CHARLES WOOLEY: When it comes to romantic leading men on Australian television, it would be hard to beat Diver Dan, the laid back, charming fisherman on Seachange. David Wenham played the role so well that, like Diver Dan, he too became a national sex symbol. Not that that thrilled him. David would much prefer to be seen as an actor's actor. He is a master of his craft, someone who can seamlessly make any role his own. Indeed, it's only when you look behind the mask, that you discover the one character that David has greatest difficulty playing — himself.
DAVID WENHAM: Do you know where we are?
CHARLES WOOLEY: Absolutely no idea! Reporters often find themselves all at sea when it comes to interviewing David Wenham. You're going to hate this, aren't you?
DAVID WENHAM: Yes, I am. Okay, may the dentistry begin.
CHARLES WOOLEY: It's not quite like pulling teeth, but then again, it's not far off.
DAVID WENHAM: I'm winging it here because I have no words.
CHARLES WOOLEY: You're good; you're talking.
DAVID WENHAM: Only just, Charles, only just.
CHARLES WOOLEY: Wenham is an actor, famously reluctant to perform except when he's in character. Then the words flow and a kind of, well, a kind of "seachange" comes over David.
SIGRID THORNTON, (ON SEACHANGE): What about your mother?
DAVID WENHAM, (ON SEACHANGE): She's a concert violinist. Wonderful woman. She had no arms, so she used to put the bow between her toes and she'd just go like the clappers. Remarkable woman.
DAVID WENHAM: Acting is about assuming another character, which I feel far more comfortable doing than playing the role of myself in front of a television camera.
CHARLES WOOLEY: Aren't we talking about a self-esteem problem here, surely?
DAVID WENHAM: Sometimes, yeah, I do have a confidence problem.
CHARLES WOOLEY: Yeah?
DAVID WENHAM: Mmmm-hmm.
CHARLES WOOLEY: The world in which David Wenham grew up couldn't be less like Pearl Bay. Where are we?
DAVID WENHAM: This is the back lane, Marrickville.
CHARLES WOOLEY: It's the gritty urban landscape of Marrickville in Sydney's inner-west.
DAVID WENHAM: Hey, Christine, how are you? I'm very good. I'm very good. What, are you doing a bit of visiting?
CHRISTINE: Yes.
CHARLES WOOLEY: Hello, Christine, I'm Charles.
DAVID WENHAM: This is Charles.
CHARLES WOOLEY: I hear this bloke used to climb over...
CHRISTINE: I saw you on the TV! Yes!
DAVID WENHAM: Here comes the 1009, I think. It's on time. It's going to land in the backyard.
CHARLES WOOLEY: David was the youngest in a working-class, Catholic family of seven; a family as big as its backyard was small.
DAVID WENHAM: It seems kind of small now, but then it was massive. It was like the Tardis, in a way. And, during the summer months, we had a little swimming pool over here. We had a pool there. It wasn't an in-ground one. No, she's gone now. Dad's put a worm farm there in its place.
CHARLES WOOLEY: His mum and dad are Bill and Kath. In order, they had Peter, Helen, Anne, Carmel, Kathy, Maree, and, finally, David.
How many did you fit in here?
DAVID WENHAM: Well, at one stage we had three. Three in here...
CHARLES WOOLEY: God!
DAVID WENHAM: ...until, eventually, they all got married and moved out and it ended up being my room at last.
CHARLES WOOLEY: Little has changed since David left home. His room is a treasure trove of early Wenham.
DAVID WENHAM: Oh, God, don't go sharp on that.
CHARLES WOOLEY: As the youngest of seven, it's perhaps no surprise that this environment fostered a love of performance as a way of seeking attention.
DAVID WENHAM: …Bert, who's missing an ear now.
CHARLES WOOLEY: As the youngest of seven, it's perhaps no surprise that this environment fostered a love of performance as a way of seeking attention David's first big break is also his little secret. He got his start in puppets.
DAVID WENHAM: How embarrassing. You're not going to show this on national television, surely?
CHARLES WOOLEY: One of those slightly less guarded moments which reveal the fleeting image of the little red-headed kid who was just driven to perform.
DAVID WENHAM: I used to do puppet shows at this table, actually.
CHARLES WOOLEY: How did that start?
DAVID WENHAM: I used to operate the puppets from underneath the table here and one of my sisters used to sell the tickets to the rest of the family.
CHARLES WOOLEY: The thing is, of course, with a big family, you always have an audience.
DAVID WENHAM: A ready audience — I don't know how willing they were, but there was an audience. I love performing. Once I have a mask, I can hide behind the veneer of another character. From a very young age, I loved entertaining.
CHARLES WOOLEY: We know about the puppets.
DAVID WENHAM: Yes, we don't have to go on about that, Charles. It was slightly embarrassing yesterday getting out the old, sad puppets.
CHARLES WOOLEY: See, we thought that was lovely.
DAVID WENHAM: That's good.
CHARLES WOOLEY: You thought that was an unnecessary intrusion into your private life.
DAVID WENHAM: No, I just thought it may have looked potentially a little sad; David Wenham's sad puppet show.
CHARLES WOOLEY: The more we delve, the more we discover. How did this start? Why does a young bloke take this up? Another of David's secrets was that, back in the '80s, he was a member here at the Cook's River Bowling Club.
DAVID WENHAM: We saw it as a way to make money. It seems absolutely ludicrous, but we thought, "We're young guys, we can maybe get a hold of the sport pretty early and there's a few competitions around Australia." We thought, "We could travel the country and make dozens of dollars."
CHARLES WOOLEY: Dozens of dollars!
