To Marrickville, Middle Earth and beyond! David Wenham makes it look easy. Catherine Keenan meets the new guy in The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
'Nice, huh?" says David Wenham, as he glides into the foyer of Palazzo Versace, on the Gold Coast. He casts a cool, ironic eye over the enormous pool, the car-sized chandelier, the gold-trim sofas and the acres of marble that melt into the gilded distance. It is the last word in vulgar opulence and he clearly delights in it. "Welcome to Queensland!"
We take a seat by the pool, where the wind is gale force and the waiters are many and confused (trade is less than brisk - perhaps the very rich don't eat). The boy from Sydney's inner west finds it highly amusing when our Versace napkins and Versace placemats are weighted down with gilt-edged Versace crockery. Even the water glasses have the Versace logo frosted into them. We're not in Marrickville anymore.
Wenham had his tongue firmly in cheek when he suggested this location for the interview, yet the surreal surrounds are oddly appropriate to this phase in his eclectic career. He is on the Gold Coast shooting the low-budget film,
Gettin' Square, a comedy about small-time criminals, that reunites him with Better Than Sex director Jonathan Teplitzky.
In contrast, on Boxing Day the mega-budget
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is released, in which Wenham plays Faramir, brother of Boromir (Sean Bean). With long hair, ginger stubble and a very big sword, Faramir has spent his years defending the borderlands of Gondor in an effort to win his father's affection. Last weekend, Wenham became one of the few people who have seen the finished film.
"It's pretty amazing," he says. "It was exactly what Pete [Jackson] wanted from the second film. It's very dark, which is what the second book is. There are light moments throughout it, but it is a very dark, violent, bloody film."
Will fans of the book approve? "Yes, I'm rather nervous about them. For the second film, there was a conscious effort really to make Faramir a little bit darker than he is in the book."
We already know Wenham can do dark. His role on stage and then on screen as the merciless, murderous Brett Sprague, in Gordon Graham's
The Boys, launched his career. Robert Connolly, who produced the play, says Wenham was so menacing, he was reluctant to enter his dressing room. "It was a very dark time," he remembers. "But it was mesmerising."
At the other end of the spectrum, Wenham was equally at home when he cropped up next as Diver Dan on
SeaChange. Here was a man who could cook, charm, speak a few languages and whose wife had left him for a woman, just to make him a bit more sympathetic. The show was phenomenally successful and Wenham went from psychopath to sex symbol overnight, a transformation that always seemed to bemuse him. (As well it might. How many other ginger-bearded men have become heart throbs?)
Faramir could be the role that rockets Wenham into the big league, though he won't discuss such a thing. When the tape recorder is off, he's a wry, entertaining lunch companion, but when it's on, he's much less loquacious. "I don't offer very much, I know that. It's dreadful."
On the subject of fame, he becomes positively tongue-tied. He already has a modicum of it, but leads a resolutely normal, A-list-shunning lifestyle, with long-term partner Kate Agnew who is an actor and yoga teacher. He doesn't even want to consider how that might change when millions of Tolkien geeks see him on the big screen. "I have no idea. I have no idea. And don't spend any time thinking about it. I have no idea. I don't know." The arrival of our focaccias puts him out of his misery.
The wind blows our salad leaves around and one of my potato chips hits Wenham in the arm. He laughs, lazily throwing one of his own in the air to make me feel better. I am reminded of director David Caesar's description of Wenham: "I imagine him leaning on a door with his arms folded and an eyebrow arched, listening." Insouciant is the word, Caesar says. It seems to sum Wenham up.
Focaccias eaten, Wenham has another go at explaining how
The Lord of the Rings might affect him. "In all honesty, it is very difficult to hypothesise about those things," he says. "Because, you really don't know. There's no sure thing in films."
We are interrupted by our third different waiter - it's as if they can't quite believe anyone is eating here and keep coming out to check that we're real (or to make sure the slightly scruffy guy isn't about to make off with the crockery). When we've waved them off again, I ask Wenham what he likes about acting.
"Quite simply, I think, the opportunity to play. That's it. It might seem extremely simple, but that's all it is. That's where I consider myself to be very lucky. Not all the froufrou that comes with it, although I love the travel and whatever."
He got into acting by chance, he says. He is the youngest of seven children in a family that is not theatrical. He was very disruptive at school and, he says, drove at least one teacher round the bend at Christian Brothers' High, Lewisham. "My parents think that I contributed greatly to him having a nervous breakdown and leaving the brotherhood."
It was the same teacher who suggested - one imagines through clenched teeth - that young David might benefit from Saturday morning drama classes.
Wenham immediately loved them and soon another teacher twigged that acting might be the making of him. Once a week, he allowed Wenham to put on a skit for the class. "I used to do impersonations: Harry Butler in the wild, or I'd do Gough Whitlam. So I suppose I channelled those energies in a much more cre-a-tive way," he says, unable to take his words seriously.
When Wenham left school, he was knocked back by NIDA and went into the first theatre intake at the University of Western Sydney's Nepean campus. His mother wanted him to go into a more stable career and she must have despaired when he was taking bit parts in Sons and Daughtersand A Country Practice.
But things improved. For many actors, television success doesn't translate onto the big screen, but SeaChange, coupled with The Boys, has led to a steady stream of good, diverse roles for Wenham. For all his diffidence, as Robert Connolly points out, the accidental actor has had a very judicious, measured career.
"It took six years to turn
The Boys from a play into a film and in that time Wenham was offered a number of Brett Sprague-style roles, all of which he turned down. He knew that that role in
The Boys, if and when it got made into a film, would be important for him and he didn't want to dilute it," Connolly says. "Which showed a kind of strategic long-term view of his career."
He has rarely reprised a role, following up
SeaChange with a turn as a Belgian priest in Paul Cox's
Molokai: The Story of Father Damien, then Josh in
Better than Sex, Jim Doyle in
The Bank, and Luke in
Dust, opposite Joseph Fiennes.
There were also small roles as Audrey, the camp writer in
Moulin Rouge and - more bizarrely - as Sam Flynn in
The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course. Wasn't that a bit left field for him? "It was totally left field!" he agrees. "I haven't seen the film, but I've become hugely addicted to the Crocodile Hunter. I saw his show on spitting snakes the other night. I was just about to go out and I was late because I kept saying to myself, 'one more ad break, one more ad break'. Sad but true."
There are plenty of other Australians Wenham, 37, would like to work with. He hopes to start a family soon and would like to spend more time at home. One plan is
to have a shot at directing, part of a pact he made with Connolly and director Rowan Woods. They all said they'd help each other to direct a movie. Woods did
The Boys, then Connolly did
The Bank. Soon it will be Wenham's turn to do The-Something-Else-Beginning-With-B.
"I'm pragmatic about it," he says. "I realise I don't need to rush it or force it. I'm becoming a frustrated director, I think, in an actor's body."
These plans will, of course, get impetus from his post-Lord of the Rings profile, but he'd like to keep acting, especially under the great Australian directors. "I'd love to work with the people who really got the film industry going again through the '70s: Peter Weir, Bruce Beresford, Gillian Armstrong, Fred Schepisi."
In an ideal world, he'd appear in one film a year in Australia and one overseas. Plus, every two to three years, he'd work with Connolly and the others at Arena Films. "If I had that, I'd be a very happy person. And I'm very happy at the moment. I do regard myself as very lucky."
He looks around at the sparkling blue pool and the palm trees and blinks into the Queensland sun. "Yeah, exactly, see! Not everyone gets to come and have their focaccia at Palazzo Versace," he says drily. "Some people would say I've made it now."
From here.
