She’s best known for playing a pioneering TV network anchor in The Newsreader, but Australian Anna Torv has just landed her next lead role playing a gun-toting cattle station matriarch.

In what is being promoted as the largest local screen production ever filmed in the Northern Territory and in South Australia, global streaming giant Netflix has finally announced its lead star.

The streaming giant says the neo-western Territory (formerly with a working title of Desert King) is about to become everyone’s “favourite prime-time soap”.

“Imagine the family drama of your favourite prime-time soap, but set in a region so rough and remote that nearly everything can kill you,” Jean Bentley says on Netflix’s official companion website Tudum.

Torv, 45, whose famous uncle is media magnate Rupert Murdoch, recently spoke about playing “wonderfully complex characters” like newsreader Helen Norville.

“Helen’s fun to play because you can fly off the handle and you don’t have to hold any of the stuff in,” she told the Australian Women’s Weekly late last year.

“I don’t think you have to like every character you play, but I do like Helen.

“It’s like you can just shoot from the hip.”

The plot

And that’s just what she’ll be doing in Territory, playing Emily Lawson, one of the cattle dynasty fighting over Marianne Station (the real-life Anna Creek Station served as one of the inspirations for the series), when it’s left without a clear successor.

“Generational clashes threaten to tear the Lawson family apart … sensing this once-great dynasty is in decline, the outback’s most powerful factions – rival cattle barons, desert gangsters, Indigenous elders and billionaire miners – move in for the kill.

“With billions of dollars at stake, everyone wants a piece of the pie,” says Netflix of what is its latest commitment to making original series in Australia.

Anna Torv swaps the newsroom for desert locations in Territory. Photo: Netflix

High stakes

Filmed on the traditional land of the Larrakia people (Darwin) and the Kaurna people (Adelaide), Torv is reuniting with two of her Newsreader cast, Robert Taylor (Colin Lawson) and Philippa Northeast (Susie Lawson).

Co-written and produced by Ben Davies (Bondi Rescue), he says the idea for Territory came during a walk on Bondi beach with the show’s executive producer, Rob Gibson (The Twelve, Colin From Accounts).

“[We] got excited about the prospect of doing a big-scale, high-stakes action drama set on a cattle station, in a part of the country you don’t often see on screen,” Davies said.

“… we were surrounded by the Bondi crowd, people moving past us in their active wear, wet suits, carrying their surfboards while Rob and I were dreaming up stories about people in jeans, boots and flannel shirts in the Top End.”

He says he’s assembled an “incredibly creative team, on and off screen, to do justice to the rarely-seen world, characters and stories of the Top End”.

Davies is no stranger to the harsh environment either.

He made The First Inventors – hosted by Tiwi Islander actor Rob Collins for Ten and NITV – and Outback Ringer, which follows the highs and lows of four bull-catching teams in the remote outback.

“The apt words to describe the challenges are ‘major’ and ‘sh-tloads’,” he told Screen NSW at the time.

“It was the toughest show I’ve ever made.”

Torv and her Territory cast. Photo: Netflix

Murdoch connection

Torv grew up on the Gold Coast, and after graduating from NIDA more than 20 years ago, has had regular work in well-respected TV series in Australia, New Zealand and America.

In 2004, she scored a role in local production The Secret Life of Us, followed by Steven Spielberg’s The Pacific in 2010, and then cult hit JJ Abrams’ Fringe playing FBI agent Olivia Dunham over five seasons in the US.

Then there was Secret City, in which she won her first Logie in 2017 and back again to American shores until 2019 to play Wendy Carr in Mindhunter.

She was nominated for an Emmy for her guest role as Tess, a post-apocalyptic warrior in the 2023 big-budget series, The Last of Us.

She also worked on feature film Force of Nature: The Dry alongside Eric Bana.

Her paternal aunt (her father was Estonian Hans Arvid Torv), Anna Murdoch Mann (neé Torv), was married to Murdoch for 31 years and her cousins are Elisabeth, Lachlan and James Murdoch.

Torv is not on social media and rarely opens up about her personal life (she married Fringe co-star Mark Valley in December 2008 before divorcing after a year).

“I think if there was a time to get older on screen now is it. I feel I’m pretty lucky. I’m getting some pretty great opportunities,” she said.

Territory premieres on Netflix on October 24