We Bury the Dead: Film starts production in Albany, stars Brenton Thwaites, Mark Coles Smith join Daisy Ridley

Survival thriller We Bury the Dead has officially started production in Albany — and the high-profile cast joining Star Wars hero Daisy Ridley can finally be revealed. Cairns-born actor Brenton Thwaites, who played the son of Orlando Bloom’s character in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, returns to WA to shoot this tale of the undead, having previously ventured west to star in the 2014 crime thriller Son of Gun. Leading Indigenous actor Mark Coles Smith is even more familiar with WA, having been born in Kalgoorlie and raised in the Kimberley before embarking on a career on stage and screen. He has acclaimed performances in Last Cab to Darwin and Mystery Road: Origin, and a Helpmann Award for his role in Leah Purcell’s play The Drover’s Wife. The impressive cast add considerable weight to We Bury the Dead, which speaks volumes for the project’s visionary writer and director, WA filmmaker Zak Hilditch (These Final Hours). The movie is a terrifying examination of grief as it follows Ava (Ridley), a woman desperately searching for her missing husband in the aftermath of a catastrophic military experiment. When Ava joins a “body retrieval unit” in the hopes of finding her hubby, things take an unexpected turn when corpses start showing signs of life. We Bury the Dead will be shot in Albany and the Great Southern across the next five weeks. It attracted production funding from Screen Australia, Screenwest, Lotterywest, the WA Regional Screen Fund, Gramercy Park Media and Peachtree Media Partners.