Celebrity Status

This week Hobart was able to flaunt its beautiful scenery as it hosted The Hunter movie premier. You may not have heard about this movie, as I certainly hadn’t, but it was filmed in Tasmania and centres around trying to find the likely extinct Tasmanian Tiger.

Oh…I haven’t mentioned the Tasmanian Tiger before have I….

Well the Tasmanian Tiger or Thylacine was once the largest carnivorous marsupial at its time. However it is believed to have gone extinct after exposure to both humans and dogs wiped it out. Of course not everyone believes this and there are occasional elusive sightings of this creature. The last know Thylacine died in captivity in the Hobart Zoo in 1933. You can see a video of this poor animal on Wikipedia.

Tasmanian Tigers

So as I was saying Hobart hosted this movie premier and had a red carpet walk for the star of the movie Willem Dafoe. He’s the actor recognized for the evil role of the Green Goblin in the Spider-man movies, the voice of Gill in Finding Nemo and countless other movies.

Willem Dafoe

I would have had no idea of this event had my friend Emily not been a huge fan of his. While other cities had Q&As and other meet and greets Hobart was only having this public red carpet walk and then a private showing of the movie so we thought our only chance would be to see him walk the red carpet.

We left with plenty of time, knowing how great Hobart bus service is, and arrived to find a busy movie entrance with photographers and camera-crew packed along the small space in front of the theatre. As most fans and onlookers hadn’t arrived yet we ended up being of interest to some reporters, and may have smiled for some photos and gave our names to the paper.

Lara Giddings, the Tasmanian Premier was one of the first to arrive and hurried into the building. The next few groups of people tripped over the one stair on the way in and thus some fixing to the carpet had to be done. After most others had entered and a crowd of around 200 had gathered finally the big star arrived to the only cheering of the night. He spent about 10 minutes signing autographs for the fans before finally heading in. Emily got his autograph and I took a picture of them too…. 


Oh! And the reporters took some pictures of us too which appeared online as well as in the Mercury Newspaper the next day. We also were cornered into giving a few interviews which ended up on a couple stations which I have yet to see!

Yes, that is my hair! This is the online news picture...I swear the other ones were better but this is all you're getting from me!! That's right-admire that hair!!

It was an exciting night and as I believe we both said in the interviews: “great to see for Hobart!”