David Wenham will always stay in our minds as Diver Dan. But, as Peter Wilmoth has found, he is so much more
David Wenham wanted to be an actor since he was a young boy but, in his working-class Sydney suburb, it didn’t seem to be a dream that was going to come true.
“I knew what I would have liked to have done but I didn’t actually believe it was possible,” he says. “The generation now is infused with that sense of self-belief and confidence. I was probably at the end of that era where people had to know their place and you don’t actually move out of where you belong.”
It’s fortunate for film and theatre-goers that Wenham was able to transcend this mindset and become one of the country’s great actors, appearing in lavishly funded productions such as The Lord of the Rings and 300 and smaller works including The Bank and even The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course, made with his late friend Steve Irwin.
We are talking at the Melbourne Theatre Company’s South Melbourne headquarters where Wenham is in rehearsal for a production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, and he’s not going to let a head cold get in the way of telling his story.
The famous Robert Redford-like locks are charmingly scruffy today – Diver Dan in SeaChange did for strawberry blondes what Johnny Depp did for moustaches – and in his conversation there are echoes of that insouciant, shoulder-shrugging charm that set many an ABC viewer’s heart beating.
With his wry sense of humour and utter lack of pretension, Wenham is a natural storyteller with a moving story to tell.
He takes me back to a Sydney suburb called Marrickville in the 1970s, in a household where he was the last child of seven. “There was a boy at the top and then there were five girls in the middle,” he says of his siblings.
“It was a very working-class suburb. It was – and quite possibly could still be – the most multicultural suburb in Australia. Back then it contained something like 87 different nationalities. Anglo-Saxons were in a minority. Predominant ethnicities back then were European: Greeks and Italians, a lot of Lebanese.
“I loved it. My next-door neighbours were Greek. In our house I’d have dinner at 5pm and then I’d jump the fence into (their) house and I’d have a Greek meal with them.’’
I ask if, as the baby, a lot of parental attention flowed his way. “If you ask my siblings they’d say definitely. They’d say that I was spoiled because of it, and that’s probably fair to say, I suppose. It was a very loud, animated dinner table.
"When the girls in the family started getting boyfriends and fiances and they’d come round for dinner, I can still remember the look on their faces, not quite believing the raucous level of noise that was surrounding them.
“There were quite a few years where most of us were in the house, a relatively small house, although when I was a kid I used to think it was enormous. For a while my bed was situated at the bottom of the dining room table. I didn’t actually have a bedroom myself and I didn’t actually think that was unusual. It was just what I knew. So I’d wake up in the morning and go and get the tablecloth and set the table. That was one of my jobs.”
Wenham’s father worked in the same job for 49 years as a clerk for a company, and when young Wenham was old enough for school his mother took a position as a secretary at Newtown Boys High School.
The area in which he grew up turned out to be useful for an aspiring actor. “I was certainly one-out (wanting to be an actor) but it didn’t work against me. In fact it probably worked in my favour. Although I was quite sporty, I was also very good with my mouth. I could impersonate people, I could entertain people. That was something that people appreciated.
“In all honesty I was a bit of a smartie back then. And I probably incited some violence in some particular instances because of my mouth. I could stir the pot, certainly. I didn’t mature until quite late so I did a lot of things back then that I look back on and think, how on earth did I get to that place?”
In his 20s he worked as a bingo caller to help fund his acting studies. “Initially the numbers came out of a biscuit tin and I had to put them on a piece of cardboard in front of me and then we graduated to using an electronic system so there was a little machine in front of me that was finger-touch. But if you left it on the touch button for more than a fraction of a second, about six numbers would go by. So I’d have to turn around to the board behind and work out which number had flashed by, otherwise the wrath of 800 people would be directed towards me.”
Wenham became a nationally recognised figure in 1998 when he appeared as the nonchalant Diver Dan in the ABC series SeaChange. “When it screened here I was in Hawaii filming a movie,” he says. “SeaChange aired the same time as the film The Boys, which got some really fantastic critical reception overseas. That helped open up an international career for me.”
