“You do find yourself, at a certain age, looking back,” William McInnes says almost wistfully, gazing out at the clearing skies over Victoria’s Western Port Bay. We will go for a walk along its shoreline eventually – despite his moon boot, the result of a decidedly undramatic accident on the set of upcoming NCIS: Sydney. But for now we’re happily ensconced in his local general store in the Mornington Peninsula town of Somers.
The final episode of season two of The Newsreader – where McInnes plays Lindsay Cunningham, the hulking and splenetic head of the newsroom – has just screened on ABC. It’s a show that trades in a certain kind of nostalgia, its cyclorama-like parade through historical events and obsession with 1980s period detail bordering on the fetishistic. But for McInnes, who lived through the times and remembers them clearly, the retrospection is both fascinating and kind of surreal.
