David Howell and Shane Osborne are relative newcomers in the world of television with just a handful of credits between them. For Shane, who plays the unsettling Young Trevor Calley in One Night, it’s surprising to discover that it’s his first experience in a major production. David, fresh from shooting a series for Disney+, finds himself in the role of Young Trevor’s quieter younger brother Joey.
While One Night rightly gives narrative priority to the three key women, the Calley brothers are, undeniably, part of that story. Only now and then do we get to see characters depicted in the way the show has, where men’s experiences dealing with trauma are as part of the story as the women's and how that trauma can affect them, too. We thought it was important to speak to the young men featured in the show to fully grasp the intricacies that come into play when representing traumatic experiences on screen.
Over two separate conversations, we asked them both about their characters, their process, and what it was like being part of a show like One Night. Here’s what they said:
// Please be aware that, due to the themes represented in the TV series One Night such as sexual assault, PTSD and addiction, it was inevitable that some of those topics would be discussed in our interviews. //
Alfie Whitby: Shane, what got you into acting?
Shane Osborne: When I was younger, I was very shy. I didn't really have a lot of confidence growing up. One day I went to the cinema and I just had a light bulb moment. I was like, "I'm trying acting to try and give myself more confidence and self esteem." So I enrolled in an open acting class at NIDA and I just fell in love with it. Then I did the next one, and the next one after that, and then I auditioned for a drama school, got into that. It's just been building ever since. I feel that acting to me is just…it's a creative output.
I wish I found that sooner. I'm very late to it. I discovered it when I was 20, basically, so it's been seven years now. I'm just so glad I fell in love with it. I think everyone needs to be creative in some output. I think it's just the way we are as humans.
Helena Emmanuel: David, you have experience on stage and on screen. Do you find that you lean toward or prefer one or the other?
David: I love theatre in a sense that I just get to be on stage for a certain amount of time. Whatever happens up there, you've got to figure out a way to get past it if you mess up or something like that, because everything relies on you and your same partners around you. So it’s not like you have a director or camera or team that says “action” and then if you mess up you can just call "cut". You can't call "cut" on stage, which is the most exhilarating feeling because if you step up, you gotta figure out how to get out of that.
[Theatre] is just a really great place to play and figure out things if you had any complications to get around that and stuff like that. Because usually in TV, even in One Night, you prepare, but then it's only maybe three takes. Sometimes they need to move on because it's so fast-paced and you're like, "Oh, I don't know if I got where I needed to go," or something like that. TV also has its nerve wracking moments, like when the camera's up real close. It's kind of seeing everything. It's like looking at yourself. You can’t lie on camera. That's one thing that I get a little bit scared about.
HE: Have you found it difficult or easy to transition between stage and camera work? Do you prep for them differently?
David: Yeah, I actually do. I find that with plays I'm much more intensive with my research and getting lines down, whereas with screen I think I'm much more instinctive.
Sometimes I'll learn my lines like the day before, just because then it’s so fresh in my mouth that when it comes off on screen, it has that sense of like, Oh, this isn't rehearsed. This is actually just like him figuring out what to say. Do you know what I mean? For me, it's more about that instinct-based response and actually listening and thinking about what I would say, but then shooting the line out - what I've remembered from the day before.
AW: What was the audition process like for One Night? How did that come about?
Shane: Unexpected really. It was just an audition, like all the rest. There was no callback - they just offered it to me. I must have impressed them! I got it, and thankfully I look like the older Trevor [Errol Shand], so I think that helped. I was kind of blown away when it happened. I was on the train home and I got the email. I had to double check that it was the right thing. ‘Cause it was my first major production, really my first gig in a sense.
David: I actually auditioned for Jason, who is Trevor’s son, and then they put me on a stronghold for Jason. I didn’t even have a recall, and then they just offered me the role of Young Joey. I was kind of guessing who would be playing the older version of me because I'd worked with George Mason on a project. He wasn't part of my storyline, but he was also on that gig and everyone said like, “Oh, you guys need to play brothers!” Because we've got very similar energies and we've got a similar look. So people were like, “You gotta play something where you’re brothers or something like that”. Then funnily enough, here we are playing the same people.
HE: When you first got the script, what surprised you the most? What jumped out at you?
Shane: The fact that it was a coherent story. The main flow of it, it just had one voice to it. It was coherent and it just made sense. You could tell there was something personal with the events that play out in the story, even before meeting Emily (Ballou) or knowing that. There's something within the words that's like, "Okay, there’s something underneath this." The subtext feels real, and that's great. I think that's where writing should come from, a personal place. Even if it's complete sci-fi fantasy, I think the writer should always instill some of their personal experience in that.
