After 15 years of impressive work in Australian films and TV series, Don Hany has the chance to make a name for himself in the US.
Meanwhile young Aussie actress Natasha Bassett has scored a role in a Fox network comedy pilot, Here’s Your Damn Family.
Hany, who starred in The Broken Shore, Serangoon Road, Devils Dust and Offspring, has landed the lead role in Warriors, the pilot for a US drama series.
Hany will play George Mann, a trauma surgeon for a US military hospital inspired by the Walter Reed Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. Caring for injured servicemen takes its toll on Hany’s character. The pilot was written by Chris Keyser (Party of Five, Sisters) and will be produced by Mandeville TV and ABC Studios for the ABC network.
Bassett, whose credits include Mental, Rake, Wild Boys and the Oz-shot NBC series Camp, will play a 17-year-old who gets upset when her dad gets remarried soon after her mother dies. The cast includes Jon Heder, Jane Kaczmarek and David James Elliott (JAG). Ricky Blitt wrote the pilot and the producers are Big Bang Thoery's Johnny Galecki and Stephen McPherson.
Hany will be seen this year in Matchbox Pictures' Devil’s Playground, playing a Bishop in the Foxtel miniseries which follows Simon Burke’s character 35 years after Fred Schepisi’s seminal 1976 semi-autobiographical movie set in a Catholic seminary in Melbourne in the 1950s.
He co-stars with Hugo Weaving in Craig Monahan’s Healing, playing an inmate of Iranian background who is serving a long stretch for murder and undergoes a rehabilitation program caring for wounded eagles and other big birds.
Produced by Tait Brady and Monahan’s Pointblank Pictures, Healing opens in Australia on May 8 via Pinnacle Films.
Both Hany and Bassett are repped by Shanahan Management.