It was winter 1989, and the Rose Noelle was three days into a voyage to Tonga when it became lost at sea. 119 days later, the crew - John Glennie, Rick Hellriegel, Jim Nalepka and Phil Hoffman -re-appeared, long after being given up for dead.

More than 25 years later, their story is being revived in the form of a two-part drama starring Kiwi stars Greg Johnson, Peter Feeney and Owen Black, alongside US-based Aussie Dominic Purcell.

The four actors got a taste of what their real-life counterparts would have gone through, spending upwards of 10 hours a day filming in the water.

Supplied The cast of Abandoned spent weeks at sea, as their real-life counterparts would have.

For Johnson (The Insatiable Moon, Agent Anna), it was a chance to revisit the same story only on film instead of stage, though he quickly found the shoot far more demanding.

"The physical aspects were extreme. We were in water - sometimes we had to lie in it for hours, other times completely submerged in it. We were on an upturned boat in relatively high seas for weeks ,10 hours a day," he says.

"There is nowhere to sit, you have to stand or lean on the upturned hull - it's like you're queuing, but...there is no beginning or end - just the ocean."

Feeney (Black Sheep) had a better time of things, striving on the action rather than being stuck in a studio. He talks about his days on set with a kind of glee almost, recounting everything from the joys of growing a beard to stories he won't tell to a journalist, but from the look in his eye would've made a great gag-reel.

"Mega-stud action-hero Dominic (Purcell) going into a panic attack about exit strategies should our upturned boat start to sink, Owen Black chundering his guts out between takes...looking at the other actors and thinking 'they look like homeless people' then realizing I looked the same," are all on his list of fond memories.

Action star Purcell (Prison Break, Equilibrium, Blade: Trinity) plays Jim Nalepka, an American traveller, "a bit of a vagabond", who was asked by John Glenny to join the excursion as cook.

He says for him, it wasn't the physical demands that got him so much as the mental ones.

"Just the confinement - it was an exact replica of the actual Rose Noelle and there were four of us in there, and we just didn't have any room to do anything. On top of that, you had four, five camera guys in there. We were squashed and the thing became like a hot box, it was really intense," he says.

"Then we spent two, three weeks out at sea and the problem with that was, we did the exterior, so we're sitting on top of the boat spending 12 to 14 hours out at sea with nowhere to go, so we were more or less stuck there all day long and the monotony and the mental fatigue of that was just really hard to deal with."

The plus side, he says, was as actors they gained extremely realistic "trigger points" to give them insight into their characters and what they must have gone through.

That and it gave the Aussie-born actor a chance to return down under, where he says the story telling is just, well, better.

"It's always nice to come down to this part of the world. My sensibilities are very Australian, of course. I grew up there, so I understand the ways of the Aussies and the New Zealanders - we're all a very similar people," he says.

"I'm always intrigued and interested to be involved in Australian and New Zealand films because the filtering system is so intense. Unlike America, where - because they've got so much money they can produce so much shit, whereas here, when they do make films they're usually of a high standard and usually have important things to say."

Abandoned will air as a two-part drama, starting Sunday, August 30 at 8.30pm on TV ONE as part of the Sunday Theatre season.

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