Marlon Williams Smoulders in TV Debut

With 24-year-old New Zealand singer Marlon Williams making his Australian television debut – in ABC’s seductive new miniseries, The Beautiful Lie – both his vocal ability and screen charisma should convince viewers of this breakthrough artist’s astounding potential, according to NewsCorp Australia Network’s Holly Byrnes.

For the drama’s executive producer, John Edwards, Williams was a four-letter-word-inducing discovery when he first heard him on the car radio two years ago.

“It was on Melbourne radio and they introduced this kid as the illegitimate love child of Elvis and Roy Orbison, so I immediately turned up the sound,” Edwards says. “He was singing live in the studio, and he sang A Prison To You. I’d never heard him before and went ‘who the f*&k is this?’”

As The Beautiful Lie script was sketched out – centring around the ill-fated love story between a married woman and a younger, more reckless record producer – ‘Marlon’ was the name given to the artist Samuel’s character.

As Williams tells it: “it was such a strange way to come to a role like that, to step into shoes that are meant to be yours but have been crafted by someone else.”

To be championed by “someone like John Edwards,” he adds, “it’s a very interesting starting point.”

Even before the first episode of the six-part series has aired, Williams has filmed his next role and first movie, The Rehearsal (based on the debut novel of Canadian-born, New Zealand-based author and Man Booker Prize winner, Eleanor Catton).

Original article by Holly Byrnes, NewsCorp Australia Network, October 18, 2015.