The Weekend Australian (Sydney, Australia)
Dec 12, 1998
Dramatic Entrance
Byline: LYNDEN BARBER

The sudden rise of David Wenham

It has taken only two roles this year to put David Wenham on the map as Australia's fastest rising male star. And, writes Lynden Barber, two roles more violently contrasting are hard to imagine

FROM chilling psychopath to affable pin-up boy, David Wenham redefines the term "chameleon". As Dan Della Bosca, aka Diver Dan, Sigrid Thornton's ultra-laidback, wouldbe love interest in the ABC TV series SeaChange, Wenham was the picture of enigmatic affability. With a kerchief around the neck, he'd typically be cooking a fish he'd just caught near the coastal small town where Thornton's ex-corporate lawyer Laura Gibson was the new magistrate.

See him as Brett Sprague in The Boys -the ringleader of three brothers who commit an extreme act of violence against an anonymous woman -and you could be forgiven for rubbing your eyes in disbelief and declaring this a different actor altogether. While Dan's light blue eyes sparkled with wellintentioned mischief, those of exconvict Brett were cold and full of hate.

Yet the performances did have something in common: through those eyes one could sense a rare artfulness -a mind always working two steps ahead of the dialogue. The roles earned him two nominations in this year's Australian Film Institute Awards. Many insiders were surprised when he failed to walk away with either of them, particularly for The Boys, widely seen as one of the most memorable performances the Australian film industry has produced in the past decade.

His Brett Sprague is comparable perhaps to Russell Crowe's star-making turn as a racist skinhead in Romper Stomper, but taking the performance in isolation would be a mistake. Add it to Diver Dan and you have the sense of an extraordinary range, a transformative ability belonging to the Daniel DayLewis school of performance. Good actors alter their physical gestures and voices according to their roles but it takes exceptional performers to so radically change what their eyes are communicating from one role to another.

I MET Wenham one afternoon on a restaurant balcony overlooking Sydney's Bondi Beach, but only after about half an hour, when he removed his sunglasses, did I realise how piercingly light blue those eyes are.

It was a relief to discover that the real-life Wenham is much closer to Diver Dan than Brett Sprague. Wenham first performed as the latter in the original stage production of The Boys. Neil Armfield, who later directed him on stage in several productions at Sydney's Belvoir Street Theatre, first saw him reading the Gordon Graham play at the Stables Theatre in the late 1980s and recalls never having seen "such fearful intensity on stage from anyone, particularly at that kind of range -he seemed to be so utterly inside the skin of that character, which I know is something that continued in the stage performance, and then in the film.

"People said on the set of the film it was kind of frightening," Armfield adds. "David's a really easygoing, knockabout, extremely unpretentious person, but people were just afraid of going near him." On the other hand, his work in SeaChange is "gorgeous: a really attractive character", says Armfield. "Somehow the attraction comes from what he withholds. He's both wry but also quite covered -so you're always seeking his approval in a funny kind of way."

Earlier this year Wenham, who is in his early 30s, was in New Zealand to publicise the film version of The Boys (on which he also served as an associate producer). The Kiwi media -which hadn't seen SeaChange -had got wind of an Australian radio competition in which he had been described as Australia's sexiest man.

"They couldn't comprehend it whatsoever, having just seen The Boys,"

Wenham recalls wryly through a gingery scrub of beard grown back for the shooting of the second series of SeaChange. "They were dumbfounded, and rightly so, I think.

"Bloody ridiculous."

Could he comprehend it in any way?

"Not at all!" he smiles, sheeting home the compliment to the character of Dan (partly based, he says, on Andrew Knight, who co-wrote the series with Deb Cox) rather than himself. Look at David Duchovny, who in his pre X-Files days would never even attract a sideways look in the street. "All of a sudden he's the sexiest man in the world.

Television does that to you."

He sheets home Diver Dan's appeal to women to "his culinary skills. Look, he's a very attractive character -and not physically. He has all the attributes of someone you'd like to be with . . . the ideal man."

While SeaChange was screening, Wenham was well away from his new fans and the prying media in Hawaii, shooting a film called Molokai for Australian director Paul Cox, playing a 19th-century missionary in a leper colony.

That the ABC series became a hit that outrated 60 Minutes Wenham puts down to the quality of the writing. While most of our comedy is in-your-face, this was a successful attempt at something more subtle, like Hamish Macbeth or Northern Exposure, he says. Despite its popularity, when he arrived back in the country three weeks after the end of the first series, he found that the personal recognition was not huge. In Melbourne, "as many people spoke to me about The Boys as SeaChange -waiters or taxidrivers, whatever". His stage work has been admired for several years, particularly with Armfield's Company B, whose alumni include Geoffrey Rush and Cate Blanchett. But, like Rush, it has taken Wenham a while to make his presence felt outside the theatre-going community. Although he has appeared in several movies, the roles were usually small, the most memorable being Doug the Cat Burner in Cosi, the musical comedy set in a psychiatric hospital. He was also the male lead in this year's low-budget comedy A Little Bit of Soul, opposite Rush and Frances O'Connor, but the film bombed critically and at the box office.

