In 1987, Brenden Abbott – aka the Postcard Bandit – stole $112,000 from a branch of the Commonwealth Bank in suburban Perth. It was a bold armed robbery – dropping through the ceiling, just as the branch was beginning to open – but it also wasn’t uncommon. Armed bank robberies were almost an everyday occurrence in those days, as branches carried large amounts of cash and the security was rudimentary.

Now, though, it’s a different story. Just ask George Mason, who plays Abbott in the new six-episode series Run.

“I was in Bellingen – where I live – and I thought, ‘I’m going to rob a bank,’” says Mason. “Well, pretend to rob a bank. So I walk into a bank and my mate’s working there. So I went up to the front desk, and I was like, ‘If I were to rob this bank, how would I do it?’ – probably blew my cover a little bit there – and I was looking at the cameras, and trying to get into that headspace.

“And [my mate] goes, ‘You couldn’t rob us. One, we don’t have any money, really. And it’s all just computerised now, you need to actually put your card in, in order to get things out.’”

Keiynan Lonsdale as Detective Porter in Run.

He might have been foiled (very sensibly) at the first step, but for Mason the thrill of playing Abbott – at one stage Australia’s most wanted man – was very real.

“I can see why they get off on the adrenaline of it,” he says. “Even just shooting those [robbery] scenes, afterwards we were like, ‘Let’s f---ing go.’”

Between that first robbery in 1987 and his most recent capture in 1995, Abbott became a classic criminal folk hero. Not only did he commit about 50 robberies, he escaped jail twice (Fremantle Prison in 1989 and Brisbane’s Sir David Longland Correctional Centre in 1997). He also built a reputation as a criminal mastermind for his talents with disguises and fake IDs, and an ability to evade the police.

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“This story was before there was social media and YouTube and all those things,” says Mason, a Kiwi actor who has starred in Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog and appeared in Netflix’s Tasmanian murder mystery The Survivors. “So most of the stories I know of Brenden Abbott are through people I’ve met, people that know him, or were in prison with them, and then they all speak so highly of him.

“And that’s the interesting thing about Brenden, he’s this really eloquent, charismatic guy. And he’s also a bit of a chameleon. He gets on with everyone. I think that’s why he did so well on the run for so long, because he wasn’t a drug user or anything like that. He definitely liked women, he spent a lot of time at brothels … [but] he didn’t present as a criminal.