Twenty years after he played pupil Nick Poulos in the hit ’90s show Heartbreak High, Alex Dimitriades is going back to school as the lead character in The Principal.

Dimitriades made his acting debut in the 1993 film The Heartbreak Kid alongside Claudia Karvan, which then spun off into the series version.

The show was a huge success in Australia and went on air in over 25 countries worldwide.

In the upcoming SBS crime drama, the 41-year-old actor will play Matt Bashir, an educator who gets the principal’s job at a Sydney high-school, notorious for its history of violence.

The well-intentioned principal seems determined to reform the school and inspire troubled youth, but is soon faced with a mystery involving a dead student on the school’s grounds.

Touching upon issues of ethnic tension and socio-economic troubles, the series is expected to spark debate among the viewers.
“We are seeing these young kids from lower-class ethnic minorities searching for an identity,” Dimitriades said.

“It’s a great opportunity for us to empathise with those kids … who are searching for an identity … instead of looking at how they’re made out to be by the media.”

The first two episodes of The Principal, which is set to air on SBS on October 7, were screened at the Melbourne International Film Festival last week.

Source: Herald Sun