ART THROB

Sydney Morning Herald

March 20,1999


He broke hearts as Diver Dan, was a chilling killer in The Boys, has just finished starring in a film about a leper priest, 
and now he's back in the theatre. ANGELA BENNIE spoke to a man of character.

DAVID Wenham is bemused. Six months ago he was dressed as a priest sitting in a caravan on a remote Pacific island playing 
imaginary cricket with Peter O'Toole.

At the same time, across the ocean, he was quietly beguiling every female heart in the country as Diver Dan in the ABC series 
SeaChange - a fisherman who could turn his hand to anything, from a mean paella to a consoling riff on the guitar.

Today he is walking the streets, head down, thinking about a troubled, edgy Parisian called Ivan and a piece of white paint 
on canvas that is causing his two very best friends one whole lot of bother, and wondering: can I do it? He asks himself this 
every time; and each time he launches into a new role the same restless pacing begins, the same anguish.

"I walk and walk and I think," he says. "I think the character out. I have to see him, hear him, and I look for him everywhere 
as I walk. I look for anything that will help me, pictures in books, art galleries, sounds, anything that will trigger me.

"And each time it becomes more daunting. Creating a character from scratch, it is such a challenge. And each time I wonder 
if I can do it. I go through stuff that makes me feel like a nervous wreck every time I approach another job.

"I suppose it's a confidence thing because, until it is actually done, I don't believe I can do it. I don't know if I am 
going to be able to pull it off."

This new "job" Wenham is stalking in his thoughts is Ivan. Ivan is one of the three characters in ART, a highly sophisticated, 
urbane comedy of manners now in rehearsal for its opening at the Theatre Royal on April 10, and around which there has been 
much hoo-ha lately over the casting of a non-Australian actor, the Brit Tom Conti, as one of the three (the other is John Waters).

Since it opened in Paris in 1995, ART has been a hit in London and New York, has played in something like 50 theatres across 
Europe and been translated into 20 languages.

The world of ART, with its brittle, hilarious brawling between three grown men over the value of a white-on-white, blank painting, 
is a long way from the soft homilies of Diver Dan, let alone the kind of dialogue needed for an imaginary game of cricket 
with the likes of Peter O'Toole.

"It's simple. One pretends to have the bat, the other pretends to bowl, and then you imagine it on to the field, then the 
other pretends to field and - oh, you can play it for hours. Peter O'Toole loves cricket; he made it up. He knows every 
score England ever made!"

You could say there is a certain kind of surreality surrounding David Wenham's life; and maybe he would be the first to agree.

Not when he is watching the Sydney Swans, of course, one of his favourite activities; nor strolling in the park near his home 
with his girlfriend on Sunday afternoons, another favourite.

Nor is it the playing of imaginary cricket with O'Toole. It is just that he is there on that island with him at all at that 
time in his life. One minute he is Diver Dan complete with neckerchief and raised eyebrow; the next - admittedly after a 
night of drinking red wine with the film-maker Paul Cox, who had flown to Australia especially to meet him and view his work, 
and who then offered him the lead in his next film - he finds himself tarted up in prosthetics and cassock, struggling with 
a Flemish accent and sainthood, starring as Father Damien in Cox's epic about the legendary leper priest of Molokai.

There was no time to learn scripts, no time for walking and thinking. It was straight into some of the hardest film-making 
he has undertaken, among a cast of thousands, including the likes of Sam Neill, Derek Jacobi, Leo McKern and Kris Kristofferson.

"The whole experience has been one of the hardest, most exciting things I have ever undertaken in my life," Wenham says. 
"The hours involved were enormous. There were 130 scenes in the film; I was in 127 of them. I felt a huge responsibility on 
my shoulders. I came in late to the project; I had no time to prepare for this role. And I knew it."

When the day's shoot was over, or the arduous time of waiting around the set was forced upon them by bad weather, he would 
find himself in the caravan with O'Toole playing cricket to pass the hours.

"He was a wonderful, wonderful character. He was only there in those first few weeks of filming, but he helped me so much. 
And gradually, over time, I felt I was on top of it. I began to feel I knew what I was doing."

