The Best British TV Series of 2025 (So Far)

Have you recently read the news? I haven’t suggest it. You’d be better off gazing out of a screen at any shade, trees, or, if you’re happy, the odd dog. Despite this, daylight hours are generally the glass solution. You’ll need to switch somewhere for entertainment when nightfall arrives. That’s where the]… ]

The Best British TV Series of 2025 ( So Far ) appeared first on Den of Geek.

Small-time American crime Mark Read had a celebrity past that might not have existed in the 1990s before the release of the movie Chopper. Read became an unlikely bestselling author and discussion topics, usually accepting payment for crimes he was found guilty of, as well as many others, while serving time in the American prison structure after being found guilty of shooting a friend in the chest.

However, that 2000 crime drama, an original that brought writer-director Andrew Domink, sun Eric Bana, and of course the person and story Chopper to an international audience, as well as many others who later came up with the legend, completely strengthened his legend. That includes American Jai Courtney, who admits that he was unaware of Read as a child growing up in the 1990s until someone gave him the Helicopter DVD.

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25 years after the movie’s release, Courtney laughs,” God knows if I was also allowed to watch it.” It was definitely one of those movies that rolled about on DVD and left people in their laps. It eventually made its way into his DVD player, and many more have since. It’s a must if you meet someone and talk about the movies you like, but one hasn’t seen them. I’ve actually been guilty of buying a DVD person and finding the Video on eBay to display it for people who haven’t seen the movie before.

It served as a guide for the upcoming <a href=””>Suicide Squad and Exception stars, and it continues to be used as a tool by Courtney today. For instance, when he stops by our studio to appear in the In the Den video series above, it is in advance of the release of Dangerous Animals, a bloody clever riff on the serial killer and shark movie subgenre. In that movie, Courtney portrays a guy named Tucker as one of the two predators who occasionally takes tourists out to swim with sharks and eventually ends up feeding them to the sharp-toothed beasties.

” Tucker is such a performer,” Courtney asserts. The boat deck serves as a kind of stage for him because he’s such a storyteller. He is a guy who may not bring all visitors home, but regardless of how the trip turns out, he is having a good time. He adores it. I believe he is really passionate about it, passionate about his conservation and the fight he’s engaged in, and truly sees himself as one with the shark.

It’s a turn that Courtney acknowledges may have subconscious influences from watching what Bana did with the real-life Chopper Read in the 2000s.

Courtney says,” I think what you see Eric do with that role is quite profound.” He transforms what might be thought of as a two-dimensional villain type into a truly endearing character. If you’ve ever watched an interview with Mark” Chopper” Read himself, you’ll know how incredible this is. Sincerely speaking, it almost feels like an impersonation. He’s like a top mimic, as Bana is.

Before Chopper made Bana a global star, opening the door to everything from <a href=””>Hulk and <a href=””>Troy to Steven Spielberg’s Munich, the actor was primarily known as a stand-up and sketch comic on Australian television shows like Full Frontal and. According to Courtney, who was a kid,” He had a few great, very quotable characters.” And, according to legend, the real-life Chopper was also a fan who watched the series while incarcerated before telling Andrew Dominik to make Bana as the movie version of himself.

” I don’t know how true that is, but from what I understood, he kind of handpicked him,” Courtney says. Whether or not it was true, I’m certain he would make that claim. The real-life Read, as the movie Chopper demonstrates, had a talent for accepting credit for crimes he presumably had no connection to.

According to Courtney, “one of the interesting things about him being such a colorful character is that he laid claim to many more killings than he was ever ever charged with,” and some of that may have been partially made up. And I believe that has somewhat damaged his ego, which is interesting.

However, for a young aspiring actor growing up in Australia, the appeal of Chopper was just the bravado of the performance and being able to quote so many of Bana-as-Read’s lines. Even though the movie has real-world roots and that the majority of the first half of Chopper was shot in Pentridge Prison, a Victorian correctional facility where Read spent decades, his theatrical moments and violence have a Hollywood crime thriller-like quality.

Consider the two first scenes of that prison setting, in which Chopper stabs Keithy George ( David Field ) and when his real-life mate Jimmy Loughnan ( Simon Lyndon ) stabs Chopper. In both scenes, Bana plays the victim as a quasi-astonished and even sympathetic figure-as-as-a-fire.

According to Courtney,” There’s that incredibly acute attack on Keithy,” which kind of comes out of it being very calculated. There is a critical moment before a hyperviolent beat and this kind of violent explosion. He then passes him a cigarette and is almost remorseful right away. There is empathy in there. Just this guy, who had so much light and shade, gave me such a dynamic performance. It really motivates me.

It was the performance that eventually led to the release of Gladiator, which was later followed by a similarly insane turn by Russell Crowe in Romper Stomper ( 1992 ), which was also the catalyst for Mel Gibson’s acutely named Mad Max ( 1979 ). Roger Ebert questioned “is everyone in Australia a few degrees away from the true north” in his 2001 review of Chopper.

Courtney makes a joke about how” that’s a good quote.” He also mentions how many of his fellow Australian performances, such as those of Bana and Crowe, had an impact on him when he first started out.

” Russell’s a friend,” says Courtney. I started working with him ten years ago, but those guys are incredibly inspiring. Hugh Jackman and Head Ledger are both close to my generation, and Joel Edgerton is a little closer. When it was either starting to feel like a distant dream in my eyes or something that I felt like I was on the verge of seeing all those guys who were succeeding,

The line also entices comparisons to Sean Byrne’s directed film, which is distinctly Australian, Dangerous Animals, which is heightened and genre-mad.

Courtney ponders whether or not people are making comparisons to dangerous animals. It was a fascinating movie to make. I wasn’t entirely sure of what I was entering. Really, you can’t predict anything about these processes. You can only make educated guesses about how things will turn out, and Sean worked well with him. So when I read it, my instinct was to be bold with this character in order for it to succeed and give it that color. Because I don’t like how he plays with this kind of evil intent, I find it to be more interesting. However, Tucker sounded like the person you could be stranded next to in the bar, the guy driving your taxi that wouldn’t stop, or the guy you were sitting next to in the back seat. He has a familiarity to him.

You can’t escape these guys, like sharks in the sea.

Dangerous Animals is currently performing in the United States.

The first article on Den of Geek was Jai Courtney Dives into the Legacy of Chopper and Australian Genre Cinema.