Last King of The Cross Delivers Elevated Drama & Gritty Authenticity

The operatic story of two brothers, Sam and John Ibrahim—who organize the street but lose each other across their ascent to power—plays out in Last King of The Cross. The 10×1-hour elevated serialized drama, starring Tim Roth and Lincoln Younes, tracks John Ibrahim’s rise from a poverty-stricken immigrant with no education, money or prospects to Australia’s most infamous nightclub mogul in Sydney’s Kings Cross district in the late 1980s.

The series, which comes from Mark Fennessy’s recently launched indie HELIUM Pictures and is sold by Cineflix Rights, is inspired by Ibrahim’s best-selling autobiography of the same name.

“A chance meeting with John Ibrahim at a Lady Gaga concert became the beginning of a unique relationship with a truly fascinating man,” says Fennessy, producer on the series. “John then reached out to seek my advice on the structure of the book he was writing at the time. This turned into a much bigger conversation and ultimately a journey that extended to a four-year process in delivering a major scripted television event.”

Kieran Darcy-Smith (Wolf Creek, The Duel) serves as writer and director on the project, which was greenlit by Paramount+ in Australia.

“As a producer, I’m all about the script, so the writing process was long and challenging but highly productive,” Fennessy says. “Among our team, there was a mix of youth and experience, involving much discussion, debate and argument. The fundamental premise was always about total ‘authenticity,’ and this is reflected in the diversity and strength of the casting. We have a premium frontline cast, which really complements the story, but even in the supporting and secondary roles, we sought the most believable actors. We had to deliver on the authenticity of the gritty world we were portraying. Even the smallest of roles had to be real.”

He says that HELIUM and the entire production team were committed to faithfully recreating the infamous world of Sydney’s Kings Cross circa the late 1980s and early ’90s, likening it to a mini-Atlantic City, “not quite a mile long, with every form of criminality on offer.” Fennessy adds, “So, we built it from the ground up in a car park in western Sydney. With much of the action taking place at night, this gave us the latitude to deliver the scripted story in a setting that is a character all of its own. The set itself was populated by literally hundreds of extras bringing the Strip to life in an authentic way—from streetwalkers and the homeless to the Bikies and the Silvertails on a night out. And we were shooting in the middle of a major rain event, so we used this to our advantage, with our DOP working with the directors to deliver beautifully framed imagery in cool tones with flashes of color from the neon of the night.”

Fennessy adds that while Last King of The Cross is inspired by true events, there are many storylines and characters that have been fictionalized for the purposes of dramatization.

The drama series, he says, plays in a similar space to The Sopranos, Gangs of London, Gomorrah and Goodfellas, “but it does so in a refreshingly different and authentic manner and with significant points of difference from any of these—including the diversity of its characters. It is an immigrant crime story that is salacious, violent and gripping and all set in the decadent, crime-infested but very sexy district of Kings Cross in 1980s/’90s Sydney—a delicious contrast to the usual Australian TV backdrops of Bondi Beach and the harsh Outback.”

Cineflix Rights is taking the title out to the global market at MIPCOM.