Music is powerful and has served as a connection point for couples in real life and across all forms of media. Many classic films employ music that sticks with us decades later. The new four-part limited series Mix Tape, premiering at SXSW, follows such a story with two periods in the lives of characters played by Teresa Palmer and Jim Sturgess in the present day and Florence Hunt and Rory Walton-Smith during their teen years.
Based on the novel by Jane Sanderson, Mix Tape follows teenagers Daniel and Alison, who meet at a house party in 1989 and bond over their love for music. Daniel is popular, Alison is a wallflower. When they meet on the dance floor, their lives are forever changed. The relationship they forge that night will follow them forever and leave them wondering what could have been. Daniel is in Sheffield, and Alison is twenty years later in Sydney. Both are married, with children nearly grown. Life looks different for both of them than they’d imagined at seventeen. Daniel, powerless to the stronghold the memory of Alison still has on him, reaches out to her in the hope that they might be able to rekindle that spark.
I chatted with the two actors who portray Alison in the series. Teresa Palmer talked about how she connected with the present-day storyline, while Florence Hunt reflected on this press tour being only the second time she and Teresa had met since their scenes were filmed independently. Both actors also talked about influential songs that they connected with during production, including tracks from a mixtape that Jim Sturgess made for Teresa. Check out the full interview in the embed above.
Mix Tape premiered the first two of four episodes of the limited series at SXSW on March 9th.
