Dear Life stars Brooke Satchwell and Eleanor Matsuura join showrunners Robyn Butler and Wayne Hope to preview this Australian drama that discusses organ donation and the power of human connection through the story of a woman grieving for her fianc.

Across six episodes, Australian drama Dear Life offers a deep exploration of themes including grief, lost love and the power of human connection.

But by co-creator Robyn Butlers own admission, this emotionally charged story which is also full of warmth, humour and hope started from an embarrassing and ridiculous idea.

Created, written and directed by husband-and-wife team Butler and Wayne Hope, Dear Life stars Brooke Satchwell as Lillian, whose doctor fianc Ash tragically loses his life after being attacked at work. Eight months later, she is still consumed by grief when she gets an anonymous letter from the man who received her partners heart one of 11 beneficiaries of Ashs decision to donate his organs after death.

The series, produced by the showrunners Gristmill production company for Australian streamer Stan, then follows Lillian as she tracks down some of the organ recipients, while she and her friends and family continue to deal with the impact of Ashs death in different ways.

Were married, and I was just having one of those little fantasy moments where I thought, What if Wayne died? Butler tells DQ. Its a terrible thing to say. Probably I read or heard something about someone losing their husband, and I thought, Oh my God. How would I cope with that? I started going down that rabbit hole and then just started thinking, I wonder if I would have donated his organs. I wonder [how I would feel if] his heart was in somebody. It was literally that. Then I just went, Well, I wonder if thats a story.


Robyn Butler and Wayne Hope, the creators, writers and directors of Dear Life
Immediately, it was very moving to hear, Hope says. I was struck emotionally because it made complete sense to me why someone would do that, and it made no sense at all in the same moment. What are you trying to achieve by going to a stranger and having this connection through a physical organ, a body part, in someone else? But I totally understand why you would, and why that might seem like a cathartic, important, emotional thing to do.

Then, of course, as soon as you start looking into that, there are lots of ethical and moral dilemmas that come with that. It was incredibly compelling as a dramatic idea.

With Lillian, they centred on a woman in her late 30s who is a bit of a late bloomer and has just started to get her life on track, only for her future to be ripped away when a drug-fuelled patient fatally attacks Ash in the emergency room where he works.

It is a hooky premise, but it quickly becomes a very interesting way just to talk about human behaviour, Butler says. Then we pick her up eight months later, after all these lives change. It was just a really interesting thing for drama, to put ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. We didnt want it to be trauma porn. We didnt want to do organ of the week.

In fact, Lillian meets three people who benefited from Ashs death and received his heart, lungs and corneas among the parts of the body least likely to be donated.

With every recipient, its a very different story, and weve tried to capture the magnitude of organ donation, Butler says. Its such an epic premise. Someone has to die so someone else can live. Sometimes we tell the story in a non-linear way and it jumps around, but we tell the recipient stories in different ways and theyre in different places [emotionally].

Satchwell has worked in film and television for nearly 30 years, having made her debut in long-running Australian soap Neighbours and featuring in Jack Irish, Mr Inbetween, The Twelve and Black Snow. Dear Life now marks the first time she has taken a leading role, though she still considers the show an ensemble due to the kaleidoscopic elements that make up the series.

Brooke Satchwell stars as Lillian in this emotional yet hopeful drama exploring grief and love. When she first read the scripts, Satchwell was absolutely staggered by the story and characters that just leapt off the page. You could feel it, you could see it, you could hear it, you understood it, the actor says. The role of Lillian is a cracker.

Robyn and Wayne, theyve poured their heart, soul and lifeblood into development and production of this job. They just have immaculate attention to detail. People were drawn to this project like moths to a flame, because we all want to do something thats meaningful and of value and challenging and real.

Satchwell describes Lillians journey through the story as an exorcism, with viewers initially meeting her in the absolute chaos of devastation, completely adrift and struggling to make sense of life without Ash.

Shes fortunate enough to have just like we had on set across the cast and crew an army of angels around her in her friends, but shes got a very public court case occurring apropos of the death of her fianc and the incident in the hospital that caused his death, she explains. Her friends are obviously struggling with their grief, and shes trying to hang on to her job and get through each day one heartbeat at a time.

When Lillian receives an anonymous (as required by law) letter from the heart recipient, thats the first light in the dark for her, she continues, because she recognises that as much as shes been living in the trauma of the experience and the grief and the loss and the struggle, ultimately there is good in what occurred, and someone got to live. Then subsequently, many people got to live as the series progresses.

Lillian might be the focal point of the series, but shes not the only person affected by Ashs death. Eleanor Matsuura plays Mary, a fellow doctor who was present when Ash died and is impacted by the hierarchy of grief, where the grief of those beyond the next-of-kin might not be acknowledged in the same way.

Eleanor Matsuuras Mary supports Lillian while hiding her own turmoil Grief is just so weird and messy, says Butler. Theres no pattern to it, and we really liked playing around with that. Marys grief is not just grief, but its trauma, because she has the trauma of having been with Ash [when he died].

British star Matsuura, who recently appeared in The Day of the Jackal, moved with her family from Toronto to Melbourne for the Dear Life shoot after landing the role of Mary. I felt like the part was me, she says. When I read it, I was like, Oh, this really is calling to me and speaking to me. I can do this. I know this is something thats meant for me. Everything just aligned really beautifully.

