With five new film rolls in the can and this week's announcement of an AFI best actor nomination, David Wenham is star material.
David Wenham leans back on a couch in Melbourne's Rockman's Regency Hotel, flashes a smile that promises mischief and announces: "I love playing thugs. I love getting permission to let loose. It's their ready-to-rumble energy that attracts me; their half-suppressed, half-expressed frustrations."
But there was nothing lovable about the hardness in Wenham's memorable turn as a psychopath in
The Boys. His co-star in the film, Toni Collette, recalls looking into Wenham's pale blue eyes on the set and seeing nothing: he was that chilling as Brett Sprague. Nor for that matter was there any tough tenderness in Wenham's portrayal of Doug, the wacko pyromaniac in
Cosi, despite the character's comic moments. Both of these read-my-knuckles roles were light years away from Wenham's later incarnation as Diver Dan, the ladies' man in the first series of
SeaChange.
Sipping from a glass of iced water on a drizzly Melbourne morning, Wenham is in fine fettle. "Years ago, when I was in drama college, I had my head shaved and ear pierced for a role in a Berkoff play. Feeling pretty tough, I swaggered on to the 426 bus back to Marrickville [his parents' home in Sydney]. My mum and dad got on - they'd been to the theatre - and walked straight past me. When I yelled out, `Hey, Mum, it's me', the blood drained from her face. She called me a bloody idiot."
Some actors have it, others don't. Judging from some recent notices, Wenham has it in spades. He pours himself into a character, like jelly into a mould, whether it's a brute or a wimp, a nerd or a ladykiller, a rake or a cuckold. "I know a great part when I see one; it's a role you can immerse yourself in."
Wenham, 35, may soon have to adjust to a new role: major star. Between now and next Easter he appears in no fewer than five films hitting multiplexes across Australia. The romantic comedy
Russian Doll, in which he stars with Hugo Weaving, opens this week; from November 9 he plays bedroom mazurka with Susie Porter in
Better than Sex; on December 21 he opens with Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman in Baz Luhrmann's musical
Moulin Rouge; and next January he plays an Oklahoma cowboy beside Joseph Fiennes in the western drama
Dust. Sometime over the next few months, Wenham will also morph into a 19th century Belgian priest in
Molokai: The Story of Father Damien, now the subject of fierce bidding between two Australian distributors.
These days, Wenham is so hot he's getting calls from Los Angeles casting agents, he has 60 Minutes chasing him for an interview (he turns them down) and says no to an Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle ("I'm picky about what I do"). Our one-day interview is wedged between the final shooting days of the anti-bank thriller
The Bank - in which Wenham co-stars with Anthony LaPaglia - and a three-month shoot in New Zealand on Peter Jackson's epic adaptation of
Lord of the Rings, in which Wenham plays the nobleman Faramir.
Not bad for a movie-mad kid who was knocked back by NIDA when he was 18 and who started with walk-on roles in
Sons and Daughters, A Country Practice and
Rafferty's Rules. Wenham, who has spent the past decade quietly chalking up awards for his stage and movie performances, has been crowned a sex symbol by a small army of women journalists. "It's so bizarre; the skinny kid from Marrickville being described in newspaper and magazine stories as a sex symbol," marvels Wenham. "I just don't get it."
Nor do I. In the flesh he's shortish and skinny, with an agreeable enough face that is slightly pockmarked from adolescent acne. Wenham doesn't come across as your standard smouldering hunk: for our photo shoot in a pool later in the day, he obligingly strips down to his boardies but sensibly demands that only his head and shoulders be photographed. After an advance screening of
Better than Sex - which tracks a three-day affair from lust to love - a male reviewer warmly praised Wenham's performance, but quipped that he shouldn't have taken his clothes off. No problems, Wenham cheerfully rejoins: he was never comfortable with the tag of babe magnet anyway ("I've had a steady girlfriend for seven years, thank you very much").
But ask the actor's peers about his talents and the responses verge on the rapturous. Hugo Weaving: "His range is extraordinary; he can play a psychopath or a romantic lead." Jonathan Teplitzky, director of
Better than Sex: "He digs and digs until he reaches the emotional core of a character, and he does it with consummate ease." Adam Cullen, whose portrait of Wenham snared this year's $35,000 Archibald Prize: "There's an Australian-ness about him I really like . a tension between his straightforwardness and something more complex." Margaret Pomeranz, of SBS's The Movie Show, coos: "He's sooo cute and masculine. And he doesn't seem to alienate the blokes: he has this laconic, slightly weatherbeaten style they can relate to." Even director Stavros Kazantzidis, with whom Wenham is rumoured to have squabbled on the set of
Russian Doll, describes him as "professional and businesslike. He walks away, works out the character and brings it back to you all fleshed out."
