I’m the most envied woman in Sydney. My best friend calls me a bitch. My neighbour crosses the road when she sees me. Even my mother has turned against me. And all I told them was that I was interviewing David Wenham.
“It’s hilarious. I laugh. It’s ridiculous, ridiculous,” says the man in question when I ask him about his new role as “the thinking woman’s sex symbol”.
It’s not him, he says, it’s his character, Diver Dan, Sigrid Thornton’s erstwhile love interest in the ABC TV series SeaChange, that’s done it. “The character is extremely appealing, he’s a fantasy man, a man who’s well-read, a man who can cook – he’s got fantastic attributes.” SeaChange creator Andrew Knight puts a different spin on it: “David’s not exactly ugly,” he states. “And he knows how to do humour without trampling all over it. You also get a depth and a resonance – he gives you all things.”
Apart from his having “surprisingly little ego”, according to Knight, it’s not a bad thing in terms of putting the sex symbol thing into perspective that it’s come up well into Wenham’s career – after all, he didn’t pick up legions of female fans from Cosi or Idiot Box, Barrie Kosky’s Tartuffe, Belvoir Street’s Hamlet or The Tempest, Blue Heelers or Sons and Daughters, or any other of the dozens of films, plays or TV series he’s been in over the past 12 years. We’re not likely to see Wenham, who barracks for the Sydney Swans, loves going out to dinner with friends and – for the record – can cook but doesn’t, derailed by the hype surrounding him.
It’s bizarre that at the same time otherwise sane women started acting like teenagers over a TV star, he was also appearing as Brett Sprague in The Boys (a film he also co-produced), creating probably the most terrifying character ever seen in an Australian movie, one of three violent brothers. “David Wenham, as the most brutal of the brothers, inspires all the despair and frustration that such a cocky monster would provoke from you in reality,” said the UK’s The Sunday Times in a recent review.
“It was fortunate that SeaChange was airing at exactly the same time as The Boys – it put the spanner in the works in the casting agencies around the place, which is good,” says Wenham. He was nominated for an AFI best actor award for SeaChange and The Boys, and had picked up a best actor award the previous year for the mini-series Simone de Beauvoir’s Babies. That trophy now sits on his parents’ mantelpiece. “I don’t put any great weight on it, I can honestly say that,” he says.
We’re sitting at the kiosk in Sydney’s Rushcutters Bay. He’s just back from filming the latest series of SeaChange and about to fly off to London and Los Angeles. In April he will be starring, with John Waters and Tom Conti, in the worldwide hit Art at Sydney’s Theatre Royal. “I’d love to be able to speak a lot of languages and work in Italian or Finnish cinema, but that’'s obviously not going to happen,” he says. He is going to Brussels, though, to do post-production work on his latest project, Paul Cox’s Molokai, which also features Peter O’Toole and Sir Derek Jacobi. “Every now and then you pinch yourself because you’re working with Lawrence of Arabia or I, Claudius.” In a brilliant demonstration of exactly how casting agencies were thrown by Wenham’s onscreen persona, he’s starring in the film as Father Damien, who he describes as “Belgium’s national hero”, a priest who ran a Hawaiian leper colony. The notion of an Australian in such a role smacks of Mick Jagger playing Ned Kelly. “I prefer to think of it as Meryl Streep as Lindy Chamberlain,” he says with a laugh.
But Meryl probably never had it so tough researching an accent. “I went to the Belgian Consulate and asked for names of some famous Belgians so I could study their accent and all they could come up with was Jean Claude Van Damme.”
Wenham became interested in acting at Christian Brothers, Lewisham, in Sydney. “I loved making people laugh as a kid,” he says. “I think most actors are like that, the naughty boy in class who spent a lot of their school life on the balcony with sore hands, having got the strap so many times. I loved putting on puppet shows and magic shows and had a ventriloquist’s act.” He and his ventriloquist’s doll toured with the school band – “my mother made a little school uniform for it. I’ve still got the doll and the scripts I wrote for it somewhere.”
Wenham’s high school English teacher, showing great prescience, used to put aside one period a week for Wenham to perform in front of the class: “I’d often do impersonations; Gough Whitlam and Harry Butler were favourites.” He was in school plays, and “had fleeting thoughts of other careers, but they only lasted a day or so.”
The youngest of seven in a working-class family, Wenham was the first to show an interest in acting. There wasn’t much money to go to the theatre but his parents used to give him subscription tickets as presents; the Nimrod (now the Belvoir Street Theatre) was Wenham’s favourite. “It was vibrant – you could feel it in the foyer, and I remember lots of productions from then. There was an incredible life up there on stage and my dream was to perform on it. That was it, nothing beyond that.”
That happened in 1991, in a musical, Head Butt. “It was a baptism by fire - there was a shower on stage, and I’d walk out, strip off, have a shower and then break into song. I couldn’t sing and there I was, nude in a musical in the theatre I’d always dreamt of performing in.”
It was that same year, though, that Wenham, who trained as an actor at Nepean College in Sydney’s outer-western suburbs, first played the role of Brett Sprague in the play The Boys. “I’d done a lot of theatre before that, and this one affected a lot of people. Every night, we’d come down and there’d be people wanting to talk about the piece, which is unusual,” he says, but adds, “Not many people wanted to approach me.”
That’s one of the strengths of Wenham’s acting, says Andrew Knight: “Nothing he does is a caricature. You don’t feel ‘now he’s playing the tough guy’ - he is the tough guy. He’s mesmerisingiy clever because he’s unspectacularly so. He’s a perfectionist but you don’t feel the struggle; he makes sure that what goes out is absolutely plausible.” Playing such a vile character was, unsurprisingly, harrowing: “I had to be one step removed – if I thought about what I was doing too much, I would have pulled out.”
It was a story, though, he believed to be worth telling. That’s why he became involved in the film, on which he worked with a team of friends including Robert Connolly and Rowan Woods. The group’s next project, due to start shooting later this year, “will expose banks for what they are”.
Wenham loves performing for children - “They’re the most honest audiences; they’ll tell you if the show’s a crock of shit, but when they get drawn into it, it’s fantastic.” He was invited to tour Germany soon after the Berlin Wall came down with a one-man show, The Tale of the Tiger, which he also co-directed and produced. “The premise of it was to fight for what you believe in. After one performance, a girl in the audience took off the peace symbol she was wearing and put it around my neck.” Wenham goes quiet for a moment. “Those are the good things, those are the best things about performing.”
But now there are more pressing things on his mind. He sets off across the park, and no one turns to look at the wiry bloke in jeans and tie-dyed T-shirt. That’s just the way he’d like it, you think.
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