She was initially intrigued by the organ-donation storyline but then quickly discovered the show was actually more about the relationships between characters. Thats the stuff were compelled by, and thats why we keep on watching something, because we like the characters, not necessarily because of the subject matter.

Mary is juggling her career and life as a mother and wife, as well as being a supportive friend to Lillian. But she finds herself in the middle of this strange web as she attempts to support Lillians grief while her own threatens to boil over in unpredictable and violent ways.

Shes a very capable, confident woman, Matsuura says, and when that [grief] starts to spiral out inside her, she literally doesnt know what to do, so she starts to have panic attacks. It really sends her on this quite unhinged journey in her own way, but its much more private, and its doused in this secrecy because she doesnt know who she can turn to and talk about it with.

Its an incredibly layered and full journey that Mary gets to go on. Its so well observed by Robyn and Wayne, because its true, its real. There is a hierarchy of grief we all suffer from, and sometimes those who arent at the top of that triangle, theres no road map for them.


Dear Life will play on Oz streamer Stan
Behind the scenes, Butler and Hopes partnership has evolved over the 25 years they have worked together, having first met as actors playing husband and wife in Foxtel mockumentary Small Tales & True. The showrunners then established Gristmill and went on to make series such as Upper Middle Bogan, Summer Love and Little Lunch.

In the past, they would often plot every single element of a series together and be alongside each other at every meeting. But now, they break story together before Butler takes over scriptwriting and Hope considers a projects visual style. They then come back together to direct through production.

The process has refined over the years, says Hope. Before people work with us, actors are like, How does it work? Its just quite organic that well both take a lead in whatever part that is, whether Im setting up a shot and Robyn is talking to the actors or vice versa. It just organically happens now in that way, and then through the post period, I generally go into the edit and Robyn usually starts writing our next project.

Writing Dear Life proved to be a complex proposition for the pair, as they sought to be as authentic as possible while also being fictitious and funny. They did a lot of research within the organ transplant community, speaking to medics and organ recipients, though no real stories are wholly dramatised on screen.

There was a lot to think about, Butler says. We probably spent about five years writing it. We were working on it during Covid, and it just felt heavy and huge, so we pivoted and we wrote something else [2022 comedy Summer Love]. Then we came out of lockdown and shot that. Wayne went into the edit, and I went, Im going to have a look at that show again and came back to it. But it was very tangled. It took a while to get the tone right.

Hope says: We want people to feel this is a warm experience. Were well aware that everybody works their ass off, and when they come home and sit down and choose to watch something, they want to feel connected to something. So tone was really important, and it took us a while to navigate how exactly we would represent that.

Filmed in Ballarat, west of Melbourne, production also took place across the wider Victoria region as well as wine-making country in the Barossa Valley, in South Australia. The story also shifts further afield to Europe at one point.

During production, Butler and Hope asked the cast to dig deep and to really go to the depths of themselves. They praise the extraordinary Satchwell, as well as Matsuura, Ryan Johnson, who plays Marys husband Hamish, and Ben Lawson (heart recipient Andrew).

This script is immaculate, says Satchwell. Every word, glance, breath Wayne and Robyn have put so much effort into ensuring that as many elements and expressions of grief, love, connection and healing as possible are in this story. All of that resonated with me.

Its no secret, Ive had an interesting life the actor has spoken out about her experiences of domestic violence and was caught up in the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai and at this point in my life, Im in my mid-40s and it was an amazing opportunity for me to actually take a lot of experiences that perhaps Id processed intellectually, spiritually and exercise them through the lens of another story. Thats testament to the healing power of the arts.

Matsuura adds: Everyone from the cast and the crew were just focused on telling it in the most sensitive and respectful way possible, and yet it never felt heavy on set. It was very light. There were a lot of laughs. The crew were probably the best Ive worked with. They were so dedicated, but funny, and there was a lightness of touch. Theres never a devastating moment that just leaves you on the floor with no hope. This is a very hopeful show.

The weight of the material and emotional days filming meant Satchwell and Matsuura would find each other in their trailers or share a phone call to decompress after shooting, while they also chose not to get too far ahead of the production schedule in their prep.

Im glad I had Brooke to bounce off, because I didnt feel isolated in that experience, Matsuura says. It was just too much to try to plan out in some almost school-ish way. It was a case of feeling as you go, being in the moment and taking it day by day. It was the only way through it, because the things we were doing were sometimes the highest of highs and the depths of the human experience. You cant overthink that. Ive never really worked like that before, but it was necessary for this job.

When Dear Life debuts on Stan, Butler and Hope want to start a conversation that could resonate not just in Australia but around the world, with Hat Trick International handling global distribution.

Their focus isnt just on the importance of organ donation, however, but the desire for human connection too. Thats what were intrinsically interested in writing about, says Butler. Why we stumbled upon this idea is that what unites us is stronger than what divides us in this wacky world in which were all living, and that actually were all just humans who do the same thing and have the same functions.

It is such a complex story, Satchwell adds. Its not just a show about organ donation. Its about friendships and love and grief and all of the great complexities of being human. I really hope it just holds a beautiful space of acceptance of all parts of being human, and is a really beautiful and an impactful experience for people.