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School uniforms scrawled with signatures and in-jokes and promises to be friends forever. They are staples of every year 12 student’s life, and they are the first costumes we see in the final season of Heartbreak High.
Three decades after the original series racked off for good, its reboot heads to graduation this month, with a fresh batch of the sexy, messy, lightly criminal capers it’s become known for since premiering in 2022. Only now with added Schoolies.
Creator Hannah Carroll Chapman is grateful to have been able to plan for the end, narratively; to follow an arc for her characters before waving them off into their unknown futures. “I was super grateful that we knew that it was our final season pretty early on from Netflix,” she says. “It felt like we could give it a proper ending. We could explore the experience of doing final exams and figuring out what future job you have, even though you feel like you have utterly no idea what you actually want to do with your life at 17.”
Thomas Weatherall is living proof of that. The 25-year-old actor has played Malakai throughout the series’ run. He grew up in Queensland as an aspiring dancer, fell into acting through a fortuitous audition, and leaves his Heartbreak High years with a future in screenwriting ahead, having toured Blue – a play he wrote and performs in – between shooting the show. He also joined the Heartbreak High writers’ room for its final two seasons.
“When I was that age, I was thinking, ‘When I’m 25, everything will be sorted. I won’t still be having these questions’,” he says. “And now I am still just as confused and figuring things out.”
It wasn’t difficult for him to live in dialogue with his character. A new student at the chaotic Hartley High in the series premiere, Malakai Mitchell explores his bisexual identity and connects with his Aboriginal heritage throughout the first seasons, while dealing with the trauma of an assault at the hands of a police officer. For all its jokes and viral moments, Heartbreak High never shied away from showing us its guts.
Chapman knew that the social realist core of the original series would remain, when she began plotting out its Gen Z reboot. “The original was groundbreaking in the ’90s for its depiction of stuff like race and social class. It had characters that you’d just never seen before on Australian TV,” she says.
“I wanted our reboot to feel really diverse and I wanted to really expand on that for now. The original wasn’t particularly queer, definitely not neurodivergent. And it was quite masculine, I think, because the creators were blokes. And so I wanted this to feel really female-driven as well … I was excited to tell a story about girls behaving badly.”
Chapman consulted every young person she knew before writing the show, including two siblings. “In talking to them, I actually felt really hopeful about the next generation.” For all the doom and gloom of our TikTok teens whose brains were scrambled during the pandemic, Chapman found a uniquely local attitude towards joy. “Something that came up again and again was: no matter what happens to you as a teenager, particularly an Australian teenager, you have to laugh at it, or you’ll die.”
Even knowing the power of having a global streaming audience behind her, Chapman was stunned by the response to the first season. She saw that, even if international viewers needed a translator to figure out what “gronks” and “eshays” are, “they’ll come to it if it feels real and truthful”.
They’ll also turn their pitchforks towards you, it turns out, if they feel passionately enough about the characters you created.
“The show kicked off and I had people in my Instagram DMs telling me, ‘If you don’t keep Darren and Cash together, I’ll end you’,” Chapman says, laughing (the DM referenced the series-long relationship between the outspoken queer and nonbinary student and their asexual bad-boy-with-a-heart-of-gold boyfriend). “I was like, ‘I’m guessing that’s a joke, so I’m not that scared, but also it’s kind of extraordinary that you care so much that you’re finding out who the creator is – because no one does – and then taking the time to message them about a pair of fictional characters that you care so much about. That’s kind of lovely if you weren’t also giving me a death threat’.”
The comments don’t hold much sway in the writers’ room though, Chapman says. “Because often it’s like, ‘Why can’t they just be happy?’. It’s like, ‘Because babes, you wouldn’t watch it’.
“Audiences [can get] really angry at how we’ve treated the characters, that we’ve put them through the wringer. But I actually find those quite heartening in a funny kind of way, that people care so much. It does not change what we do; we still play Old Testament God with them, unfortunately.”
And what’s a final season without really leaning into the titular heartbreak a little?
Weatherall’s spot in the writers’ room meant he got the inside scoop on what his castmates would endure as they march towards graduation, and all the possible paths they almost took. “It became very odd to suddenly know that we were doing this swan song for this show that has been massive in my life, and to then have a say in where it goes,” he says. “I know all the 20 other alternate endings to what this show could have been.”
Since filming wrapped in February last year, Weatherall has spent more time offscreen, in other writers’ rooms, than he has on set in front of the camera. “It’s been a bit of a shock to the system, to be honest,” he says. “There’s always the insecure actor inside of you going, ‘I need to stay relevant. I need to be working. I haven’t been on camera for three months. What’s my worth?’.” But workshopping a new project he’s developing soothes the nerves. “Writing and directing is definitely where my heart lies.”
And much of it is thanks to Chapman. After he drafted Blue during season one, she was one of his earliest readers of the play. “She pretty quickly went, ‘I think you want to be a writer’. I wasn’t ready to admit that to people.”
After shadowing Heartbreak High’s writers as they brainstormed season two, Weatherall got his first co-writing credit on episode six of the final season. Its massive set piece is a raucous party in the fancy house of one of the season’s villains, a snotty rich kid from a rival private school.
Chapman’s DMs might be safe from threats this time around, seeing as how episode six throws them a bone in the form of a brief reappearance by heartthrob Josh Heuston, who was whisked off to Hollywood the second Heartbreak High’s first season aired. “It’s testament to how much the cast all love each other and love this show that he’s off filming Dune and he still comes back to carry a case of beer, in one scene, just for us,” Chapman jokes.
The rest of his alumni class might not have had the same big franchise spin-offs yanking them out of Hartley prematurely, but in just three seasons, they’ve become promising young performers, beyond just the screen. Lead Ayesha Madon is a pop singer whose 2024 single Eulogy was one of the year’s five most-played songs on Triple J. Her role as autistic student Quinni became the launchpad for Chloe Hayden’s career as an author, podcaster and spokeswoman for neurodivergence. Will McDonald hung up his Nike TNs and transformed from eshay Cash into the slimy Tom Ripley in Joanna Murray-Smith’s recent stage adaptation.
And Weatherall bravely stepped into the role of prisoner of war Frank “Darky” Gardner in Justin Kurzel and Sean Grant’s adaptation of Richard Flanagan’s Narrow Road to the Deep North, which also starred Jacob Elordi, a fellow Queenslander come good. “Sean Grant actually admitted that he saw me as Malakai, and that was one of the reasons that he had me in mind as Darky,” he says. Playing a labourer on the Burma “death railway” required an intense physical transformation.
“I went pretty much straight onto that after wrapping season two of Heartbreak High,” says Weatherall. “For any eagle-eye viewers, if you watch season two, you can see Malakai slowly losing weight throughout the episodes.
“It’s another kind of acting cliche, but that role really came to me at the time I needed it most and at the right time. It truly reaffirmed my love for this artform and this industry in a way that I didn’t know I needed.
“I don’t think I’ll ever make a show like Heartbreak High again, and I don’t think I’ll ever make a Narrow Road again. They’re totally different projects – they couldn’t be more removed from each other if they tried – but they were both these kind of massive ensemble pieces with brilliant creatives at the helm. I’m desperate to work with [Kurzel and Grant] again in the same way I leave Heartbreak High desperate to find the next Hannah Carroll Chapman script to step into.”
Heartbreak High (season three) premieres on Netflix on March 25.
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