Home Sweet Home.
When Manu Bennet (The CW’s Arrow) received a call from his manager about a test deal for MTV’s fantasy television event The Shannara Chronicles, he had just 24 hours to assimilate the series as a next step in his career.
It wasn’t until the hunky Kiwi heard the big names attached to the project did he realize its magnitude.
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“When I heard that Jon Favreau was on board, Dan Farah was producing, I just knew they were really good players in Hollywood and Los Angeles to be involved with, and that it was going to be a high-end production,” Bennett tells OMFGTV.
“The cherry on top was that it was actually filming in New Zealand. This is my first audition having landed in LA after Arrow and everything and I got sent back home for all the right reasons. Because being sent back home meant that I went home to do a series with all the people I worked with on The Hobbit.”
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Not only is Shannara’s production crew from Hobbit, but they also worked on Peter Jackson’s previous trilogy, The Lord of the Rings.
“As soon as I walk into the set, it was like this looks just like the big productions we do for film over there. MTV are going to throw their hand on the table and take a big gamble with this as what really should be a film scale, they’re bringing to television.”
Manu goes on to say that with the new series, you will not need to frequent your local cinemas as much to get movie-quality entertainment.
“Shannara will be a breakthrough,” he exclaims. “It will be another hurdle in the evolution in television. It’s where television just gets a little bit closer to film and you can sit at home and turn on your television and this will come on and it’ll be like, ‘Wow, I didn’t have to go to the movies.'”
The Shannara Chronicles premieres Tuesday, January 5 at 10pm on MTV.