David Wenham knows the value of anonymity and he’s keen to hang onto it. In Los Angeles to finish his latest film, the actor once known as a Diver Dan tries not to talk to Gerard Wright about religion, maintaining privacy and conquering performance anxiety.
The Invisible Man
The make-up artist is fussing and fiddling and David Wenham’s thick blond hair follows obediently, in waves, Lip gloss is applied and what seems to be several layers of make-up. He sits still in the chair, a paper towel covering the collar of his shirt, his eyes, that topaz blue, flicking between the mirror, the make-up artist and my notebook.
He is thinking, but not really talking, about religion His latest work, the ABC miniseries
Answered By Fire, recalls the violence that attended the 1999 referendum on East Timor's independence from Indonesia. Religion is one of the miniseries’ many subtexts: the Catholic East Timorese, with framed pictures of Jesus on their walls, and their conflict with Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim nation,
Wenham thinks about this, looks in the mirror, looks away. “I could see their faith gave them incredible inner strength and courage,” he says, finally.
The youngest of seven children - and one of only two boys - he was brought up in Marrickvilie in Sydney’s inner west, where, he slept on the dining room floor until he was 12. He got his Catholic education at a Christian Brothers secondary school.
The make-up artist, having wiped, waved and dabbed, steps back to appraise her work. There is much silence. Mention half-jokingly the legacy of Wenham’s Catholic upbringing and the 40-year-old actor replies, “It’s certainly there. I can only hope I that it’s given me a solid foundation. I can only hope.” He says very little but every story written about David Wenham refers both to his capacity to transform himself and become Anyman - be it Faramir in two installments of
The Lord Of The Rings trilogy or the psychopathic Brett Sprague in
The Boys, the reissued snag Diver Dan in SeaChange or the whining, hilarious junkie Johnny Spitieri in
Gettin’s Square – and the crisis of self-belief that accompanies every new role.
“Each time, it becomes more daunting,” Wenham said in a 1999 interview, as he prepared for his role as the submissive Yvan in the play
Art. “I go through stuff that makes me feel like a nervous wreck every time I approach another job.” And then, a year later: “I walk and think. I imagine the character. I see him, hear him and look for where he might be.”
In Los Angeles now, on an afternoon off from doing his final voice-over work for sword-and-sandal epic 300, due for release next year, he talks about calming that anguish: “I don’t meditate but I used to take a tennis ball and bounce it. Maybe that’s a form of meditation, whereby I get to a state where I can just focus and think about what I can possibly do.” He’s not keen to discuss his work, not really. “It’s something I’m very reticent to talk about.” He rolls his eyes and continues, "As I am about a lot of things.”
There are plenty of actors who don’t like talking about their personal lives. What’s intriguing about Wenham’s insistence on privacy is that it’s motivated by professional reasons. “A whole part of my creative life has been ruined by becoming famous,” is how Russell Crowe once put it. “I was the person who could just slip into any situation, see what I needed to see and take the information away.”
The ability to watch unobserved is not something Wenham will give away easily. Jessica Hobbs, the director of
Answered By Fire, is struck by his capacity for camouflage. “He has a great physical ability to not be seen,” she says. “I’ve been out with him in public, where there’s sudden recognition, after an hour. He makes a great quiet entrance - if he wants to.”
Hobbs is sure, too, that Wenham would keenly feel any loss of anonymity. “He would be devastated if he didn’t have that,” she says. “He loves those little details in life, those quiet, private moments in people’s lives. He’s a great observer.”
Wenham confirms this the next time we speak by phone. “I’m sitting on the foreshore at Santa Monica,” he says happily, “and very few people recognise me. I love that. If you want to represent the community on the screen, you want to see what they’re like.”
In the face of fame, Wenham has maintained at least some of his private rituals. One is walking to whichever theatre he’s performing in. Another is watching the Sydney Swans, with whom he has been smitten since the Aussie rules team were South Melbourne and he learn the rules from his local butcher n Marricville. Sunday games at the Sydney Cricket Ground are best, a downhill walk from his home in Potts Point.
