All eyes are once again on Channel Nine as they present the third installment of their true crime series Underbelly: The Golden Mile. Over 2.2 million viewers tuned in to watch the first two hour long episode screened on April 11 which charts the rise of Kings Cross identity John Ibrahim.

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It’s being touted as a glitzy and glamourous take on how the Cross grew and changed from 1988 to 1999. And adding to the glitz is the larger than life Wanda, played by the equally larger than life Eastern state drag personality Miss Man… who is the alter ego of Mitch Bartlett. Confused? Don’t be. They’re each as fabulous as each other.

‘Wanda is a transsexual drug addicted prostitute,’ Bartlett told OUTinPerth on the phone from Melbourne of his latest incarnation. ‘She is the top transsexual prostitute in The Cross. She’s out there, a little bit moody. Everyone likes Wanda. She was an amazing character to play. Oh, and she loves a bit of cocaine.’

As she should, because after all you can’t be on Underbelly unless you have some kind of seedy vice gripping at your soul. The result is a vivacious exhilarating character who literally consumes the screen with her va-va-voom. And the fact that she gets to pack an emotional wallop later in the series only adds to her appeal.

‘I played Wanda how I felt her and the direction that I got was to just keep doing exactly what I was doing,’ Bartlett said of his Underbelly experience. ‘I’ve worked myself in the clubs and I have friends who are sex workers – which I don’t judge at all – so I visited them while they were working on the street to catch up with them down in Melbourne.

‘I learnt a lot from that, from what I saw in real life, so I knew how to bring it to the screen with Wanda in a sort of classy way. She’s a top girl of The Cross, but she’s very respectful as well.’

Bartlett has had a rich and varied career, one he kicked off by starring in Kylie’s first video Locomotion and then playing her lover in Je Ne Sais Pas Pourquoi, both back when he was 20. He also toured with Kylie and helped her little sister out by appearing in one of her videos too, before falling into the role of stand-in drag queen for large scale productions and corporate shows.

‘But I didn’t like the miming because I could sing,’ Bartlett confided.

To highlight his ability, Bartlett created Miss Man, a self-confessed cougar very much based on ‘Sonia Krueger, Jennifer Hawkins and Kerri-Anne… as well as being a bit of a Toorak wife’. Miss Man is the headliner of a now very successful corporate show, one Bartlett will soon be expanding to incorporate other characters, include widowed pensioner Nanna Man.

But it’s his role as Miss Man which landed Bartlett the role of Wanda, his corporate show identity teaching him everything he needed to know about his Underbelly character. The results have blown Bartlett away.

‘I learnt so much from it and I learnt so much about myself,’ he explained. ‘After one of my big scenes in the show I actually went back to the make-up van and Bernie the wardrobe girl was like “Wanda, why are you crying?”. And I was like “I’m crying because I’ve just done my biggest scene, and I’m relieved and happy and I’ve done something I never thought I could do”.

‘But they’d pulled my big scene on me a week earlier than I was planned to do it and so when I flew up to Sydney I had all this anxiety thinking they had pulled this big scene on me to see if I could cut it. And I thought that if I couldn’t cut this emotionally big scene, I thought they’d get rid of me and write me out. So I had all this anxiety behind me.

‘I did the whole scene and the driver is driving me back to the airport and I’m like “Thank God today is over, I can’t believe they pulled that scene up on me, they must be testing me” and she goes, “What are you talking about?”. And so I told her that I thought they were obviously testing me on it and she said “No, the building that we’re hiring and filming and using as a detective’s office is being demolished next week so we have to quickly do all those scenes that are in that building”.’

With that, Bartlett peels with laughter, a laugh that we’ll no doubt come to know and love when Wanda takes to Underbelly.

Underbelly 3 screens every Sunday night on Channel Nine. For more information on Miss Man visit www.missman.net.

Scott-Patrick Mitchell