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In 1987, Brenden Abbott – aka the Postcard Bandit – stole $112,000 from a branch of the Commonwealth Bank in suburban Perth. It was a bold armed robbery – dropping through the ceiling, just as the branch was beginning to open – but it also wasn’t uncommon. Armed bank robberies were almost an everyday occurrence in those days, as branches carried large amounts of cash and the security was rudimentary.
Now, though, it’s a different story. Just ask George Mason, who plays Abbott in the new six-episode series Run.
“I was in Bellingen – where I live – and I thought, ‘I’m going to rob a bank,’” says Mason. “Well, pretend to rob a bank. So I walk into a bank and my mate’s working there. So I went up to the front desk, and I was like, ‘If I were to rob this bank, how would I do it?’ – probably blew my cover a little bit there – and I was looking at the cameras, and trying to get into that headspace.
“And [my mate] goes, ‘You couldn’t rob us. One, we don’t have any money, really. And it’s all just computerised now, you need to actually put your card in, in order to get things out.’”
Keiynan Lonsdale as Detective Porter in Run.
He might have been foiled (very sensibly) at the first step, but for Mason the thrill of playing Abbott – at one stage Australia’s most wanted man – was very real.
“I can see why they get off on the adrenaline of it,” he says. “Even just shooting those [robbery] scenes, afterwards we were like, ‘Let’s f---ing go.’”
Between that first robbery in 1987 and his most recent capture in 1995, Abbott became a classic criminal folk hero. Not only did he commit about 50 robberies, he escaped jail twice (Fremantle Prison in 1989 and Brisbane’s Sir David Longland Correctional Centre in 1997). He also built a reputation as a criminal mastermind for his talents with disguises and fake IDs, and an ability to evade the police.
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“This story was before there was social media and YouTube and all those things,” says Mason, a Kiwi actor who has starred in Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog and appeared in Netflix’s Tasmanian murder mystery The Survivors. “So most of the stories I know of Brenden Abbott are through people I’ve met, people that know him, or were in prison with them, and then they all speak so highly of him.
“And that’s the interesting thing about Brenden, he’s this really eloquent, charismatic guy. And he’s also a bit of a chameleon. He gets on with everyone. I think that’s why he did so well on the run for so long, because he wasn’t a drug user or anything like that. He definitely liked women, he spent a lot of time at brothels … [but] he didn’t present as a criminal.
“He was an expert at everything he did, whether it was picking locks or breaking into banks or doing disguises or learning Japanese. This is not your everyday criminal dumbass. He knew what he was doing.”
The series tracks Abbott from that first robbery – Mason is electric, with his little 1980s baby mullet – and looks at what drove him. A difficult childhood, an awful mother (played brilliantly, as usual, with a great hard edge by Robyn Malcolm) and a desire to set up a new life away from the chaos with his girlfriend Jackie (Ashleigh Cummings).
Robyn Malcolm as Brenden’s tough-as-nails-mum Thelma in Run.
“This story is actually quite a common one,” says Mason. “Being a ward of the state from a young age, that [life of crime] happens to a lot of young men, and having that abandonment, and then being in and out of the system, it does bad things for people. You’re in that environment and you end up just doing more crime. It’s not like you’re rehabilitated in any way. You get out and you go, ‘Oh, I can’t get a normal job.’ So what am I going to do? I’m gonna re-offend.”
Mason spoke to Abbott – who is still in jail in WA – during filming, when Abbott’s son James Laycock visited the set.
“He chucked me the phone and goes, ‘It’s dad’,” recalls Mason. “My heart was in my mouth. I was so excited to meet him, but at the same time, nervous. And obviously representing a real person who’s still around, there’s a bit of responsibility that goes with that. And I just said in this really nervous voice, like, ‘Have you got any advice on playing you, Brenden?’ And he said to me, ‘Don’t forget the Fifth Amendment: Thou shall not get caught.’ [seemingly merging the American right to remain silent with the unofficial 11th commandment].
Keiynan Lonsdale and George Mason, stars of the new Binge series Run. Credit: Steven Siewert
“And he told me not to sweat it when the cops pulled me up, which I thought was really good advice. But he didn’t miss a beat. He’s a very, very intelligent man, and an incredible storyteller. In the short chat we had, I think he told me about six stories about his time on the run and going, ‘Oh no, it wasn’t like that. It was like this.’”
Mason is sitting with his co-star Keiynan Lonsdale, who plays the moustachioed Detective Gary Porter. And if Mason had the challenge of staying true to a real-life character, Lonsdale had the freedom of finding his own way with Porter, who is based not only on real-life detective Glen Potter, but on other detectives who worked the case as well.
“As plain as I can put it, an African-Australian dude playing a copper back then, there was a bit of freedom to go, ‘Well, how do we honour this version of it?’” says Lonsdale, who broke out in Dance Academy and has since built a solid career in the US in everything from The Flash to The Divergent Series and the drama Love, Simon.
“I didn’t have the same pressure as George, I guess, to portray someone as close as possible. But I could pick and choose what I would grab from Glen. And Ben Young, one of our two directors, with Bonnie Moir, sent me 37 questions that I could fill in with answers for myself so that we could discover the other parts of the character.
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“It was even down to, ‘What’s his full middle name?’ So one of the names I gave him was [African], which means ‘God never sleeps’. So what I put into my mind is that for Porter, he feels like he’s not allowed to have any rest. That was something conditioned into him as a kid. So that’s another reason why he’s driven to get this guy; he doesn’t think he’s ever doing a good enough job, so he’s got to be the best he can.”
Obsession is one of the driving threads through the series: Abbott’s obsession with not getting caught and Porter’s obsessive hunt for this criminal mastermind. The other thread there, though, is Australia’s obsession with putting charismatic criminals on screen. From Ned Kelly through to Squizzy Taylor and Tilly Devine, to Melbourne’s colourful criminal identities and Sydney’s very own corrupt copper Roger Rogerson, they have all lived large on the small screen.
What do Mason and Lonsdale feel is the enduring appeal?
“In a way, it gives those guys a bit of a voice,” says Mason. “But also seeing someone beat the system, beat the coppers, to be on the run for so long, I think it’s like a bit of a [finger] to society. In a way, we all probably kind of dream about that.”
George Mason as Brenden Abbott in Run.
Adds Lonsdale: “People resonate with anyone that’s brave enough to risk. There’s a lot of bullshit in this world. So while there’s many better ways than robbing banks and causing a lot of trauma to find that freedom and to bring your people up, but at the same time, is the system designed for that? When you’ve been in a space of lacking and survival for that long, you need a lot of help to get out of that space, to believe that abundance is possible and doable, and to bring your people into that part is near impossible.
“People want to see people win and rise up and express and he’s kind of doing that cry and expression for a bunch of people that maybe aren’t brave enough or courageous or dangerous enough to actually do it. It’s not easy.”
Run streams on Binge from January 1.
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