Such glowing testimonials would normally drive a jaded journalist to hunt down naysayers and critics, but apart from some unverifiable backstage gossip, Wenham does not seem to have earned himself any real enemies. But maybe he's not yet a tall enough poppy. "If it makes you happy, a theatre reviewer for a major paper once called me `moronic'," says the actor dryly. "It was his first review and he went on to become a leading newspaper reviewer." A blistering headline attached to a review of his role as a nerdy scientist in
A Little Bit of Soul - "This is Pure Hell: Burn Baby, Burn" - only made Wenham laugh ("but the film's director wasn't so amused"). Wenham says he does pay attention to reviews, but insists he's not easily bruised by criticism.
Wenham's toughest critic, however, may be himself. Off-limits for today's interview is any discussion of
Russian Doll: continuing script changes during its production meant that Wenham's role was reduced and re-framed; according to a colleague, he was less than thrilled both with his performance and the final product. A shame, really, because
Russian Doll is an amusing, wry and warm entertainment. "An actor can be proud of his work in a dud film," says Wenham, speaking in general terms about the industry, "but first and foremost I want to be in a good production. Some producers and directors are very good talkers, but the results don't live up to their promises."
Russian Doll off the agenda, Wenham wants to talk about Better than Sex, which he believes more than lives up to its marketable title. "I'm no Brad Pitt and Susie is no Julia Roberts," he says. "The movie doesn't deal in glamorised Hollywood sex: it's about the Everyman and Everywoman. It's something audiences can relate to."
There's a cool air about Wenham, as if he has just breezed in from a swish cocktail party. "There must be something about me that says: `Don't come near me, don't talk to me and don't write to me,'" he muses. "People recognise me but very rarely approach me. Even at the height of
SeaChange, the fan mail I got tended to come from young kids and old ladies. Because I'm not dying for publicity or desperate to be a `star', maybe I hold back something."
Reticent or not, on the likeability scale, Wenham rates highly. After sharing a few memories of his working-class upbringing in Marrickville, where he says he learnt his "street smarts", we discover to our mutual surprise that we once lived opposite one another and shared a one-eyed support for the long-defunct Newtown "Blue Bags" rugby league team. "I'd go to Henson Park to barrack for my loser football team, but I loved just sitting there and watching all these quintessentially Australian characters," he recalls. He has fond memories of growing up with five elder sisters and one elder brother, even though it meant not having his own bedroom until the age of 12. "I used to sleep on a mattress in the dining room, which was okay because I was always the first for breakfast."
Wenham sees his upbringing as a blessing. "I'm so glad I'm not Val Kilmer. I'm so glad I didn't have his ridiculously privileged upbringing and grow up with his sense of entitlement in life.
I have never met him or worked with him, but from what I hear he is less in touch with reality than ever before." Wenham's hero is the late John Hargreaves, who once declared: "Listen real, think real and don't do anything else." Very few actors, says Wenham, actually listen to other actors while performing: "Most are totally preoccupied with their own performance." Toni Collette and Hugo Weaving are exceptions, he says - both are good "listeners" and generous performers.
Acting turned out to be Wenham's salvation from a career as a clerk with the NRMA. "I only lasted six weeks - which was when I got a spot in Theatre Nepean's drama course - but it wasn't until
SeaChange that my mum finally stopped reminding me I should never have left the NRMA." As a struggling actor, Wenham supported himself as a bingo caller at Marrickville Town Hall and valiantly tried to earn extra pocket money as a lawn bowler at the local bowling club. "A mate of mine was convinced we could beat the old codgers and make a killing. We dreamed of going to competitions on the Gold Coast and grabbing the $200 prizemoney. The bowling club must have felt sorry for us because they kept rigging the meat tray so we would win. The next youngest player was about 75."
Wenham's larrikin spirit emerged early, recalls his sister Maree, a nurse in Melbourne. "He was no mummy's boy, he was always tormenting his sisters with practical jokes and trying to be the performer." But he later had to deal with some trials himself: the terror of auditions and the pain of rejection. "The first year after graduating from Nepean was pretty hard for David," she says. "He kept his feelings to himself but you could tell he was pretty sad and disappointed." And then his luck turned. "I don't think he has ever been as excited as when he got the lead role in The Boys."