But there is a door into the life of David Wenham that remains firmly shut. It is the door that hides home and family and personal history. Occasionally, Wenham will nudge it ajar. We know that as a child he was noted for his impressions – he did a memorable Gough Whitlam - and his parents, Bill and Kath, ware not only relaxed about the stray theatrical gene that had appeared in the family, they actively nurtured it, with his father buying him theatre subscriptions for his birthdays. He didn’t make it through the auditions at the National Institute of Dramatic Art but was accepted at Nepean College in Western Sydney. His partner of 12 years, Kate Agnew, is a yoga teacher and actor; their daughter, Eliza, was born in 2003. He’s quiet but assertive, and he’d rather not talk about all that.
“We’re all ordinary people in the end hut there’s something extra about him. He’s observing; he's working on something,” says Paul Cox, who eight years ago directed Wenham’s lead performance in the troubled biopic
Molokai: The Story Of Father Damien. “You know that there’s something burning him that needs to come out”.
“I wonder whether we’ve seen everything he can do,” says Hobbs. “He can just disappear into a role,”
Trainer Mark Twight, who oversaw the grueling physical transformation of five actors and 50 stuntmen into Spartan warriors for 300, describes Wenham as “self-effacing... his attitude in the gym got better and better as the project wore on.” Others began coasting once they thought they looked good enough but David stayed on.”
Wenham “stayed on”, too, during the filming of
Molokai, which was set and filmed in a remote Hawaiian leper colony. While most of the cast and crew flew in each day, director Cox and Wenham lived on the island among the lepers for four months, befriending them. “It seemed strange to remove ourselves from the community when we had the opportunity to live and breathe it,” says Wenham.
On his upper right arm is a souvenir from
Molokai, which was plain blue tattoo of a turtle. On the way back to Honolulu, he and Cox stopped by a tattoo parlour where trey both had images inscribed of the turtle. Cox describes the image as “the Hawaiian symbol of peace and earth and all that to remind us of very tricky days.” It has , he adds “become a companion for life. I would be the last person to get a tattoo. So is David. But when we meet, we always bring the tattoos together, let them greet one another.”
The turtle makes a brief appearance between costume changes in the photographic studio in Los Angeles where Wenham is trying on clothes. At one point, he stands alone by a window, wearing a brown leather jacket while trying on expressions to match There is an instant when he glances back from the window, giving a look of pure malevolence; it’s like a diamond reflecting darkness,
That is what Wenham’s reputation rests upon: it capacity to absorb and then remake a character, as happens in
Answered by Fire, filmed on the Gold Coast hinterland last winter. Wenham stars as Mark Waldman, an idealistic and restless policeman whose character, circumstances and actions are loosely based on the accounts of David Savage, an Australian Federal Police officer who served in East Timor as a UN volunteer during the 1999 referendum and later returned as a member of its Serious Crimes Unit.
The miniseries, to be shown on the ABC on May 21 and 28, has a unique take in a troubling episode of Australia’s regional history; the majority of its cast are East Timorese, not just untried as actors but real victims of the violence that had been part of fledging country’s existence since Portugal renounced sovereignty over it in 1975.
“I’m aware that people are re-enacting some of these events that are exactly like that, that they have seen their families encounter,” says Wenham. “Just negotiating emotions; that was the trickiest thing.”
In addition to his final narration duties on 300, he’s also in Los Angeles to discuss future projects. “I’ve never come across so many Australians in my life,” he says from Santa Monica. “Everybody is over here because there’s such a lack of work in Australia. Obviously, some are here for fame and fortune but most are just here for bread and butter.”
This, Wenham believes, points to an impending loss of cultural identity. “I fear a more homogenised society in Australia,” he says. “And that’s through the impact of what we see on our small and large screens.” For once, Wenham is in full flight and only slightly self-conscious about expressing a deeply held belief. “Historically, it’s how we’ve learned about who we were and who we are,” he says of the Australian film and entertainment industry.
“It’s all we have – another sweeping statement,” he says, in a self-mocking aside, but continues: “The big influences in my career were people like John Meillon, John Hargreaves and Reg Livermore. I can look back on their work and understand what was happening in Australia at that time and who we were.”
He pauses to exclaim at a pair of teenage boys in T-shirts and board shorts, who he says have just passed by him, fighting enormous cigars. “God,” he remarks, “this is a strange place.” It is an LA moment to be remembered and perhaps replayed on a stage or a screen near you, sometime when: everyone else has forgotten and David Wenham remembers.
From here.