He achieved his first serious recognition as a screen actor last year when he won the AFI award for best leading actor in a TV drama, for the ABC miniseries Simone de Beauvoir's Babies.

WHEN Wenham was growing up in Sydney, he was steered towards acting by a teacher who felt it would be a constructive outlet for his disruptive energies. He quickly fell in love with the stage, encouraged by his father, who would buy him theatre season tickets for his birthday.

"It was a magic world -a world that I wanted to be involved in when I grew up," the actor recalls. It's now around 12 years since Wenham left the University of Western Sydney at Nepean on the city's western borders, where he was part of the first intake for what was then a new course in dramatic arts and where he was able to observe the bleak suburban milieu in which The Boys was set.

"It was an interesting time, coming out of a drama school in the backblocks of the western suburbs that nobody had heard of," he recalls. "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."

His early jobs included some roles in "those marvellous soapies at the time. A couple of things have just disappeared off the CV -and don't go looking for them!" I did -his early TV work included Sons and Daughters, A Country Practice, Police Rescue and Rafferty's Rules. He openly admits he was "atrocious", though partly because his training, like that of many of our actors, was geared almost exclusively towards the theatre.

At times, maintaining the faith was hard. "All actors go through their moments of depression," he muses. "I went through many moments. I still have them. Success is relative, in a way. No matter where you are on the scale, you still worry about certain things."

He maintains that, far from becoming easier as he gains more experience, "each progressive job becomes harder. After I finish a play or film, I honestly believe that I wouldn't be able to do another play or film. I just think, `I'm no good at this'. I go through confidence crises. After each job." But, he says philosophically, echoing something Blanchett said recently in The Weekend Australian, "in a way I suppose it helps as well. As long as you sweat and care about it and worry about it; the minute, I think I become complacent and it becomes too easy, maybe then I should give up."

His friend and colleague Robert Connolly, who produced both the stage and film versions of The Boys, suggests that Wenham's long haul towards the film and television spotlight is not entirely accidental. "He's made an interesting choice as an actor by being strategic about the roles he wants to play," Connolly says. "He's offered a lot of work and he only does a fraction of it." While most actors look at work on a projectby-project basis, Wenham always looks at how it will fit into his career in the long term.

After doing The Boys on stage, he says he had to fight against being typecast.

Armfield recalls his turning down a stage role in Stephen Sewell's The Blind Giant is Dancing. "It was the kind of world that David came from: working-class Catholic.

I don't think his family life was anything like that family in The Boys but I think it was a world that he's seen. I think he had a feeling that playing working-class lads was the long suit and he was interested in bigger stretches -doing Shakespeare and doing Genet plays."

What kept Wenham going through the hard times -and still does -was the sheer love of acting. Yet he is a long way from one of those off-with-the-fairies, thespian cheek-kissers for whom the British coined the term "luvvies". Karen Rodgers got to know Wenham when she was stage manager at Belvoir Street and describes him as "kind of a real bloke. He loves the footy and a meat pie, and it's those real things that he takes back into his characters. He's not at all esoteric. There's no bullshoot about him."

While his work is really important to him, "he has a life and a view of the world outside of the world he plays" which keeps him balanced, Rodgers says.

Wenham realises this is both an encouraging and a worrying time for Australian actors. More locals are making an impact overseas than at any other time -Rush, Crowe, Blanchett, Rachel Griffiths, and his The Boys co-star Toni Collette -and they no longer have to be based outside the country to do so. Now they can maintain a career in the US, Europe and Australia all at once. Wenham was in London recently and says the British are "really excited about the talent that's being produced in this country at the moment: actors, directors, writers". At the same time, government funding cuts to the film industry and the ABC and the increasingly perilous position of Australian theatre, where our actors learn their craft, threaten to undermine those hard-won gains.

"The stage is important to me," he says.

"I think it helps an actor's work on film as well. Like anything, it's good to have a balanced diet." Yet Wenham's film ambitions are not restricted to acting. As an associate producer on The Boys, he was one of the team that hired director Rowan Woods, rather than the other way around. He used the position to learn about every stage of film production, including the financing, and hopes to make the move into directing in about five years.

In the meantime, what gives him "the greatest joy" is his professional relationship with Woods, Connolly and fellow producer John Maynard (Sweetie, The Navigator) under the name of Arenafilm.

Modelling themselves on the Scottish team behind Trainspotting, their next project Wenham describes as "our antibank film", with Connolly directing and Wenham starring.

How this turns out remains to be seen.

But if the strength of their first collaboration is anything to go by, it will be worth looking out for. When The Boys screened in competition at the Berlin Film Festival this year, Wenham was considered a leading contender for the best actor award. "There was De Niro and Dustin Hoffman and Daniel Day-Lewis -it was not bad company to be mentioned in," he recalls, enjoying his moment in the sun.

No, not bad at all.