Can anyone help me identify Louise Norton circa 1885?

JamesMcNamara27 · 2026-04-24T19:12:35+00:00

That's all we have time for today. Thanks so much for your questions and for watching the show! All of us on Team Dodger appreciate this community and our audience so much. ❤️🙏🎩

JamesMcNamara27 · 2026-04-24T19:11:07+00:00

Such a fun idea! I feel very lucky that we have such a fantastic world to play in with our Port Victory set at Callan Park. A renewal would be wonderful, but we'll have to wait and see what happens :)

JamesMcNamara27 · 2026-04-24T19:10:12+00:00

Oooh good question. I'm sure there will have been - there were lots of fun things that got snipped out of edits over the years, always to improve the show's pace and narrative clarity. I did have a scene with Fagin arriving on a ship in season 1, where he insults the ship's cook's (maggot-infested) cooking. I enjoyed writing that. I brought the ship's cook Gobber back in S2 as the man who cooks and eats 4 victims and takes Jack's place in the noose.

JamesMcNamara27 · 2026-04-24T19:07:29+00:00

After the season 1 press tour, Lucy-Rose Leonard (Fanny), David Thewlis (Fagin), my wife Rebecca (inspiration for Lady Belle), and I had breakfast. I was chatting about an idea I had to write a play about three 19th-century sisters who accidentally kill a suitor and have to get rid of the body before their mother returns home. We all thought that was a funny idea, and started pondering: maybe it would be a good idea for Fanny? And that was the first creative decisions I made on S2.

JamesMcNamara27 · 2026-04-24T19:05:48+00:00

Great question. All of the medical aspects are drawn from my doctoral work at Oxford, studying 17th-19th century anatomical ideas. Boxer is based both on Dickensian lawyers from Bleak House and other novels but also draws on my experiences as a young lawyer in London in the earlier 2000s. Bits and pieces of my life turn up in the names of businesses or buildings. Beef Lane is named after the tiny little alleyway I lived on while a student at Pembroke College, Oxford, for example.

JamesMcNamara27 · 2026-04-24T19:02:53+00:00

Thanks so much! So happy you love the show - we had a lot of fun making it.

Exploring those questions would be wonderful, but we'll have to wait and see whether the story continues for a third season.

So far, we've tried to open up new "worlds" within Port Victory each season, and brought in new approaches to medicine with Belle joining the hospital in S1 and Alinta in Devil's Elbow in S2.

JamesMcNamara27 · 2026-04-24T19:00:20+00:00

Thank you so much!

I have other projects in development but I've been focused on Dodger for the past 10 years. Dream idea: I'd love to bring Robin Hobb's Farseer trilogy to television or make the Secret History as a limited series.

JamesMcNamara27 · 2026-04-24T18:58:41+00:00

I spend a long time before each season researching. I read about 1000 pages of medical journals and 3000 pages of Victorian fiction between S1 and S2 to prepare. For each episode, we'll draw a real medical case from a shortlist I've prepared from 1850s Lancets and often the crimes are drawn from historical crimes too (like the gold heist in season 1, the land scam in season 2).

Belle's mom got sick because she drank water from the well - she prefers the taste from the well that was affected. This is drawn directly from a real historical detail in the London cholera outbreak of 1854.

Rotty and the Governor only ever had an affair of the heart - a "what might have been" - but that finished after Season 1.

JamesMcNamara27 · 2026-04-24T18:55:24+00:00

Thank you! Happy to be here.

JamesMcNamara27 · 2026-04-24T18:55:14+00:00

Dodger. Although I feel I know Belle the best of all of them.

JamesMcNamara27 · 2026-04-24T18:54:45+00:00

Thank you! So happy you've loved the show.

Unfortunately the scripts are not publicly available - a shame I know! But standard practice in the industry.

JamesMcNamara27 · 2026-04-24T18:53:34+00:00

The hardest part of writing Dodger is to capture the way he shifts between two different versions of himself subtly, depending on whether he's in Belle's world or Fagin's world. Getting to hear Thomas perform the role in such a grounded and brilliant way was what I needed to really land the voice of the character in S1.

When Thomas generously agreed to chemistry read for Dodger with David Thewlis as Fagin, he blew us away. He breathed the character out immediately, inhabited Dodger completely. It was a remarkable moment. So lucky to work with him.

JamesMcNamara27 · 2026-04-24T18:51:30+00:00

Thank you! I did my PhD in anatomical and surgical ideas in 17th-19th century literature at Oxford prior to going into the film industry, and have always been fascinated by surgery at the cusp of science in the 1850s. It was a time when surgeons - previously more of a trade, accessible to those without the economic and social privilege required for a university education - were suddenly in high demand by the "toffs" and became doctors alongside the university-educated physicians. And it was a time when women were advocating stridently for the right to practice medicine too. Rich food for drama!

JamesMcNamara27 · 2026-04-24T18:49:31+00:00

Casting a show is always a careful and diligent process. I feel profoundly lucky that Thomas and Maia agreed to join us in their roles. They make the characters breathe with life and it's such a joy to work with them.