I first saw Wenham perform in 1991 in a production of
The Boys at the tiny Stables theatre in Sydney's Kings Cross. In the confined space of the venue, his performance was electrifying. "I've met guys like Brett," he says. "Damaged guys who are so full of anger they are about to burst, ready to take it out on the world."
If
The Boys established Wenham as a serious actor, SeaChange set him up as a leading man. While the salty charms of Diver Dan were winning female hearts across Australia, Wenham was on a small island in Hawaii, filming
Molokai: The Story of Father Damien. "When I returned to Australia my friends told me they were sick of reading about me, but I had given only one interview - and that was by phone from a lighthouse - the whole time I'd been away. I don't know where the journalists got all their material from."
Despite what Jonathan Teplitzky describes as Wenham's "laser-like focus", he doesn't seem a 24-hours-a-day actor. Over a lunch of shepherd's pie, Wenham's conversation spans topics ranging from the Pope to John Howard to the giant image of Pamela Anderson on Sam Newman's house in St Kilda. He has no desire to spend his downtime revisiting his work, he admits. "I wouldn't hire out
The Boys or
Cosi; I don't see the point." Had he not been an actor, he would have opted for football or, more realistically, dancing. "I would love to have been an elite footballer but at school most of my footy mates were twice my size." Dance can hit an emotional core rarely matched in theatre, he adds.
"I have stood up for a play only once or twice in my life, but for a dance production, at least four or five times. I'd love to harness that kind of energy in a play."
Strolling the back lanes of Melbourne's Chinatown after lunch, Wenham describes acting as a lonely tunnel of concentration. "I walk and think. I imagine the character: I see him, hear him and look for where he might be. I investigate him: through books or whatever is appropriate." Good actors, adds Wenham, have a passion for observing the everyday world and are driven to become what they see in the most authentic way possible. "I'm not interested in doing an empty special effects vehicle like Twister. People don't watch a movie like this for the story, and in this respect it's no better than porn. I tried to sit through The Perfect Storm, but like the fishermen on the boat, I didn't survive," he quips.
Now that Wenham is on the fast track to stardom, why continue to bother with small-budget movies? Would it not be logical to move into the megabucks film category? "People say you have to be in a big movie - preferably one that turns into a hit - to keep the momentum of your career going. But Australian movies like
Muriel's Wedding and
Strictly Ballroom proved you don't need a huge budget to have an internationally successful film. Maybe that mentality exists in America, but not here."
As Wenham is not the type of actor who fits into a tidy pigeonhole, audiences could be in for further surprises, says Robert Connolly, who directed the actor in
The Bank. "There's a fearless quality about David, matched by tremendous potential. He has great comic skills that he hasn't fully explored yet: I can easily picture him taking on Jim Carrey-type roles, for example. The sky is the limit."
But Wenham, who has been working his tail off for more than two years, insists he is no workaholic and is keen to start a family over the next couple of years. After his role in
Lord of the Rings wraps in January, he plans to take a six-week break with girlfriend Kate, a Sydney yoga instructor. "I'm sick of running up huge phone bills and the loneliness of hotel rooms." Wenham pauses before adding, "But then, in this business, if a great role comes along, you have to grab it while you can."
In bed with David Wenham
You're an average guy - perhaps not the best-looking or most popular person around, but smart and honest. You're at a party, you're about to return to London in three days' time and you meet an attractive woman. You share a taxi, but you're not sure whether to ask her up for coffee. You decide to throw caution to the wind - after all, you're never going to see each other again - but before you summon up the courage, she asks you up first . This pretty much describes Wenham's role in
Better than Sex. You'll see some prime acting by Wenham and Susie Porter, both of whom have expressive, if not exactly A-list bodies. Is it love or is it just a one-night stand? It takes the couple three days of bedroom gymnastics to decide.
Better than Sex earned nifty notices when it opened the Sydney Film Festival earlier in the year and has been sold to 11 countries, including North America. It also earned Wenham an AFI best actor nomination, announced this week. But the film occasionally dips into cornography and stale dialogue; there's a hackneyed scene with Wenham in a wedding dress and an impossible-to-believe taxi driver who keeps appearing at the couple's doorstep.
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From here.
