Popular Neighbours stars reunite for epic new Aussie series: ‘Just so exciting’

Former Neighbours stars Jesse Spencer and Radha Mitchell reunited on the set of their new Disney+ series Last Days of the Space Age. However, the pair admits they’ve ‘blocked out’ any shared memories from their time on the show together.

Speaking with Yahoo Lifestyle the actors, who first met on the Aussie soap in 1996, play a married couple in the new series. Last Days of the Space Age is set in 1979 Perth, when the city hosted the Miss Universe pageant and the US space station, Skylab, crashed just beyond the city’s suburbs.

Jesse Spencer and Radha Mitchell spill all about their time on Neighbours

In Neighbours, Jesse played Billy Kennedy – the son of Karl (Alan Fletcher) and Susan (Jackie Woodburne). Radha, meanwhile, played strong-minded and opinionated student Catherine O’Brien.

Jesse tells us that, despite knowing they met on the soap, his memories of meeting Radha are still a bit fuzzy.

“We met on that show in the green room, we still don’t know if we actually worked together,” Jesse tells us with a laugh.

“We did, but we’ve blocked it out,” Radha says. “We were joking that they had a whole sub-theme for our characters and it was just so exciting that they had to cut it out of the show, so no one’s seen it.”

She adds, “But we really got to know each other on this show, actually, and we felt like there was a bit of a shorthand, I guess, because we’d both been living in the US. So, although we hadn’t seen each other for 20 years, there was some sort of like, ‘Oh, I kind of get where you’re coming from’ feeling.”

Speaking about their favourite memories from the show, Radha said she mostly remembered that “everyone was quite relaxed”, while Jesse shared that he still has “fond memories”.

“I have really fond memories of that show, because the people who play my parents are still there, yeah, the Kennedys are still there,” he says. “I mean they’ve been there for 30 years or something, so that’s, I mean it’s gotta be a record. But they were great, because I was a young kid, they really wanted to get our family dynamic up and very quick, and a lot of overlaps and a lot of energy, which is sort of what we had in this show.

“So now it was interesting to be on the other side playing, you know, the parents, and having the kids with the youthful exuberance and energy and keeping it fast-paced and, you know, having a lot of dynamics and keeping it alive and bringing it onto screen. So it was, it was like that from the opposite angle, I guess.”

Jesse Spencer on using his Aussie accent for the first time in years

Jesse has been very busy working in the US on shows such as House M.D. and Chicago Fire, and it’s been quite some time since he’s had to work with his native Australian accent. Similarly, Radha also does a lot of work overseas but has had a little more practice recently with projects like Troppo and Take My Hand.

“We were trying to figure out what our voices were going to be because we’d been doing other dialects for so long. I mean it’s very exciting to get to use [my Aussie accent],” Jesse says.

“Are they going to understand us?” Radha remembers asking herself.

“Are they going to have to put the subtitles on?” Jesse joked. “I mean, even all the Australian colloquialisms, which I’d forgotten, you know, I hear them and I’m like, ‘How could you forget those great expressions?'”

“But being able to use your own accent is actually quite freeing once you, you work on it,” Jesse adds, with Radha saying it’s almost like taking off a mask. “Yeah, because you work so hard to go the other way, and so, yeah, you’ve got to strip back and it’s almost a little bit vulnerable in a way, but in a really good way.”

Jesse Spencer and Radha Mitchell reveal ‘uncomfortable’ moments on set of Last Days of the Space Age

The series tackles several tough topics, including sexism, racism and homophobia, with Radha and Jesse revealing some parts of the show were quite difficult to film.

Jesse shares that one thing he found quite hard to reconcile with was the fact that his brother in the series Mick (George Mason) is gay and while Tony is a modern man and a feminist, he doesn’t understand why his brother won’t marry a woman.

“I found there was a moment Tony has where he’s over at his brother’s house, and I guess he’s sort of a more contemporary guy,” Jesse says. “He wants to encourage his children to go off and live their dreams and fight against gender roles, I guess.

“And he’s at his brother’s house, but he still can’t quite get over the fact that his brother’s gay, you know, and he’s still trying to enforce a sort of more traditional – ‘Just get over it and marry a girl, mate, what are you doing?’ It’s kind of a, I don’t know, just an interesting dynamic about people in a certain time when ideas are changing and shifting, and they’re right in the middle there, sometimes caught in between two worlds and trying to figure out who they are and how they fit into society and where society is going. And they’re good themes, and those themes run all throughout the different families.”

Radha adds, “I actually found it uncomfortable being a housewife, to be honest. That I felt, and I was like, ‘Wow, it’s interesting that I’ve got all this resistance to this woman’s experience.’ And that must be just being the product of a different period, feeling very differently about things, as you say. So, yeah, it was kind of confronting in that sense.”