Class of 07 stars at high school reunion at the end of the world

High school reunions are scary enough without adding the apocalypse to the mix. That’s the premise of Prime Video’s latest show, class 07is now streaming on the platform.

class 07 follows Zoe (Emily Browning), fresh from a humiliating stint on a reality dating show. She has disappeared from the scene to heal her bruised ego, which coincidentally coincides with the 10-year reunion of her pure girls’ private boarding school. And also a tidal wave.

The latest entry in the apocalyptic series canon, class 07 explores how we can cope with a healthy dose of comedy and nostalgia in the face of overwhelming danger and dwindling resources. Browning and co-star Caitlin Stasey who will be familiar to international viewers Govern, please like me and as the eerily grinning visage from the promotional poster for the 2022 horror surprise hit Smilecompare their own reactions to such an event as similar station eleventhe HBO Max series, based on the book of the same name by Emily St. John Mandel, which follows a theater company at the end of the world.

“I’m scared for myself in the future because I don’t have any skills outside of acting, and who needs a friggin’ actor?!” Stasey tells The Daily Beast’s Obsessed. “Compared to the people I just did a show with, there are 11 of them if you need entertainers who are far more adept at entertaining!”

Stasey’s character Saskia was the necessary mean girl in high school, but has reinvented herself into a positive influencer — that is, until the lofty environment she finds herself in causes her to relapse into old habits and the alpha position to take again. Faced with this real-life catastrophe, Stasey says she would probably be resource hoarding or performing abortions like some of the other characters on the show, she jokes. “Come to me if you need one [back]street abortion!”

“Print that!” Browning laughs, realizing that given the dire state of reproductive rights in the US, where she and Stasey both live and work, that actually isn’t such a disastrous matter.

Despite class 07 Taking place right in the midst of the nostalgia boom, it has modern parallels – most obviously with society hurtling towards the end times at devastating speed, but also with how COVID has impeded the progress of many young people.

Filmed across Sydney, Australia in late 2021 after two years of strict COVID-19 lockdowns for the country, it marked the first time for both actresses since the pandemic to be back in the big southern country and see their families. One character’s story explores how her stranding is affecting her IVF, which with the roadblocks that COVID has put up, many people trying to conceive in recent years can certainly relate. Another character is so ashamed of not being where she envisioned that she pretends to be a doctor instead of a nail technician, which of course has disastrous consequences when someone inevitably needs medical attention.

While Browning, who has acted in films like sucker Punch and the series American godswho didn’t attend her own high school reunion—and thus spared herself the humiliation of having to invent her own success stories—she says she was “a constant embarrassment in high school,” adding, “I probably was more Zoe-esque [then] than i am now I didn’t have a filter and maybe I spoke my mind a bit too much and I was loud and I annoyed people.”

Stasey, who made a name for herself debuting on the Aussie Soap Institution Neighbors When she was in high school, she didn’t attend their reunion either.

“I wasn’t invited! Because I didn’t get a degree, I don’t think I qualified,” she admits.

Instead, the two actresses reminisce about their high school horror stories, like making fun of normal bodily functions like toe hair, Stasey says.

“I’m so glad Instagram didn’t exist when I was in high school,” says Browning. “I can’t imagine being a young girl today and seeing these things [images]. As a woman in my thirties, it scares me. When I look at Instagram, I feel like I want to die.”

Another thing that freaks her out? The waistline of the time in which class 07 looking back and that they are back in fashion. “My waist size is getting smaller, but it will never be as small as it was in 2003,” she says.

“It’s depressing to buy things that you used to have and compete … with kids, little 16-year-olds, who buy the same clothes as me, and I don’t think I can do that. I have to respect myself and get out there,” Stasey says, admitting that the outfit she’s wearing looks like she stepped out of a fashion magazine circa 2002: patterned velvet bell-bottoms, a ruffled full-bodied blouse, a long pearl necklace, the she stole from the set of class of ’07, and a funky, half-grown lovechild with a mullet and a pixie cut that made me do a double take when she walked into the room.

One thing’s for sure: she’ll never go back to flared jeans with straps — Australian slang for flip-flops — “and the hems get soaking wet” in the middle of winter. Damn horrible.”

Baby G watches could be making a comeback, however, and the pair are considering buying them on eBay.

“It gives me such a visceral feeling. I was so excited when I came [one of the watches] as a child. Maybe that’s why the nostalgia thing is such a thing,” says Browning, recalling the Fairycore, Raver and Vintage Prada and Miu Miu she still has when she first bought them.

“People who were then teenagers and who have come of age are now the adults who are creating content and are beneficiaries of nostalgia,” Stasey says wisely. “The future doesn’t feel so bright anymore, so we’ll always say it was better then – for some people the future had a lot to offer in some ways and the future doesn’t feel that bright with a lot of possibilities.”

That is the question at the heart of class 07: How will this ragtag group of largely stagnant Millennials overcome the crappy hand they’ve been dealt? And indeed it is a mystery to all of us.

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