When he returned home he had a taste of real fame. “I became instantly aware that there was a recognition factor in the country that I had never encountered before,” he says. “That was a little bit weird but it was nothing that was unsettling.”
And he didn’t find it unsettling to be voted “Australia’s sexiest man alive”? “Yes,” he says. “But by God knows who. People like to write these things to sell magazines, I think.” He remembers an amusing story about the moniker. “I went with (The Bank film producer) Robert Connolly to New Zealand not long after that. Robert and I were on morning television and this rather strange character talked about the fact that, ‘You are the sexiest man in Australia, but I can’t see it’,” Wenham laughs.
Wenham had a remarkable taste of being in big-budget films when he was in New Zealand shooting Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings. “There was one moment on set that I thought, ‘I will pinch myself at this moment’ because I realised I was in something that would probably never be repeated on this scale.
“On a field, they had built a two-mile (3.2 kilometre) road for a tracking vehicle that was going to hold cameras to drive along as all these guys on horses ride along this field while they shot them. When the horses arrived on the day and everyone was fully armoured, and then they rode, I thought, ‘This is pretty big’. I’ve been in some other relatively big films and you never cease to be amazed at the amount of money spent.”
But he’s done small films, too. With Magda Szubanski he made a film with the late Steve Irwin. “He was an amazing man. What you saw was what you got. There was no act there. I saw him with animals. He was a man with a pretty amazing gift.” Wenham read a poem at Irwin’s funeral in 2006.
Wenham comes from a strong Labor family. His father was a close friend of Whitlam government minister Fred Daly. Wenham handed out literature on behalf of Maxine McKew in her successful attempt to dislodge John Howard from the once-safe Liberal seat of Bennelong. “What drove me to do it? I suppose frustration with what was happening in the country at the time.”
When he was young he considered a political career “but the politics of politics is the thing that frustrates … Am I a Labor man now? Not necessarily. My politics have changed, I think. I don’t affiliate with any particular party.”
Wenham’s passions outside work are eating great food, dance and contemporary art. He would have loved to have pursued a career in dance. “In an alternative universe – I don’t have the body for it and I’m not right for it – to be a dancer would have been amazing.”
And he loves AFL, specifically the Sydney Swans. His passion for Australian football is interesting considering he grew up in rugby league heartland, and he tells a moving story about why.
“When I was quite young my father introduced me to a friend of his, Les Barfoot, who lived not far from us. He was a butcher from South Melbourne. On Saturdays I used to walk past the Town Hall milk bar on Marrickville Road. My parents used to give me money and I’d buy a packet of jubes for his wife Doreen who was confined to a wheelchair. I’d give the jubes to Doreen and I’d watch on a black and white TV what was then the VFL (Victorian Football League) and he taught me about football.
“Les has passed away and South moved to Sydney, and it seemed like the right thing to do to pick up that team as my own.”
Wenham is swathed in a winter jacket today, so it’s difficult to get a handle on how the one-time “sexiest man alive” is going physically. He tells a story about his rigorous training schedule to get in shape for 300, the epic retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae.
The need for buffness meant five months of “ridiculous training”. Along with the cast and stunt crew, Wenham trained with a strength and conditioning expert, Mark Twight, who helped give him and the others the appearance of Spartan warriors.
“I found myself in a peak of physical fitness that I wasn’t in in my 20s and 30s. I had to get very fit.”
Wenham and his partner of 20 years, Kate Agnew, have two daughters – Eliza Jane, nine, and Millie, four.
His thoughts on fatherhood? “It’s the best thing,” he says. “It’s the No. 1 thing in my life. It’s the thing that gives me the most joy, being with the kids, seeing them grow and change.”
At 47 he’s an older dad. “I think we’ll be fine with these two kids. Would I go again? No.”
He may be widely recognised as one of the country’s strongest talents, but reputation counts for nothing in the Wenham household. What do the kids think of their dad’s acting?
“Sometimes at home they think my acting stinks,” he smiles. “I think I’m rather funny sometimes but they just roll their eyes at me.”
The Crucible by Arthur Miller opens on June 27 at 8pm, at The Sumner, Southbank Theatre.
From here.
