‘I never saw anybody who looked like me on screen’: New Aussie Prime Video boss wants to tell local stories
Having only taken on the head role for Australia and New Zealand just last month, Hwei Loke has already made her mark in regards to the type of programming the popular streamer puts out.
Loke has worked in the industry for two decades, working in marketing and creative roles at Disney, SBS and ViacomCBS, before landing at Amazon in 2020. She tells Mumbrella that heading up Amazon’s Australian streaming offering is “a dream role”, but one that comes with a certain weight.
“What I definitely see from Australian consumers is what they want is diverse and compelling storytelling that reflects them. They want to see stories that are uniquely Australian – and we’ve seen that through series like Deadloch, which have unique Australian humour,” she said.
Hwei Loke
Loke hopes Prime Video’s content slate represents how Australians actually are – not the usual whitewashed version seen in the usual blonde-heavy local productions
“I mean, I’m an Asian Australian woman who grew up in Australia in the nineties, and I never saw anybody who looked like me on screen,” she says, noting SBS legend Lee Lin Chin as a notable exception to this rule.
“I’m excited to bring content that reflects what Australians even just look like on a basic level. We had the launch of Five Blind Dates earlier this year, which had an all Asian-Australian cast for a romantic comedy, and that’s exciting for me.”
It’s also paying dividends, with the success of Five Blind Dates proving “that’s what Australians want”, as Loke puts it. “They want stories that reflect them, that are diverse and that are compelling.”
Five Blind Dates
Prime Video’s local iteration of The Office franchise is one such example, with the feckless boss character a female, for the first time across 13 different versions of the show. Loke says the show steers close to the UK and US versions of the show – “something that feels familiar yet fresh” as she puts it – but with an Australian lean.
“It has the same kind of archetypes of, you know, The Office workers. But then at the same time, we have this brilliant Australian take on it. It’s really fresh Australian humour, Australian situations, you know, one episode centres around Melbourne Cup, for example,” Loke explains.
“And then, we have this fantastic Australian female boss played by Felicity Ward in the role of Hannah Howard, and she is just delightfully inept and relatable and people are really going to fall in love with her, just like they did with all of the prior boss versions.”
And although Prime Video has had major success over the past 12 months with international properties, such as viral hit Saltburn and their new release rental platform, which often sees films hit Prime Video concurrently with the cinemas, Loke doesn’t look overseas to try and replicate success.
“We’re quite focused on what the Australian consumer wants,” she said.
“At the end of the day, what our main objective is to present a compelling, entertaining, surprising proposition to our audiences – and we’re hyper-focused on how to do that.”
More on Prime Video’s 2025 slate of content, and their live sports offering will be published next week.
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Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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