“My parents had always informed visitors who came round to our place for lunch or dinner that it was going to always be a very noisy experience because there'd be cross conversations going all the time. My bed, for quite a few years, was at the base of our dining room table, which I loved and I thought it was really cool that I didn't have a bedroom. My bedroom was actually the dining room and I used to roll out of bed in the morning to set the table ready for breakfast.”
***
“Very disruptive. Oh, yes! Very disruptive! Just stupid things I’d do, like taking off the teacher in the class when he had his back turned, that sort of thing. You could say I spent more time out of the classroom than in it”.
***
“I loved making people laugh as a kid. I think most actors are like that, the naughty boy in class who spent a lot of their school life on the balcony with sore hands, having got the strap so many times.”
***
"I didn't know where to channel my energy and neither did my teachers. I liked school but probably for the wrong reasons. But once I started acting, I suddenly had a focus. "
♦
about his parents:
“There are images from my childhood that stick. Sundays were great times in our growing up years. We’d always go somewhere and always by public transport. I grew up in a house with no car and, with seven kids, it was always a little journey. Sometimes they could be very simple things like just going for a walk –we'd love that as long as it wasn't too far 'cos our legs were always smaller than our father's.
One of the best memories I have as a kid was just walking around to the next street. There was a park that seemed extremely exotic. If you go back
to it now in Marrickville, it seems like quite a sad park but at that time, just that childhood imagination endowed it with so much more. I must have been about six I suppose and my mother was just picking leaves off this tree and the colours were just so vivid and I can remember what it was like. That's one of my favourites."
***
“My parents weren’t people who grew up going to the theatre, they had no real knowledge of theatre, so how they knew that it might be something that would in-terest me. I don’t know. But they saw that, and nurtured it and nourished it. I can’t thank them enough.”
***
“Both my parents were extremely supportive. My father did extraordinary things, looking back on it now. Once he knew that it was something that I did have an in-credible passion for, he would do things like, the University of New South Wales would have a book sale every two years and my father would take public transport out there and buy cardboard boxes worth of books and bring them back on drama and plays and film and it was a terrific thing.”
***
"My parents were always supportive. But they thought it was probably a foolish career choice 'cos not many people make a career out of acting. I never thought about it. I just thought, 'Oh, yeah, that's something that I want to do.' But they've come around. I'm doing OK and they're proud, and that makes me happy."br>
***
“I know how much their faith means to my parents and I have nothing but enor-mous love for them.”
***
(on his father) “He had a genuine interest in others. But I’ve seen in my life a shift. When I was younger, I think people in Australia were more interested in others. But certainly, we’re more interested in ourselves now”.
♦
what can he do besides acting?
“I was also a hay carter – out in the open, in the scorching heat. I didn’t last – that was a week. I also sold china and glassware in a department store, and I was a cameraman at the local greyhound track!”
***
“I called bingo for five years at (Sydney’s) Marrickville Towne Hall. I started off calling the manual method which was to have all the numbers in a biscuit con-tainer. Then the technological age started and I had this computerised board”.
***
“A friend of mine, Bill Mather, who was a colleague of mine at Theatre Nepean, we did become quite proficient at lawn bowls and I must say... I did bowl in the State Championships here in New South Wales and did quite well. But we didn't earn much money but I did win many chooks and meat trays throughout New South Wales.”
***
“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." It's a very frustrating game”.
***
“When I left school I got a job selling insurance before drama school, but I didn’t ever think that that’s I’d do (sell insurance). I often wonder what I’d be doing if I hadn’t gone into acting and the only thing that comes to mind is gardening, even though it wouldn’t be financially rewarding”.
♦
how did all begin?
"I used to do impersonations: Harry Butler in the wild, or I'd do Gough Whitlam. So I suppose I channeled those energies in a much more creative way”.
***
“I did have a love of entertaining. Once again, like most actors I suppose I was the class clown, I loved making people laugh. I suppose the defining moment for me was as a young kid, I was the last of seven, so I was forever trying to fight for at-tention. My birthday and Christmas presents were subscription tickets to the thea-ter. I didn’t come from a very wealthy family at all, but my parents would get sub-scriptions to one particular theater in Sydney, it used to be called Nimrod, it’s now the Belvoir St. Theatre. Back then, theater was really a vibrant scene in Sydney and that was just like the most magical world for a young kid to go along and enter into. And as soon as I saw productions there, I knew that’s where I wanted to be. I’d dream about the possibility of one day performing at that theater company. And I did”.
***
“It was the first degree course in Australia for performing arts and I was in the very first year. From there, I battered my head against a brick wall and spent a lot of time in very small cooperative theatre in Sidney, and little by little, the doors opened”.
***
"We had a tin shed in which we trained. What it did was force us to use what we had within us...and I think it made us more resilient and I think it exercised our imagination in a really wonderful way".
***
"It was an interesting time, coming out of a drama school in the backblocks of the western suburbs that nobody had heard of. So it was a matter of beating your head against a brick wall for long enough, getting a lot of headaches along the way, but eventually there's a bit of movement."
♦
what led him to art?
“... There’s no history of performances in my family. It’s obviously not a genetic thing. But growing up the last of seven, definitely you do strive for attention: the survival instinct, I suppose”.
***
"Another factor that possibly nourished a theatrical interest in me was growing up Catholic and the rituals within the church. I don’t think I’m in an unusual situation here. Being the last child with a Catholic upbringing is not something unusual in this business. I look at myself in comparison to my siblings and I do see myself as relatively similar, slightly similar to my brother, who comes at the head of the fam-ily. But the sister just above me has a totally different temperament from me".
***
"Quite simply, I think, the opportunity to play. That's it. It might seem ex-tremely 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".
***
“Great - absolutely. Acting, to me, is being given the freedom and ability to play, and that's - that's what I love most about it. I feel very comfortable in playing, whether it be in front of a camera or on stage. I feel far more at ease doing that than, as I am now, being myself, chatting about my work, which I find a very strange thing to do”.
♦
about his sacrifices in the name of art:
“There was one particular play I was involved in. It was a Berkoff play called East, and it was about, you know, I shaved my head and had my ear pierced and this was 20 years ago. I was coming home from rehearsal and I'd just arrived in Central Sta-tion. I was on a bus going back to Marrickville, where I was staying with my par-ents at the time, and my parents got on the same bus going back towards the house at Marrickville and they didn't recognise me and were horrified when they actually saw what I'd done to myself, all in the name of art”.
***
“That happened in 1991 in a musical, Head Butt. It was a baptism by fire – there was a shower on stage, and I’d walk out, strip off, have a shower and then break into song. I couldn’t sing and there I was nude in a musical in the theatre I’d always dreamt of performing in”.
***
“When I graduated drama school, I did a lot of guest roles in a lot of television se-ries. In a way, that was a great training ground. You sort of had the right to fail, because it was so quick, and like most actors, I learned a hell of a lot about acting on those serial. Because I did fail, I failed miserably on quite a few occasions. But that’s okay. “Drama schools have a tendency to train actors specifically for the theater, which is a certain approach to acting. It’s very rare at drama school you get the opportunity to be knowledgeable about techniques in filmmaking. So it’s trial and error”.
***
"I made a couple of visits to the Valley (" A Country Practice"). Probably the most embarrassing was when I took over from Frank Gilroy as the policeman. My char-acter 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".
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