The main thing that jumped out at me was just the balance of the three ladies, the three mains, and their relationship. The return of one and the reconnecting of an old friendship. The flashbacks where the younger cast come in, they just… I like to analyse structure in screenplays – well any story really–, and when I got the scripts I broke them down with the acts and the sequences, and I just was like, "Oh that flashback there makes sense, and this flashback there makes sense." So it was just very well put together. I'm a big nerd about that stuff.
David: I was really keen to work back with George, that was really, really something that I was looking forward to. Now we've made this amazing relationship. We hang out all the time now.
I'm always one to believe in telling stories that are close to your heart and this was pretty close to my heart. So to be a part of something like this and to tell that story is pretty honourable and cool.
AW: How did the fact that you were playing the younger version of someone influence how you approached the role, if at all? Did you and your adult counterpart collaborate at all about the character?
Shane: Oh, yes. They set up a meeting pretty early on with Errol over Zoom just to meet him because he's from New Zealand. So I couldn't, unfortunately, meet him in person unlike David [and George]. A lot of our communication was over text and sometimes video calls. I wanted to go above and beyond with collaboration because I knew you kind of had to. It wouldn't make sense to not do that.
We were both trying to figure out Trevor together, we both had our inputs, our point of view and then Emily's point of view as well. She gave us a lot of rich backstory, like a whole eight page word document of what she based Trevor's upbringing and family from, which was a great resource. Before we met, we just really did our homework of coming together on how Trevor was in his younger days versus after the events of the one night - the rape, then going to prison and then coming out of prison, and who he is after prison, because obviously after 20 years behind bars you're going to be a different person entirely. I feel like there's no way you're not different. The first day Errol and I met was actually on set, so we ended up figuring it out. We just kind of figured out how he walks, his laugh. That's a big one. I felt after seeing in the script that it was more older Trevor on screen, that it made sense for me to approach Errol rather than him coming to me.
I wish there was a little bit more of younger Trevor. I wish we could have had a chance to tell a story about why Trevor made that choice and the buildup to that. Why did he make that choice, you know? He's a horrible person, but considering all the backstory that Emily gave us, it would have been interesting to see all the abuse that Trevor and Joey received growing up basically climax in that one choice.
David: [George Mason and I] kind of did. We got together and we read each other's lines. He read the young Joey lines and I read the older Joey lines. George is Kiwi, so just to get the mannerisms and the speech similar. We wanted to try to find something where Joey gets a bit heady, ‘cause Joey gets anxious quite a lot around his brothers, particularly around Trevor, and we wanted to try to find something, like some action that we both can replicate in current time and back in 2002. I don't know if we achieved it, but yeah, we both just got agitated and a bit spaced out whenever Trevor was around. I guess Joey's kind of like the black sheep of the family where he wants to have this normal life, he wants to be content with everyone in the town, and you know, he doesn't want that past life that his brother had. Joey just wanted something where he could fit in and like, romanticise his life a lot more than what he grew up like.
One of the hard parts with Joey was making him seem likeable, but you don't want him to be too likeable to the point where people already know by the first episode that he's not the one, or the fact that he's got a wire on at the pub the whole time.
AW: Was there anything that was unexpected about this role that you weren't foreseeing, positive or negative?
David: Yeah, one of my favourite scenes was when [Young Joey, Young Simone, and Young Tess] were in the keg room and we're just playing truth or dare. It was kind of like, one time where Joey's away from his brother. He’s actually just enjoying the time with the girls, and you see how much he actually loves spending time with them. I think that's such a pivotal part of the story because I think Joey still wants that relationship with those girls in [present day], but obviously he can't, because he's lost their trust. In that moment it was just so much fun to play truth or dare with them. Then when the brother comes in, it just ruins the whole vibe.
Another really special part was when I'm sitting in the car with Hat, and you kind of get a moment of like, "What if none of this happened with Hat and Joey? What if they had a family?" I think that something could have happened there. That was a really, really cute moment.
The moment where on the night when I'm closing the door, Simone comes down and everything like that, that was tough. I was like, "Just stay in the emotion." I wasn't really talking to anyone the whole time and I was just kind of staying in it and just going take after take. I wasn't trying to show too much sympathy because I didn't want to make it obvious. I also wanted to show rage rather than sadness or something like that. Then it still keeps the story alive of, "Oh, is it Joey who's done this?" you know?
HE: How do you approach getting into that space, both for Joey/Trevor and just the show in general? How did you balance honouring the character and what he required while also taking care of yourself?
