DAVID WENHAM is quietly fuming. Perched on the windowsill of a suite in Sydney’s Hotel, he stares down the barrel of a camera for this photo shoot. He is clad in an all-black Gucci ensemble and a vein in his neck is throbbing the way it will in an animal poised to strike. And when I try to engage him in conversation while he is being tended to by the makeup artist, he is decidedly withdrawn I ask him about the trip he’ll be taking to Melbourne the next day “I’m doing an interview talking about someone”. It’s as though a trap door in his mind has slammed shut
It was mostly an act.
“That’s what the photographer was telling me to do,” he says later of the steely glares and spasming reflexes which reminded me of Brett Sprague – the borderline psychotic he played in the 1997 Australian hit The Boys. And the stilted conversation had little to do with my hovering, it turns out, and much more to do with Wenham’s very real discomfort when subjected to the unswerving eye of the still camera “I’m totally at the photographer’s mercy, whereas in front of a moving camera I have the security blanket of having a facade - there is a mask of some description there When you’re in front of a still camera, often times you feel nude,” he says, pronouncing it nuuuuude “You feel totally exposed.”
To misread David Wenham is all part of The David Wenham Experience, of course. His appeal to both men and women - confirmed by his position on
Who Weekly’s 1999 Most Beautiful People List and reconfirmed by everyone I know - lies in his undefinable nature. He can discuss – and does, in the course of our interview – both sport and shopping, with equal passion. The last time he cried (a “trickle” really) was when delivering a speech at a Sydney Swans dinner in Melbourne, and white his sensitivity marks him out as different, his boyish quality does the opposite. He confesses to be “shy”, yet possesses an arsenal of sounds and phrases that could match a three-year-old’s. He can make a cardie look sexy for God’s sakes. And those around him seem to delight in outsiders’ perceptions of him. When I call his agent’s office to request more interview time, one of them chuckles and says, “Why, because he’s so complex?”
Ask his peers what marks him out and you’ll get myriad responses To Robert Connolly, the film producer who first worked with Wenham in the stage production of
The Boys 10 years ago at Sydney’s Griffin Theatre and who has just directed him in
The Bank, it’s his “chameleonic quality.” Adam Cullen, the Sydney artist who won the 2000 Archibald Prize with a flat, bold-stroked painting of Wenham, says it’s his “intensity”, and Susie Porter, who acted opposite him in
Better Than Sex (for which the pair spent a month in the buff) says it’s his “natural” quality. “He is the easiest person to work with, really in the moment. And he’s just a really nice guy to hang out with.”
When Wenham and I meet up at a bustling Sydney cafe three days after the photo shoot, he more than lives up to Porter’s description. Arriving with a fistful of mail, some of which he proceeds to open in front of me, he wears an indigo-coloured wool cardie (“It’s Fraaanche,” he says mockingly) and blue jeans. His freshly washed strawberry blonde hair has a baby-soft quality to it, and his clear blue eyes are alert They are the penetrating sort that one imagines would be quite useful in the field of hypnosis, or seduction.
OUR CONVERSATION turns to his childhood – a noisy one in Marrickville, Sydney, alongside five sisters and one brother. I’m looking for evidence of early Wenham attention-seeking behaviour and while he’ll admit to it, he’s much more interested in talking about, and demonstrating, his antics with Andrew The Greek Boy Who Lived Next Door. “We’d decapitate flies using hairs that we’d pull out of our heads,” he says. And with that, he yanks two flaxen strands from his mane. “You get a hair, okay? You tie a little thing in it, and then,” making the sound of a mini-guillotine, “...sssstt.” He leans back in his chair and smiles.
This particular Wenham, the reposeful one, is the result of circumstance. He has just filmed five back-to-back projects, and he’s happy. In the next 18 months, audiences will see Wenham, 34, play an American gunslinger in Dust (opposite Joseph Fiennes), a mathematical genius in The Bank, an effeminate showbiz writer in Moulin Rouge, an Orthodox Jew in Russian Doll and Faramir, noble of Gondor, in the second episode of
The Lord Of The Rings. He admits that he becomes bored easily. “I love working. I love creating. I love it when I have a problem that I can’t exactly... you know, I’m in the problem of solving it,” he says, his hands manipulating an imaginary Rubik’s cube.
His latest quandary is his own career, which has thrust him from treading the boards in obscure theatres in Newcastle to working on sound stages the world over. “I find it very odd that I’m playing leading man characters,” he says, “because that’s not how I came into this industry. I was very much a character person where it really didn’t matter what you looked like. I find it intriguing that I am playing roles now that I never imagined myself playing.”
Those who know him are far from perplexed Connolly compares him to Steve McQueen and Paul Newman. “Oh, he’s an astonishing actor. He brings an incredible intellect to what he does. In
The Bank, he plays an enigmatic character who conceals things from you, and to compel you to follow him through the film an actor needs that extra something.”
Although he’s been working in Australian film and tv for the last 20 years and was much cherished as the laconic Diver Dan in
SeaChange, most people first caught sight of Wenham's astonishing talent in
The Boys. Brett Sprague occupied a desperate world in which any action, even the most gruesome kind, provided more hope than doing nothing at all. Wenham seemed to capture this from the soul outwards, his eyes lifeless, his face cracking with emotion at only the rarest of times
It’s the role that so astonished Cullen that, when speaking to Wenham during their first portrait sitting, he told him he knew he’d win the Archibald with a painting that captured both the actor and his most riveting character. And even though Wenham has gone on to star in multi- million dollar projects, it’s still the role he most relished. “It was a fantastic challenge to really nail the character and attempt to understand the psychology. I can be hypercritical of my own performance and I can actually look at that one and I am actually happy with every moment in that film. Every other one there are moments or parts that I think can be better.”
It’s also the role that brought him to the attention of Milcho Manchevski, the Macedonian director of
Dust. Wenham paid his own way to meet with the director in London. “We had these strange little conversations and didn’t really talk about the film at all, but we did make a connection. And then the casting director said, ‘Do you want him to read some scenes now?’ and he said ‘No’.” He was offered the lead – a cowboy mercenary - then and there.
Surely he must have felt he was The Man. “I was obviously excited, but extremely nervous as well. Every time I get a role it’s exactly the same, regardless of where it is,
whether it’s in a theatre in front of 100 people on a role in a $200 million American film because
I suffer from a - ha! -
slight to more-than-slight confidence problem. And I often don’t think that I can pull anything off. So it’s a hard journey every time I step in front of the cameras or I step on stage. I put myself through the mill really.”
Wenham may possess an actor’s need for self-examination, but you won’t hear him droning on about his
craft. If anything, he’s now looking for the perfect comedic project to harness all the goofy and benignly mischievous impulses that he displays throughout our interview.
I ask him about the last time he laughed so hard he nearly peed his pants. “Oohh. That’s a really good one. I can remember one case when I thought the waters were going to break. That was a one-man show at Belvoir Street (Theatre) by Australian actor/comedian Mark Little. It was just coming thick and fast. I’ve never had that feeling before where I’ve had to physically put my hands on my stomach to ease the pain from laughter,” he says, eyes wide, his hands grasping at his taut abdomen. “But brilliant feeling. Fan-
tastic. There’s another moment that does stick out,” he says, his speech gently erupting into ha-ha-has. “But it’s probably not ht for public consumption. Oh yeahh. That’s a ripper of a story.” He clocks my anticipatory gaze as if to decide whether he should go on. And then looks down at his feet as he thinks the better of it.
From here.