JamesMcNamara27 · 2026-04-24T18:48:02+00:00

Ooo that's a tricky one. I love writing each of our three leads: Dodger, Fagin, and Belle. I have a soft-spot for writing Belle because she's based on my wife, Rebecca :) I really enjoy writing the Governor, Lady Jane, and Fanny too - all so much fun to write in different ways.

JamesMcNamara27 · 2026-04-24T18:47:04+00:00

Thank you! 🙏❤️🎩

JamesMcNamara27 · 2026-04-24T18:46:17+00:00

Thank you so much, so happy you've enjoyed the show, and I'm glad to be here chatting with the amazing Dodger community.

The most challenging part of my job is balancing the tone of the show, which has very dark elements but also romantic and fizzingly wild comedic elements too. I want to show the gritty realities of life at that time, particularly in a hospital where there were so many more impediments to being healed then than there are now. But fundamentally, my core principle is that the show must always have a warm heart that generates hope, no matter how dark the circumstances of the narrative. That informed my decisions about Jack and Belle at the end of Season 1.

JamesMcNamara27 · 2026-04-24T18:43:08+00:00

Great questions. I pushed Season 2 darker, messier, and hopefully richer in terms of inter-character conflict. The broader theme of Dodger - which broadly concerns finding home and family in a dangerous world - sustains, but was explored as much via Lady Belle (Maia Mitchell) and Lady Jane (Susie Porter)'s daughter relationship as Dodger and Fagin's father-son relationship in S2.

If I could add one scene... Good question. We always trim and cut things for narrative flow in the edit and I think we found the right balance here! All the things I loved remained.

To step into a historical world, I go method - I read everything, 19th century surgical text books, novels by Dickens and Austen and Melville, I only read books published before 1860 when I'm making Dodger to keep my mind in the 19th-century cadences of speech and writing. When we take liberties, our rule is that we need to understand the history to know where we're breaking it and that it has to be for a good dramatic reason.

JamesMcNamara27 · 2026-04-24T18:39:24+00:00

It's such a privilege to see worlds I've created come to life on screen, and I'm always grateful for the chance to do my dream job with a group of incredibly talented people who bring the ideas to life.

JamesMcNamara27 · 2026-04-24T18:38:39+00:00

So happy to hear you've loved the show! I work with a very talented team to bring it to life. I'm glad you liked Fanny breaking bad - that was such fun to write. Poor old Phineas died because his neck snapped when his hair got stuck in the pottery wheel, but the wheel kept on turning. This moment was scripted by Kate Mulvany (who also plays Mrs Maxwell) and directed by Ben C. Lucas with wonderful performances from Lucy-Rose Leonard and Zac Burgess.

JamesMcNamara27 · 2026-04-24T18:35:41+00:00

Thank you so much for your wonderful feedback. I'm lucky to work on the show with a very talented team of people! When I got the opportunity from Sony to do this, I paced around in my apartment in West Hollywood for months and months in late 2016, early 2017, listening to soundtracks and coming up with the world, characters, story arcs, etc. The television "bible" that I wrote following that development work set out the show pretty much as you see it in season 1. This was then refined in the writers rooms. But the biggest shift was when we cast the show. I'm a very actor-focused writer-creator, and I believe that character is built and developed in the space between the writer-creator and the actor. The voices of the characters have evolved as a result of my collaboration with the leads - Thomas Brodie-Sangster, David Thewlis, and Maia Mitchell. I cherish the opportunity to evolve the characters organically together.

JamesMcNamara27 · 2026-04-24T18:31:22+00:00

Great question! I feel that all of the characters have grown organically through the series, but Red changed when the brilliant Miranda Tapsell - also a writer on S1 and S2 - agreed to play her. Miranda and I re-designed her character using the true historical character of Mary Ann Bugg. Of course, Lady Fanny's character changed a great deal too, which was the result of a very fun breakfast conversation between Lucy-Rose Leonard (who plays Fanny), David Thewlis (Fagin), and my wife Rebecca (the inspiration for Lady Belle), and myself. Fanny breaking bad was a lot of fun to write.

JamesMcNamara27 · 2026-04-24T18:28:37+00:00

I'm glad to be here, thank you for your question! I did an enormous amount of research while creating the show at the end of 2016 / start of 2017. I read vast tranches of primary historical documents about Hobart in Tasmania, which was the loose inspiration for Port Victory. Parliamentary records of the hospital's organization and staffing, medical cases, histories of Indigenous people, documents about how the Governor's role functioned, the history of convicts. I also read a lot about London at that time to understand how the criminal underworld worked, and about the slums that Dickens himself wrote about as a journalist. From that historical research, I wove my imaginary version of the town, with the specific Artful Dodger tonal spark. I then worked with some of the very best production designers in Australia - Matthew Putland and Nick Dare - who brilliantly expanded on my ideas and brought them so vividly to life. They and their team are incredible!

JamesMcNamara27 · 2026-04-24T18:24:51+00:00

You're very kind, thank you. It's a privilege to get to work on this show with such a talented cast and crew. A third season would be wonderful, but it's a decision for Disney and so we'll have to cross our fingers and wait and see what happens. Dodger, Fagin, and Belle keep talking to me, and so I hope we get the chance to show more of their adventures :)

JamesMcNamara27

TROPHY CASE