From fisherman to priest is one kind of leap; the surreality increases only when you add it to the others.

There he is, only two years ago, for example, prancing around the stage of the Sydney Opera House as a very gay Cleante in 
Barrie Kosky's notorious production of Moliere's Tartuffe, dancing to a Christmas jingle with a blind man and an uncooked 
turkey. Everyone walks out humming Wenham, some in horror, some in delight, everyone agog.

And there he is, a few months later, an unassuming young man receiving an Australian Film Institute best actor award 
(his only) for his role as a sperm donor in the television series Simone de Beauvoir's Babies.

There he is, a noble Laertes in Neil Armfield's celebrated production of Hamlet, which tours the country to rave reviews; 
and there he is as a nerdy bank teller in David Caesar's riotous film Idiot Box, a deadpan cog in the sustained chaos.

Even before this, only two years out of drama school, you could see him as one of a group of "children" playing with life 
and death in Dennis Potter's mesmerisingly beautiful play Blue Remembered Hills in a tiny theatre in a church hall in 
Darlinghurst; then again, you might have found him, in that same year (1992), a modern troubadour, touring Germany in his one-man show, Dario Fo's Tale of a Tiger.

The repertoire of the characters is building slowly and quietly over the years, and the glimpses of the possible Wenham 
potential are becoming more frequent - an urbane Richard as steady counterpoint to Geoffrey Rush's mad silliness in the 
film A Little Bit of Soul ; the pyromaniac Doug, mad as a cut snake in Louis Nowra's Cosi, who sheds lighted matches like 
so many scales from his twitchy, ecstatic fingers.

Behind them all, however, across the decade of work, lurks a shadow, a terrible shadow, that sometimes seems to intrude 
upon them all, these strange Wenham characters, no matter their innocence, or tenderness, no matter how hard Wenham tries 
to keep it at bay.

This shadow is Brett Sprague of The Boys.

In some ways, you could say, it all began with The Boys.

In other ways, you could say it all began well before that, way back when he was a boy himself.

He was restless as a child, he says, very restless and disruptive. He was the last of seven children, and neither his 
parents nor, later on, his teachers knew how to assuage or harness his disruptive energy.

Then one day a teacher introduced him to the school's drama classes. Wenham was entranced, hooked: by the magic of it, 
by the fact that you could put "stuff up there on the stage and it have an effect" on people.

Wenham's father saw the effect the classes were having on the boy. He began taking him to the theatre, travelling with 
him in to the Genesian Theatre in Sussex Street ("mainly because it was the only theatre my father could afford") and he 
would buy him theatre subscriptions as Christmas and birthday presents.

"I cannot remember the very first piece of theatre I saw there, but I remember seeing A Man for All Seasons. I remember 
being enthralled.

"But probably the greatest magic of all was being taken in to the Nimrod theatre [now Belvoir Street] on Sunday afternoons. 
I think this is what had the greatest influence on me as a young child. There was something about it. It was wonderful, 
colourful, vibrant; there was something about walking into the foyer of that theatre.

"We used to go there on Sunday afternoons, and I would look forward to those Sunday afternoons so much. That became my 
ambition, to perform on that stage one day."

And one day he did. But not before two things happened, quite unexpectedly linked in some ways.

The first was his decision to become an actor, shortly after completing high school, much to the horror of his parents, 
especially his mother. He would never go far as an actor, she told him, begging him to stay in his job as an insurance clerk.

Instead, he enrolled in the first intake at Theatre Nepean at the University of Western Sydney.

"Getting into Nepean rather than NIDA gave me opportunities I never realised I would ever be grateful for. We were so 
underfunded out there. We had to do everything ourselves; we had to build our own sets, make our own costumes, do our 
own publicity. We learned all the facets of the business.

"But geographically, too, it was also good, because we were way out of Sydney, there was nothing there, no other theatres, 
no cinemas and things like that. It was hard. We just had to concentrate on our work. So that's all we did."

