Opinion
How Sydney’s light rail became Hollywood’s most unlikely star
Mary Ward
ReporterThe opening sequence of a trailer for The Fall Guy, the recently released action movie starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt shot in Australia last year, features an action-packed race down Sydney’s George Street. Swerving around civilians on his e-scooter, Gosling beats the closing doors of the L2 Light Rail to Randwick, before crashing out a window through the other side of the carriage. Yes, the writers’ rooms of Hollywood have concocted a high-stakes action sequence within an alternate reality beyond the bounds of our imaginations: legalised e-scooters in the Sydney CBD!
I jest. (Although, please, no one let Transport for NSW see this film as they will add “light rail window damage” to their list of safety concerns keeping Sydney from following every other eastern capital city in trialling the devices.)
Watching The Fall Guy trailer in a Sydney cinema brought on a moment of reflection, if not cultural cringe. Among the snapshots of Sydney daily life featured in this internationally released film, which involved shutting down the Harbour Bridge for a car chase, is … the light rail? Ryan Gosling is racing onto and crashing through the window of … the light rail? We let Ken catch the light rail? It’s not exactly Wolverine fighting bad guys on the bullet train to Nagasaki. Or is it?
Maligned by locals since it opened four years ago as the public transport you catch when you want to travel through the city at a bit quicker than walking pace (but, crucially, not quite at running pace), Sydney’s light rail has become an unlikely movie star.
In case you haven’t noticed: smile, Australia, you’re on camera. Hollywood’s strikes are over, and the films shot Down Under during the pandemic and its aftermath are now being released. Not all of these movies are set here, but watch closely and you can spot the local production.
Former Q&A host Stan Grant is on screen as a small-town US news anchor in the new Zac Efron movie Ricky Stanicky, shot in Melbourne and now streaming on Prime, and the Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes looks suspiciously like the Illawarra region (the 10th film in the franchise, shot in NSW in 2022, will be released in cinemas next month).
The Fall Guy is the second Hollywood flick set in modern-day Sydney released in the past six months. And, curiously, it is also the second to feature a cameo from the L2 to Randwick. The L2 – alas, the L1 to Dulwich Hill is yet to crack the big time – made its silver screen debut last year in Anyone But You, a romantic comedy starring Sydney Sweeney and Glenn Powell.
One scene features Powell’s character making a convenient and completely normal 40-kilometre trip from his Palm Beach mansion to the centre of town to buy flowers for a wedding, standing outside the QVB as George Street’s red chariot glides through in the background. Is the light rail’s newfound film star status just a coincidence? A Destination NSW conspiracy?
Sydney has been featured in big budget Hollywood films before: brazenly in Mission Impossible II, more discreetly in The Matrix. We’ve watched as young Nemo and his friends turned up in Circular Quay. Homegrown international film successes such as Priscilla: Queen of the Desert, Looking for Alibrandi and Strictly Ballroom have showcased the suburbs and inner city.
We like to think we know what the world thinks of Sydney. But cinematic Sydney, and perhaps also the Sydney of our popular imagination, is a “Sydney 2000” Sydney. A city with a frivolous, flashy monorail, not a functional light rail.
If you were to ask the average Sydneysider for a list of their hometown’s landmarks, the light rail – for all its frequency (running until 1am on all lines, it was announced last week) and centrality – is unlikely to rate a mention. Is that because we don’t like it, or because, in its tram-adjacency, it feels a little too Melburnian?
Sometimes you have to have your city reflected at you through the eyes of an outsider to see its best bits. Have we been blind to the George Street light rail as a Sydney icon? What could be more Sydney than a shiny red car that stops right outside an exponentially growing number of Merivale restaurants?
On the big screen, the light rail looks really cool. Modern, slick, pedestrianising a main street and getting people from A to B, and running until the early morning for all of your late night dining and action-sequence filming needs.
Could Sydney’s light rail become Australia’s most famous tram? Don’t worry, Melbourne. It’s impossible. Features of Sydney’s light rail network mean it is technically more of a rail system than a tram system, I am told. Sydney is not here to cut your grass, or pull your cord.
But, if it continues being cast in Hollywood roles at this rate, the Sydney’s light rail may be the first to receive an IMDB page.
Mary Ward is a reporter at The Sun-Herald.
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