Macedonia, Molokai, Middle Earth and Barwon Heads - all have been home to David Wenham in the past few chaotic years as his acting career has kicked into overdrive. But while leper colonies, former war zones, mythical kingdoms and seaside retreats near Geelong all have their appeal, right now Wenham has Melbourne on his mind.
His turn as Lee, the wild-eyed black sheep of the family in the MTC's production of Sam Shepard's
True West, has not only virtually sold out but has been earning rave reviews.
His meticulous preparation for roles usually involves wandering around streets and parks observing people, looking for ideas and inspiration. "Melbourne actually provides great fodder for characters," he says. "I think it's one of my all-time favourite cities. It's full of the most amazing characters, especially the city, this square mile here. And some of the characters I encounter on a day-to-day basis just walking down Swanston Street, you know, if you put them up on stage people would say you're over-acting."
On the stage a ball of intense, frustrated energy, off stage by the banks of the Yarra, Wenham is calm and easy-going. He's been kept up beyond his bedtime by the noise of post-Logies revelry, but he resisted the urge to party, keeping his focus tightly on the play.
"It's certainly not an easy play to perform eight times a week, but it's a challenge, and that's something I enjoy. I bumped into a very well-known writer here the other day who'd seen a preview. He thought the production's take was about the frustration of writing, which is very intereseting because that certainly is there. You can feel Sam Shepard exorcising his demons. It's a very bitter, angry piece."
When I mention that I saw the play last Wednesday he is suddenly concerned. "You weren't in the front row were you?" he asks, thinking of the beer that gets sprayed around in the course of the drama. "The play is in 'smell-around' actually," he laughs. "Beer and toast and sweat and eggs. Yes, it's all there."
Wenham's acting career began in student theatre. Sydney's western suburbs Nepean drama school opened the door to budget theatre ("We divided the profits so everybody got an equal share of nothing"), which led to TV - notably S
imone de Beauvoir's Babies and
SeaChange - and movies.
In rapid-fire succession, Wenham has starred in Paul Cox's
Molokai: The Story of Father Damien, Better than Sex, Moulin Rouge, The Bank, the first Crocodile Hunter movie, and the second and third
Lord of the Rings epics.
He can't say too much about Lord of the Rings, but he is very excited at the imminent release of Molokai, the story of the Belgian priest famous for founding Hawaiian leper colonies. "Rejoice, rejoice, it's actually getting a national release in June, which is brilliant, really, really brilliant," he says. And a long time coming, since, incredibly, the movie was being shot while the first series of
SeaChange was going to air.
"There's a wonderful irony in that - a film about somebody who is extremely selfless and is totally altruistic, and that particular film got held up by people who were haggling over money." Wenham almost spits the words out. "But the shackles have been released, and so will the film. I think it's an important film. I had an incredible time making it."
As readers will know, Father Damien was a kind of Belgian Mary McKillop. This gave Wenham an opportunity to brush up his Flemish accent, with the help of some Belgian crew members. "I could've quite easily done the role in an inoffensive English accent but I just thought that since I was playing the Belgian national hero it would be slightly offensive to that particular country if, when it was released around the world, he didn't sound as if he came from Belgium."
It hasn't all been noble figures like Father Damien, Diver Dan and
The Lord of the Rings' Faramir, or edgy anti-heroes like
The Boys' Brett Sprague and
True West's Lee. For example, there was the time a young Wenham paid his dues in
A Country Practice. "Ah yes," he says, philosophically. "I made a couple of visits to the Valley. Probably the most embarrassing was when I took over from Frank Gilroy as the policeman. My character was the most inept policeman who had ever been given a badge. He was a motorcycle policeman - whoever came up with this concept I don't know - who wore red socks which attracted the local dogs, so the dogs would pull him off his motorbike. And there were kids who had flour bombs and he thought they were cocaine. Sadly it wasn't an ongoing role."
Keeping the peace in Wandin Valley somehow led to him becoming a national sex symbol (sorry ladies, he's taken, by long-term partner Kate Agnew) as Diver Dan.
Nevertheless, he says, it's his role as a bank-breaking mathematical genius that has struck a major chord with the Australian public. "There's a lot of public support for that film," he says. "Probably daily, people stop me in the street to talk about that particular film. I think at least every second person has a bank story."
The Bank is a circuitous story that gave him one of the great lines in Australian cinema: "I hate banks."
"I was looking forward to that little line," he smiles.
Curiously, if Wenham wasn't in Melbourne, he would most likely be in Argentina, where
The Bank is about to launch. "It's just been screened at a festival and it's been picked up for an enormous national release. I think there'll be stampedes in the cinema," he says. Film festivals have loomed large in Wenham's schedule of late. After doing five films back-to-back, he took a large chunk of last year off and travelled, taking in a few festival premieres for those five along the way.
But he can't give too much away about what the future holds. "I have a sort of long-term plan to direct. I would love to direct a feature and have Robert Connolly (
The Bank) produce it. That would be really fab. At the moment Robert's working on another film that, all going well, I'll be involved in, in an acting capacity."
And other work? "There are a couple of things I can't talk about that I'd really love to."
In the meantime, though, he can talk about True West, and why it's the right job at the right time. "I wanted to get back to a) do some theatre again, and b) do something that was a bit dirty in a way," he says. "I just felt I needed to be pushed and be challenged in areas I hadn't been for a couple of years. That's why I'm down here doing this play."
True West runs at the Victorian Arts Centre until May 25.
From here.
