A WELLINGTON Point actor is ready to break on to the big screen starring in a crime film about the murder of young Canberra engineer starring Joe Cinque.
Jerome Meyer, a former student at Wellington Point State High, plays the engineer in Joe Cinque’s Consolation, based on Helen Garner's book about the true story.
The little-known Meyer, by all accounts looks like Cinque, a 26-year-old engineer, who died at the hands of his 25-year-old girlfriend, Australian National University law student Anu Singh in 1997.
Meyer, who studied a Bachelor of Fine Arts while majoring in acting at QUT, was chosen for the part after moving to Sydney last year.
He stars opposite Maggie Naouri who plays Singh and Gia Carides as Maria Cinque, Joe's mother.
Jerome's mother, Anna-Louise Meyer, who still lives in Redlands, said she was thrilled her son had scored such a gripping role and expected Garner's name to help boost box-office tickets.
Since finishing his degree, Meyer has played John Caleo in Holding The Man and has had a small part in Channel 10's Secrets and Lies.
He also played "Lysander" in A Midsummer Night's Dream with Sport for Jove theatre company, before taking on the crime role.
Director Sotiris Dounoukos was able to draw from real-life experience when he wrote the screenplay.
He practised as a lawyer before becoming a filmmaker, studied law at ANU where he met Singh but not Cinque.
The film was shot in and around Canberra at many of the same spots the couple frequented.
The movie starts after a party to farewell friends who thought Singh was planning to take her own life.
Singh put the sedative Rohypnol in Cinque's coffee then injected him with heroin, leaving him to die.
Singh was eventually found not guilty of murder but guilty of manslaughter and served four years in jail.
Controversial films are nothing new to Dounoukos, who won awards at the Sydney Film Festival for his movie A Single Body about two abattoir workers whose friendship is tested.