Shane: Both directors and the whole cast were fantastic. Beautiful people, so supportive. It was like a family, basically. It's a very tricky subject matter, but you can't judge a character. They always tell you not to do that. You have to approach them like they're a human being. They make choices for their own reasons, and I feel it’s the actor's job to interpret why they make those choices.
You have to understand the emotional beats - every choice they make has a reason. I feel having that backstory of Trevor, with his abusive father and a cycle of violence…Understanding that is like, "Okay, he's angry at me, so I have to be angry at something else," and that was a through line for me. I thought of Trevor as a great white shark, and like a shark when there’s blood in the water, they just go at it. Trevor's version of blood in the water is showing weakness. So whenever Joey would show weakness, Trevor would just love that because his personality has been warped by all the abuse he's received from his father.
David: I guess you’ve got to accept it for what it is. I think you've got to act upon it with so much maturity and go into it knowing that you can't ignore the fact that this stuff does happen in real life, you know? Because of that, you want to act on it so truthfully because you don't want to portray something that isn't real. I kind of think of loved ones and if this was to happen to them, and although that kind of sucks, it really brings that connection and realisation. And I'm quite an anxious person as it is, so I just think of that and it brings me into that space of ‘what would I do in that situation?’ and then I bring the morals of the character into play.
I know for Trevor, it would be hard because, [Shane Osborne’s] got to come to terms that it's okay to do something like this, you know? So I think for every character, no matter who you're playing, it's got to be in your mind: "Right, okay, you've been brought up this way and you think that it's okay to do these things." There's some sort of justification there that it's like, "Oh, okay, so why am I like this? What made me like this in my childhood?"
AW: Intimacy Coordinators are a relatively new position in the industry, but are so important. When we spoke with Lisa Matthews and Emily Ballou, they both said how good it was to have someone there for your scenes especially. Could you talk about your experience working with an intimacy coordinator and what you found helpful from it?
Shane: [Playing Young Trevor] was very hard. Especially one of the days of filming where I had to…it was a sexual assault, basically, with Young Simone. The spin the bottle scene. I was very, very nervous that day. I felt very uncomfortable, but everyone was so supportive. Bridgette plays Young Simone, and I was like, "Are you okay?" after every take. Like, "Is there anything I can do better? Is it okay if I do this?" And the intimacy coordinator - I cannot stress enough just how crucial they are for subject matter such as this.
That scene with Bridgette, we had to do choreography, like putting the hand down the pants. It's almost like a dance and with steps of like one, two, three, four. The intimacy coordinator Chloë just walked us through this method of like – before we rehearsed the scene of really touching each other – hand-holding or pushing kind of actions with an, "I'm gonna push you like three out of five, is that okay?" And then, 'That's okay." Then you do the thing and then reflect, like, "Was that okay? Yes?" You just go back and forth, seeing each other's level. What's a two out of five for me could be different to a two out of five for you. You know, strength and size. If you didn't do that and you started the scene, you'd feel so awkward and just like, locked-up. Doing that warm up, you walk through this and you just become more comfortable. Even though I was a nervous wreck on the day, knowing that we had done it before, it's like…in the back of my mind, it's like, "We've done this. It'll be okay." That had to be the heaviest day for me just because of the whole physical side to it.
They're like a referee, almost. Like, "Here are the rules and here's what you can't do as well," and explaining that in a very easy-to-understand manner. Because when you're asked to do things like that, no one would not question themselves. Like, "How far can I go?" So I can't stress enough how crucial intimacy coordinators are on projects such as this.
AW: How did you interpret and experience Joey and Trevor’s relationship? Did that evolve for you throughout the show?
Shane: [David and I] had a good meeting in pre-production of rehearsing, running through the lines or whatnot. In that time, we actually had the chance to really discuss that situation of the relationship. I think David and I had a pretty good understanding of how it was from the get go. We didn't really communicate like how I did with Errol about our characters. I feel it was pretty well established: Trevor's the dominant one and Joey is, you know, the beta to the alpha, essentially. The lesser. It was just that dynamic of Trevor always punishing Joey. So I think we had a pretty good understanding before. We didn't really need to dive that deep into it. David's great. I couldn't stress enough how great David is. Yeah. Legend.
HE: In the last episode, Joey and Trevor are having a fight and Joey says, "You carry it. I'm done. You carry it." Do you think that Trevor carries it at all?
