Rain is pouring down and the narrow Sydney street is full of dark shadows. A long-legged blonde woman pauses to look through a lighted window at chocolatier Juliana Lovece (Louise Lombard) as she sweeps melted chocolate across a marble slab with a sensuous arc of her arm.
Then the woman moves on, pausing to take a chocolate from her pocket. Suddenly hands reach from the darkness, there is a struggle and she falls dead.
The next day when homicide detective Bennett O’Mara (David Wenham) arrives to investigate the murder, a chocolate wrapper leads him to Juliana’s shop. More deaths and a trail of handmade chocolates in the locally made telemovie Dripping in Chocolate keep bringing him back. Is she an innocent bystander or maybe the killer?
Wenham’s character is on a detox diet so the chocolates, like the lovely Juliana, are always just out of reach. Not that he was too worried about that.
“I wouldn’t say I am passionate about chocolate,” he said. “When I was a kid I used to love white Milky Bars but now I have inherited my parents’ taste and I am more chocolate ginger and I like very, very dark bitter chocolate.”
Lombard, on the other hand, has a secret fantasy – when her children grow up she wants to open a chocolate shop.
Speaking from her home in Los Angeles, she said that before she started the role she was put through an intensive one-on-one course in chocolate making and fell in love with it.
“Chocolate is my weakness,” she laughed. “I have absolutely no control around it and I’m quite disciplined about other areas of my life.”
Lombard is British but settled in LA after landing an ongoing role as investigator then detective Sofia Curtis in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. She is currently working with another Australian actor, Julian McMahon, on the pilot for an unnamed spy series.
One of the reasons she was drawn to make her first visit to Australia to take up the role of Juliana was the ambiguity of the relationship between the leads.
“You don’t know whether they are being pulled together because they are trying to solve the crime or because they are interested in each other,” she said.
Wenham chose to make his first whodunnit because he thought the script was a bit of fun and also because the genre was something his mother had loved.
“It brought back really good memories for me,” he said.
“It reminded me of the type of thing I grew up with and got great enjoyment out of watching. I threw myself into it purely for the enjoyment factor and I had a great deal of fun doing it.”
His crumpled detective carries with him overtones of Humphrey Bogart or even an early Columbo.
“Life is starting to unravel a little bit for O’Mara,” Wenham agreed.
“He is a single parent and he has a teenage daughter and they are not exactly on the same page at the moment. We find him in a situation where he has decided to take control of things and he has gone on this detox diet, which may or may not work, but at least he is doing something.”
In O’Mara, writers Sarah Smith (Wild Boys, Rescue Special Ops) and John Ridley (Rush, Sea Patrol) have created a character who could easily go further, and Wenham says there has been talk about making more telemovies.
But for the moment, he is busy on set in New Zealand playing a Queenstown policeman in the mini-series Top of the Lake, which has been co-written by Jane Campion and will be directed by her. It also stars Elisabeth Moss (Mad Men), Peter Mullan (War Horse) and Holly Hunter (The Piano, Saving Grace).
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