Wenham wanted to clean up in order to subsidise his studies at the Nepean Drama School in Western Sydney.
DAVID WENHAM: It's a very frustrating game.
CHARLES WOOLEY: I can't see it getting you on the front of Who magazine.
DAVID WENHAM: No, Bowler's Weekly.
CHARLES WOOLEY: It's not very glamorous.
DAVID WENHAM: Oh, come on, look around — it's just a different sort of glamour. It depends on your spin.
CHARLES WOOLEY: Typecasting came early to David. One of his first films, Greenkeeping was actually set in the exciting world of lawn bowls. His early acting career was marked by playing odd bods, like the pyromaniac who delighted in burning cats in the movie Cosi. But the most dysfunctional character of all was his chilling portrayal of the psychopathic Brett Sprague in The Boys.
DAVID WENHAM, (IN THE BOYS): You're such a shit-brain; you'd look a whole lot better with your head hanging out of your arse.
CHARLES WOOLEY: The Boys won him critical acclaim, but in the same year, it was a very different character that saw David win over the country with the wooing of Sigrid.
DAVID WENHAM, (ON SEACHANGE): Would it hurt if I told you you've got your skirt on inside out?
SIGRID THORNTON, (ON SEACHANGE): Oh, God!
CHARLES WOOLEY: Diver Dan transformed David Wenham from character actor into a national sex symbol.
DAVID WENHAM: I honestly don't see myself as a sex symbol at all. I see myself as an actor who's been extremely fortunate. I can see that the character of Diver Dan was a very attractive character, but God, no, I don't see myself as a sex symbol.
CHARLES WOOLEY: For such a reluctant sex symbol, we've seen a lot of David Wenham lately. Since Seachange, he's done no less than six films in a row, and in one of them, Better Than Sex, he certainly wasn't so shy anymore.
I watched Better Than Sex. I couldn't work out what the plot was, except, you and what was her name?
DAVID WENHAM: Here we go — bzzz — Susie Porter.
CHARLES WOOLEY: I was only testing you.
DAVID WENHAM: Twenty dollars, and I didn't even have to go for the lifeline there.
CHARLES WOOLEY: You and Susie Porter were nude for most of the film. I don't think the costumes even got a credit in that film, did they?
DAVID WENHAM: There was a costume designer, but they were only there briefly.
CHARLES WOOLEY: You didn't have a problem with nudity, though, did you?
DAVID WENHAM: Partial nudity. I have done the "Full Monty" on stage a few times. Not for a while, thank God!
CHARLES WOOLEY: In warm weather or cold?
DAVID WENHAM: In cold weather, actually.
CHARLES WOOLEY: What goes through an actor's mind when you're doing that?
DAVID WENHAM: Nothing, hopefully.
CHARLES WOOLEY: That's a very good answer.
DAVID WENHAM: God, every now and again, I've got to give one good answer.
DAVID WENHAM, (IN MOULIN ROUGE): Where in heaven's name are we going to find somebody to read the role of a young, sensitive Swiss poet goat-herder?
CHARLES WOOLEY: If you blinked and missed David Wenham in Moulin Rouge, you won't in his latest movie The Bank. This is a thriller set in the industry we all love to hate.
DAVID WENHAM: It's a clever movie, a timely movie. It's a film about something that a lot of people, particularly in Australia, I think, have a bit of a passion about and that's banks. It's unashamedly an anti-bank film.
ANTHONY LAPAGLIA, (IN THE BANK): We've now entered the age of corporate feudalism and we are the new princes.
WOMAN, (IN THE BANK): What do you call yourselves? Bastards without borders.
CHARLES WOOLEY: The bankers are such bastards in that and portrayed as such bastards that I …
DAVID WENHAM: It's a very honest film, Charles.
CHARLES WOOLEY: ... I left during the third closing titles, which I always do in movies. I shouldn't, because I suddenly wanted to see which bank had put up the money for the movie.
DAVID WENHAM: Oh, tricky that.
CHARLES WOOLEY: At the Melbourne premiere of The Bank, we find the other well-kept secret in David's life, his partner of seven years, Kate Agnew, an occasional actress and full-time yoga teacher.
You have a partner in life who has experience as an actress, so she must understand all this? That must help?
DAVID WENHAM: It does, she's very understanding, yeah.
CHARLES WOOLEY: But she's teaching yoga now, I believe?
DAVID WENHAM: She does.
CHARLES WOOLEY: Is that a sensible career option?
DAVID WENHAM: Absolutely, absolutely. It's constant.
CHARLES WOOLEY: Do you practice yoga?
DAVID WENHAM: Sometimes.
CHARLES WOOLEY: Which postures do you use?
DAVID WENHAM: Oh, look, I salute the sun, I do the old downward facing dog and all of that.
CHARLES WOOLEY: All the euphemisms...
DAVID WENHAM: I know. We're working blue again now.
CHARLES WOOLEY: Let's not salute the sun, this is a family program.
This television profile has been a somewhat uneasy voyage for David Wenham; a creative and talented actor, an award-winner known for his ability to play a wide range of characters. But a man strangely tortured by an endearing shyness that seems to make it so hard to play the most elusive role of all — himself.
DAVID WENHAM: I subscribe to the Alec Guinness school of acting there. He was a man who could easily walk down the street without being recognised and who took great delight in appearing on the stage each evening and then slipping out the stage door and nobody knowing who he was. And I used to love that. I used to love doing plays for various theatre companies around the place and, after the play, just having a little bit of a drink at the bar and slipping off and nobody knowing.
CHARLES WOOLEY: This would be a good time to just slip off now, I think?
DAVID WENHAM: Hooroo.
