After playing a member of the dysfunctional Moody family and a young Rupert Murdoch, Guy Edmonds is set to play a guy who’s forced to impregnate seven women in seven days.
That’s the punishment meted out to his character Scott by a domineering angel in Wingman, a made-for-the web series from writer-director Steve Anthopoulos and producer Yingna Lu.
The screenplay by Anthopoulos and co-writer Luke Davidson follows Scott as he buys the morning after-pill for his girlfriend Becky. This prompts a visit from an extroverted angel named Wingman, who tells him they've committed a grave sin by ending a potential life. To save his girlfriend from eternal damnation, he must impregnate seven women in seven days.
“It’s a funny, sexy show with an underlying message: Everyone has the right to choose,” Edmonds tells IF. The producers aim to raise a modest $8,500 via crowd funding site Pozible towards the cost of renting locations, feeding crew, hiring lights, cameras and rigs, buying insurance and paying for special effects and licensing music.
Shooting is due to start in Sydney in January. Those who support the crowd funding campaign are being offered a “Procreate Action Kit” comprising mini-posters, two shot glasses, two coasters, stickers and a hipster bracelet.
Tying in with the web series, the producers launched a “Don’t Not Have Sex” campaign, which aims to reframe how people see reproductive rights. Via Twitter, graphic novelist/ screenwriter Neil Gaiman hailed it as the “sharpest PSA video about birth control and sex I’ve seen so far.”
Anthopoulos has directed short films including Farid in the West and the web series TBI and The 21 Conspiracy. Yingna produced the series Lessons from the Grave, directed by Matilda Brown and starring Bryan Brown, which was broadcast on ABC2 and has been commissioned for a second season.
She’s developing three feature films with producer Bill Leimbach (Beneath Hill 60), including Banjo & Matilda, to be directed by Morgan O'Neill.
Edmonds plays Hayden in Jungleboys’ ABC comedy The Moodys, the sequel to A Moody Christmas. He says the character is barely recognisable, the result of travels he’s been on, but declines to reveal more.
Edmonds and his mate Matt Zeremes directed, co-wrote, produced and starred in the feature Super Awesome!, a comedy about two struggling actors who decide to stage a musical about gay marriage with disastrous results.
The cast includes Simon Burke as an Australian action movie star who gets involved in their crazy project, Patrick Brammall as a pretentious theatre director and Brett Stiller as a heartthrob actor. The film is finished and Edmonds and Zeremes are talking to distributors and sales agents and aim to launch it at international festivals.
Zeremes tells IF the duo is talking to Australian production companies with a view to developing a slate of film projects.
Edmonds played the young Murdoch in David Williamson’s play Rupert, which was staged by the Melbourne Theatre Co. in August/September. There are talks of a Sydney season and Edmonds will be performing in the play at the Kennedy Centre in Washington in February.
The revue-style exposition of the life and times of the media magnate takes an even-handed approach to its subject, he says, adding, “It’s not a Leftish playwright bashing Murdoch.”