incumbent Peter Dutton look somewhat pedestrian. She’s still spying for the Chinese, her power is absolute, she’s the reigning woman in a man’s world and she’s making a fist of it. After series one, which aired in 2016, everyone was wondering how Weaver would go on the hill in real life. Producer Stephen Corvini even acknowledges it. “Knowing Jacki, the kind of character she is, so forthright and with very strong opinions I can see her suiting up for Parliament,” he says. “She's a pretty formidable character. She's tiny but not to be underestimated.” Secret City: Under the Eagle picks up with Harriet Dunkley (Anna Torv), not long out of prison and unwittingly ensnared in a military and political cover-up with Catriona Bailey’s fingerprints all over it. Dunkley’s search for the truth leads her back into Canberra’s corridors of power, this time working for a maverick Independent MP. What she unearths is a military program so secret, not even the Prime Minister is aware of it and begs the question of who is really running the country? Corvini is extremely pleased with how the second season, which premieres on March 4 on Foxtel, has come together. “It's a really powerful story, we’re very happy with the performances, the production values are very, very high. It really is a political thriller of the highest order. “The first season established a certain criteria for the type of show we wanted to make.” The storyline is a departure from the original books written by Steve Lewis and Chris Uhlmann, who were story consultants on this series. “But we’ve ripped it right from the headlines again. It’s a take on the relationship between Australia and the United States, which is under an enormous amount of pressure as the US exercises its power around the world. It’s another series that taps into a really strong topical moment in our history.” The production once again enjoyed “unfettered access” to Parliament House, shooting in Canberra in March 2018. “Given the access we had, I think we've got something as close to the truth as you could possibly get,” Corvini says. “It's really important for a show like this to have that voracity and verisimilitude, the fact the first series was so well received within the inner circles of that world in Canberra, it allowed people to open up even more, be more involved than in the first season.” The cast list reads like a who’s who of Australian television. “Some days I used to look at the call sheet and think, my God we really do have the creme de la creme,” Corvini says. As well as Weaver and Torv, Danielle Cormack (Wentworth), Don Hany (East West 101), Rob Collins (Cleverman), Andrew McFarlane (The Sullivans), Marcus Graham (Cleverman), Sacha Horler (The Letdown) and Joel Tobeck (Tangle). But the real star of Secret City is our home town. Have they managed to make her look as great as they did in the first series? “Absolutely,” Corvini says. “Don't you worry about that. Canberra looks pretty sexy and it is. “I think when you see some of these great civic buildings on a screen, they are amazing buildings, and see those kind of figures in the landscape … it really is a city of monuments. “When you look at them in a course of a series, they are very, very impressive. We've looked a lot at the brutalist architecture, the National Gallery of Australia, the High Court, the angles of the city, we've taken those and expressed quite strongly throughout the series.” Corvini said Canberra improvised a little too. “We seemed to be competing against every major festival in Canberra all in that one week, the fireworks, Enlighten, the hot air balloons … there was a myriad of things. “We've managed to fold some into the shoot. In episode one we actually feature the fireworks which worked quite beautifully into the story, the scene we were depicting, we're storytellers so we just had to look for ways to make it work.” Secret City: Under the Eagle returns, with all six episodes released to stream on Foxtel from Monday, March 4 at 8.30pm and also available to screen each week on Fox Showcase.

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