He was just meant to be in the background of one of this year's biggest Australian films, but new Redan priest Eugene McKinnon ended up with a speaking part and being an official member of the cast.
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When those behind the hit movie The Dry were searching for film locations, they ended up at one of the nine different churches Father McKinnon oversees in Wimmera-Mallee.
The film stars Eric Bana as a policeman who returns home to investigate the mysterious death of a friend and has already taken $16 million at the box office.
When they decided to film the funeral scenes in the early part of the movie at Father McKinnon's Banyena church, he was asked by director Robert Connelly to play the part of the priest conducting the service.
"I didn't have to do much to act. Just be me at my age," he said.
"There is only one line in the book that refers to a fat old padre that begins the funeral service."
So while the book has no spoken words from the priest, when filming started the director asked Father McKinnon to say what he would normally say at a funeral.
He said, after the first run through, the director said: "that's brilliant, we'll use that".
"For the next six hours I kept going through the same spiel," Father McKinnon said.
"About six months later I had to go down and record my voice on the same sound system that they were using for the whole of the production of the film.
"With that they said we'll elevate you to a member of the cast."
Father McKinnon - who moved to Ballarat in January to take up a position at the Redan church - had also roped some of his paritioners and even some friends from Melbourne to be extras in the film.
"The other thrill was that the author of the book, Jane Harper, out of 30 something days of filming in the Wimmera, she only appeared for two days and she was the extra those two days," he said.
"I did say to her 'next time you write a book, give a few more lines for the priest'.
"At that stage we didn't know it would become part of the film.
"My part's not a big part in the film. The movie itself I thought was very well done having read the book. Eric Bana was brilliant in it."
Father McKinnon attended the premiere of the movie in Horsham in December alongside Bana, and later watched it again in Warrnambool with a friend.
Father McKinnon grew up and was educated in the south-west before being ordained. He worked in Papua New Guinea and was parish priest at St Joseph's in Warrnambool before moving to the Wimmera.
-The Standard
