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Matthew Sunderland in Morning Hate Photo: supplied
The vision of a drunken Charles Bukowski in the back of a Sydney bus. A WW1 solider losing his mind up to his neck in muddy water in the trenches. A feral barefoot nobody drifter with a dingo who turns up on a Northern Territory cattle ranch.
Matthew Sunderland of Harbour Board Photo: Alys Longley Jeffrey Holdaway
Matthew Sunderland is an Aotearoa New Zealand screen actor whose characters often turn up unexpectedly, in unexpected places. Ever since playing gunman David Gray - the man who killed 13 residents in the small township of Aramoana - in acclaimed 2006 film Out of the Blue, Sunderland has been looked to play outliers and, frankly, disturbed individuals.
Sunderland’s WW1 soldier appears in actor Dean O’Gorman‘s debut short film Morning Hate this month in the Show Me Shorts Festival. He’s also currently starring alongside Rena Owen as a grieving parent in Christine Jeffs’ new film A Mistake.
Yet increasingly Sunderland’s work has been over the ditch. Debuting this month, he plays memorable supporting roles in two of the highest profile Australian television dramas of the year.
First there’s alcoholic poet Charles Bukowski making surreal appearances in the excellent new ABC drama Plum, starring and based on the novel by Brendan Cowell (Jermaine Clement also makes a star turn). It premieres in Australia October 20. No word on its release here yet. Then there’s Sunderland’s drifter with a dingo. He starts turning up on The Territory - a big-scale Netflix drama destined to be dubbed the Antipodean Succession - which is on screens in Australasia from October 24.
But another new Matthew Sunderland release is the most unexpected of all.
It is his role as dark baritone crooner and songwriter with new folk-rock musical project Harbour Board. Sunderland is joined by producer Jeffrey Holdaway with Marc Chesterman and Nicolas Tillion.
Following the release of a debut EP in May, The Strays, the Harbour Board have just released a new single. It’s called ‘The Signal’ and clearly inspired by Sunderland’s own work situation: the protagonist feels conflicting emotions as they hear a siren call, calling them home across the Tasman.