Friday, December 30, 2011
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Chris Lilley stars in HBO’s “Angry Boys.”
AP Television Writer
NEW YORK
Three years ago in his mockumentary “Summer Heights High,” Chris Lilley played a trio of characters at an Australian high school, including a flamboyant drama teacher and a mean society girl named Ja’mie.
Now Lilley is back with the even more ambitious “Angry Boys,” a 12-episode showcase where he tackles a half-dozen personalities in an examination of boys and men who are misunderstood, self-deluding and typically at odds with the opposite sex. By turns painful, bitterly funny and illuminating, the series premieres on HBO on Sunday at 10 p.m., with two half-hour episodes airing weekly.
Lilley’s pantheon includes identical twins Nathan and Daniel Sims, an angry, constantly bird-flipping pair of 17-year-olds. They have a troubled dynamic: Nathan was left deaf and mentally addled by an accident, and Daniel, who loves him yet hates him for being disabled, teases Nathan cruelly while defending him against the rest of the world.
Lilley is also the boys’ grandmother, Gran, a devoted but often inappropriate prison officer at the Sydney Garingal Juvenile Justice Center for teenage boys. To keep the mood light, Gran likes to play mean jokes, such as telling a young inmate his sentence has been cut by nine months, then yelping, “Gotcha!”
Another of Lilley’s characters is S.mouse, a rich-kid rapper in Los Angeles who scores with an embarrassingly stupid novelty song and dance, “Slap My Elbow” (“You do it like thiiiiis,” he raps on his video: “Slap my el, slap my bow, slap my elllllbooooooow”), but is bitter at his father’s derision and, worse, his lack of hip-hop outlaw cred.
Lilley is Jen Okazaki, the soft-spoken and almost psychotically exploitative mother of an aspiring skateboarding champion whom she is bullying into the big time. And he is also a 38-year-old burned-out championship who lost his testicles to a stray bullet in a gang fight.
This spectrum of characters — and the geographic range they represent — speaks to the higher stakes for which Lilley (who created, wrote, co-produced and co-directed the series) is playing this time around.
Declaring “Summer Heights High” to be “ contained and small,” Lilley speculates his fans “figured they’d worked out my formula — find a work environment and throw in some characters — and expected my next series should be in a hospital or a police station. But a part of me wanted to rebel against that. I wanted to do something on a massive scale with a story that was woven together in a trickier way.”
With its documentary format, “Angry Boys” seems to unfold spontaneously, but Lilley says it was tightly scripted, even storyboarded, before shooting started.
The 37-year-old Lilley spent a year writing the series while scouting locations.
Filming consumed seven months, and editing took a year after that.