Dan, Dan the ladies' man
CAROLINE WILSON
Date: 01/08/1998
Sydney Morning Herald


While his eccentric character Diver Dan has been breaking hearts and boosting ratings in the ABC series SeaChange, actor David Wenham has been away from the fuss, stuck in a Hawaiian leper colony working on a new film. CAROLINE WILSON tracked him down.

WHEN David Wenham says the SeaChange phenomenon has passed him by, it's not his laconic character Diver Dan speaking. The actor behind Australian television's newest "thinking woman's sex symbol" has been adrift from urban life since the ABC series began in May and only recently learnt how successful it has become.

Wenham has been living for almost three months in a leper colony on a remote Hawaiian island where he is making the Paul Cox film Damien, the story of an heroic 19th century Belgian monk. His co-stars include Peter O'Toole, Derek Jacobi, Sam Neill and Kris Kristofferson.

Simultaneously, 12 weeks of sexual tension between Pearl Bay's local magistrate, Laura (Sigrid Thornton), and Wenham's laidback but brooding Diver Dan have delighted and frustrated SeaChange's Sunday night audience and the 33-year-old actor has missed it all.

"I'd love to be there to experience it," Wenham says. "It's very hard to comprehend. I'm sitting here in a lighthouse in a very isolated place and you're the first journalist I've spoken to since the series began. I'm delighted because it's the most wonderful piece of writing I'd seen in television. Working with Sigrid was just a joy. I miss our lunches."

How did the pair manage to create such electricity? "That's pretty personal, isn't it? " Wenham says.

The good news for fans of SeaChange, which finishes its first series tomorrow night (7.30), is that Wenham has agreed to return to Pearl Bay when shooting starts again in October. He had earlier told the program's producer, Artist Services, that he would not be available.

"I will be back," he says. "Whether it's just popping in or not really depends on the writers. I was asked to come back to let the character's journey run a little longer."

Wenham, who won an AFI award for his performance in the ABC's Simone de Beauvoir's Babies last year and appears to be one of the most in-demand actors in the country, is not indulging in false humility when praising his character's creators.

Although Diver Dan is said to be heavily based on the SeaChange co-writer and Artist Services' boss Andrew Knight, his loveable eccentricity lies in the female influence, as well.

Deb Cox, the writer who created SeaChange, envisaged a character she christened "Diver Dan". "He was always going to be the love interest," says Knight, "and he was always going to have a tragic past."

For not only is Diver a handsome dropout fisherman to whom the locals turn with their problems, he has some pretty deep problems of his own. Along with being able to produce a perfect cup of coffee, being a great cook and being wonderful with children.

Knight admits that while he has been dining out on the fact that such a lovable character was partially based on him, his children were not - dining out, that is. "I'm a single dad and I've got a five-year-old who won't eat my food," he says.

"Dan being a great cook was Deb's idea. She just wanted to be romantic. It was Deb who gave him a lesbian ex-wife, too. She thought he was getting too smug. It was a brilliant trump card."

And yet when Knight's women friends enthuse about Wenham's character, he loves to tell them, `I wrote that'. "Unfortunately for me," he says, "he's much better looking."

Wenham is amused at the concept of Knight trading on the character of Diver. "But Andrew's a slob," he says.

Knight likens the character to himself in the days when he worked with writer-comedian John Clarke. "We made a show years ago for the ABC called The Fast Lane," he says. "We'd do a series and then drop out for a while. I guess the character's the character I write the most. I don't think I could be that ambitionless. I like doing things too much."

Knight says there is also some of Cox's husband - a physiotherapist who likes to work three days a week and surf the other four - in Diver Dan. P ERHAPS there is a little of him in all of us. Wenham claims "the dry, laconic humour and the strange take on life". But not the devotion to one particular seaside destination. "As a child we never went away to one place," he says. "I was the last of seven and we were always going somewhere different. I've been to many places like Pearl Bay [but] I don't like revisiting places. When I've returned it's never been so special."

Wenham says he has no idea what the writers have in store for him next time around but "there are a few more boat trips for Diver" and "a few more fish to catch".

Says Knight of the casting: "We didn't have anyone in mind for the part and when I went to Sydney to screen [test] David I thought he would be a bit too middleclass and clean cut and too young.

"But straight after his test, I called Deb and said, `We've found him! We've found him!' I couldn't believe it when he agreed to do the series. He's being offered every single role under the sun at the moment."

Wenham, whose first TV role was as a 21-year-old in the soap Sons And Daughters, has a long list of Sydney theatre credits to his name. In film, recently he has starred as the brutal Brett Sprague in a role he reprised from the stage in The Boys and appeared alongside Geoffrey Rush in A Little Bit Of Soul.

In Damien, he plays the title role and will appear, he says, in "127 of 130 scenes". His schedule has seen him rising each day at 4 am, spending four hours being made up as an advanced-stage leper, filming, and then falling into bed in his beach hut at 10 pm.

"It's been a great experience," Wenham says. "I've been acting with Lawrence of Arabia. But it's taken it out of me - I'm pretty run down. I'd love the people enjoying SeaChange to see me after undergoing four hours of prosthetics."

Knight says he and Cox were "privately quite proud" of SeaChange, which he initially worried was either going to prove "spectacularly good or spectacularly bad". He attributes the series success, in part, to the Diver Dan character, who deviated so radically from male TV characters of the past.

"Men have just been represented in some testosterone- imbalanced way for so long," Knight says. "Partly because writers in the past have been puny and desperately wanted to be like that and wanted to hold a Magnum in someone's mouth and say, `You've got two choices'. When reality is they're scared to leave their houses because they're going to get bashed up at the pub."

And yet not everything about Laura and Diver Dan has been realistic. Specifically, you have to wonder how long the writers of SeaChange can keep the two characters apart. "It's not reality but it's what people like," Knight says.

"I know when I was married and I'd turn on to a program and there was a happily married couple, I'd reach immediately for the remote control."

And Wenham, who is also unmarried? "I'd have to concur," he admits.

But will the once-bitten boatie/cook/fisherman take on the town magistrate, her adolescent daughter and pre-pubescent son? With a husband lurking in the background? "I couldn't tell you that," Wenham says, with mock horror, "that would be like opening your Christmas presents before the 25th of December."

Not even a kiss before the end of the first series? "You'll just have to wait," he says.

But if Knight and Cox have their way, the sexual tension in series two of SeaChange will be out of their hands. "I'm already pulling out of writing the next series and so is Deb," Knight says. "It's time for someone new. I've honestly run out of ideas."