Shane: I think he would. It's just…he's so damaged that it’s covered up, like wall after wall after wall after wall, but it has to be there. It has to be there. There's no way just as human beings that it wouldn't affect you to even the smallest amount. It's just a man like that who's caught that much abuse, his mind has been conditioned to think a certain way. You wouldn't be able to see it unless you really took a good hard look at that person. Whether it be body language, or how with film and TV you can show two people talking and one person leaves and then the camera can hold on the other person - that can reveal how they truly feel by themselves versus when they're around others.
Definitely, I feel Trevor would feel it.
HE: What ownership do you think Joey feels over the story of that night, if any? Do you think he trusts himself in remembering it and carrying it? Did it change him?
David: I think Joey actually feels that ownership of the deterioration of the [Tess, Simone, and Hat] in a way. I guess his partnership with Hat and then him with Tess, trying to cover up the whole story to the girls is one thing. I think not openly telling the truth is why Joey struggles to come to terms with what he did and holds so much animosity to his family because he's bottling up everything and he just doesn't know where to go or who to talk to. He knows what's happened. So why couldn't he have just told the girls?
I think all he was trying to do was help the federal agents and I think he just tried to move on from that whole situation. He got what he deserved and that was to put his brother in jail. He just wanted to forget all the other events that happened that night. Because it was so overwhelming for him, already having to wear that wire and that now that this event's happened, he doesn't even want to think about it. When people ask him about it or talk about it, it's just, it's not something that he wants to explain or tell the story of.
HE: Do you think Joey was expecting to have to deal with more than just ratting out his brother?
David: I don't think he was expecting more, no way. I think there was already enough on the line for him, already enough that was going through his mind. I think he was so guilty that he had to put Hat through this and that she was involved because she just shouldn't have been.
Joey was just... he was romanticising this life without his brother and this new life where he could break free from all of this family trauma and go on living a fresh life on a blank canvas and repaint it. But it's a bit hard to do that when you’re in the same town that you grew up in and you put your brother in jail and then you stay in that town.
I think there was still some love for Trevor because you feel sorry for him. He lives such a hard life. You see the pain that he has and he just can't push past it. So I think Joey kind of just bottles it all up and just doesn't really address the issue like a mature man. I think he tries to do these things like putting his brother in jail and all of this stuff that isn’t just trying to sit him down and have a mature conversation with him.
HE: Does Joey feel responsible for it or accountable for it because he let it happen?
David: Yeah, I think so. I think he does feel a sense of "this has happened because of me". Maybe because when Trevor does come back from jail, maybe he’s the way he is because he did go to jail. What would have happened if he didn't? I always think of that. He comes out and he's even more creepy, you know? When he's in Hat’s house? That's one of the creepiest scenes I've ever seen. I think Errol played that really, really well. Firstly, he just looks really scary. I think he played it really well.
HE: Something that we appreciate about the show is that it deals with generational trauma not just with the women, but the men too, with Joey and Trevor and their upbringing and how differently they reckon with it. The show’s not afraid to go there.
Shane: That’s the exact phrase I couldn't think of before, generational trauma. That's exactly the side of the Calleys that I wish was shown a bit more, that generational trauma. You're absolutely right with the women and how it just carries on. When the trauma is that potent, it will carry on. It's a matter of like, trying to understand why that occurred.
HE: What was your experience on the set on a show that’s so heavy?
David: I try to just respect it as much as possible because there were a lot of women on set and I think, you know, I just didn't want to be the first person to like, make it all lighthearted. Fair enough if the director goes and makes it a bit lighthearted or the producer or the creator — if they go and start making things lighthearted, then of course I'll join in and bring things back to light. I just stayed in my own lane, especially in the scenes that were quite tough and dark. I did the job that I needed to do. If we started to have a little bit of a giggle or things started to lighten up, then I would join in. I think it's just about reading the room and knowing your time and place in that room.
AW: Is there any type of TV show, film, theatre or genre that you’d love to pursue that you haven’t gotten to yet?
David: I want to do a bit of a slapstick comedy. I think I'm very goofy in real life and I've been playing all these darker roles. I'd love to do something a bit more comedic, even something like Dumb and Dumber. I would just love to do something like that where it's just so spaced out and you can just have so much fun on set and not worry about emotional work. You just have fun.
Shane: Recently there was a show called ONE PIECE that was released on Netflix. I'm a huge fan of Manga and anime. They renewed it for a second season and it would be an absolute dream to be able to play a character, even small, on that show. So that’s what I'm currently dreaming of at the moment. That's where my head is.
Words: Helena Emmanuel, Dominique Gagnon & Alfie Whitby
Interview: Helena Emmanuel & Alfie Whitby (with questions submitted by the RTR team)
You can watch One Night on Paramount+ UK & Ireland and Paramount+ Australia now.
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