At the age of 20, Ryan Corr was already something of a seasoned screen actor when he won the role of black sheep Coby Jennings on Packed to the Rafters, after making his TV debut six years earlier in tween comedy The Sleepover Club. Indeed, it was thanks to another series he made when he was 14 that he was asked to audition for Rafters in the first place.
"I became good friends with Angus McLaren, who played Nathan Rafter, when we worked on a show called Silversun back in 2004," says Corr. "He and Pino Amenta, who'd been a director on that show and was working on Rafters, saw a bit of Coby in me and rang up to see if I'd come in and try out for the part."
Originally Coby, a Rafters relly from the wrong side of the tracks, was meant to appear in just three or four episodes, but the showrunners were sufficiently impressed with what Corr did that they paid him the "massive compliment" of asking him to continue in the role, which ended up lasting four seasons and 61 episodes.
"I was really excited to join the show, which was already established and successful when I was invited on board," he says. "It'd cleaned up at the Australian TV awards and was really well known; it was a series that sat families around the television set together, and it was a really big step in my career to be on something with such a high profile."