The second thing was his being cast in a "fringe" play in 1991 at the tiny Stables theatre in the heart of Sydney. It was 
The Boys by Gordon Graham.

Set in the degraded landscapes of the western suburbs of Sydney - or any modern city, for that matter, given its horrific 
topology of emotional and social degradation - the play depicts the events leading up to the brutal rape, torture and murder 
of an anonymous woman by Brett and his brothers, affectionately referred to throughout by their bewildered mother as "the 
boys".

In the small, confined space of the Stables, Wenham's performance was electric, terrifying. His Brett, with his pale, blue 
eyes, his petulant voice, his rangy, lethal body, was charged with a terrible, yet utterly controlled, cold anger that would 

ignite into red, violent horror at a split-second firing.

"At first I could not see his face, but I could hear him." Wenham thinks carefully about what he is saying, those same pale 
blue eyes gazing down at the floor. "I could hear the rhythms of his character, I could hear the speech patterns, and then 
I could visualise the way he moved. Once I knew how he moved, I started to get him. That movement, that's what led me to him. 
And then his look came. The way he looked. And I knew I had him." He raises those pale blue eyes and looks and there is a 
knowledge buried in them of something seen, and encountered.

"It was a very difficult process. I had to make sure . . . I really had to make sure there was . . . a definite line between 
myself and . . . performance. I couldn't afford to . . ." He trails off.

Robert Connolly, a close friend and the producer of the play, was loath to come into the dressing room, Wenham said, because 
of the atmosphere in there. "It was an energy he did not particularly want to be involved in."

Wenham went on to repeat the performance in the film version, which has received the highest local and international critical 
acclaim, an invitation to last year's Berlin Film Festival, and is considered one of the most important Australian films of 
the decade.

It was in this role that Armfield first saw him perform and, according to one report, said he had never seen "such fearful 
intensity on stage from anyone".

And so, years later, in 1994, when Armfield was choosing his ensemble of actors to form Company B - an ensemble that over 
time would include such actors as Geoffrey Rush and Richard Roxburgh, Cate Blanchett and Gillian Jones, Max Cullen and Kerry 
Walker - at Belvoir Street, Armfield included Wenham.

Only four years out of drama school, and he had made it onto "that stage", yes; but he had made it as a peer of some of the 
best actors in the country.

Now Brett is at long last behind him, despite his shadow. He has viewed his own performance on film, he says, and "seen the 
nature of the beast".

Diver Dan, too, has gone - yes, he says, there is another series (to screen in July) and "there's lots of kissing in it, that'
s all I can say"; but, no, the laconic fisherman will not linger for long.

Today, it is Ivan. Ivan invades his thoughts as he walks, prowls the rehearsal room and propels him on to the stage into action.

And tomorrow? Who knows? Where Wenham is concerned, it could be anyone - a bank teller or a saint, a psychopath or just your 
ordinary nerd. But one thing is certain. He will be noticed.

Resume

1965: Born in Sydney, the last of seven children.

1970s: Attends Christian Brothers High School at Lewisham. Writes and performs ventriloquist act and tours as support for school 
band. Drama classes at weekends; plays Hotspur in school production of Henry IV.

1984: Enrols at Theatre Nepean, University of Western Sydney. Completes studies, begins working around Sydney theatre "fringe".

1991: Cast as Brett Sprague in Griffin production of The Boys at Stables Theatre.

1994: Joins Company B at Belvoir Street. Tours in Hamlet and The Tempest, directed by Neil Armfield. Forms production company 
with Robert Connolly and John Maynard to make film of The Boys.

1997: The Boys released, and acclaimed at Berlin International Film Festival. Wenham wins AFI best actor award for Ian in 
Simone de Beauvoir's Babies. Plays Cleante in Moliere's Tartuffe, directed by Barrie Kosky, at Sydney Opera House.

1998: National exposure as Diver Dan in SeaChange. Cast as Father Damien, the lead in the latest Paul Cox film, provisionally 
titled Molokai.

1999: Begins rehearsals for Art at Theatre Royal.