2008 (November) TVWeek Australia interview - Interviews 2008-2011 - File Catalog

Obviously he’s s a cavalier sort of character but I think it works better if he’s not right all the time because it makes it alive. I grew up with only two networks and one showed mostly reruns from American TV shows, so I grew up on Kojak and Columbo and they were procedural shows but you got to love the tics of the strong characters and when those characters were wrong, it made them even more interesting.

When I met Rebecca, she’d done eleven films in Australia and was nominated for an AFI award on her first film up against Judy Davis. I came into this business totally green and she had all this experience and was on A Country Practice so she was like, ‘relax, take it easy!’ We disagree about a lot of things but she’s very bright and has very strong opinions so I want to know what they are.

I was born in Tasmania but left when I was two and went to the Highlands of New Guinea, to a very small town. Then my mother and father split up and my mother came back to Sydney with my stepfather and we moved from Sydney to the north coast of New South Wales just south of Byron Bay, a small town called Lennox Head where there were six guys to every girl, so the odds weren’t good for me!

I dreamed of being an actor from about 13 but it was an incredible secret because it was not the kind of place you could say it out loud. My stepfather was a butcher and my sister, who was two years older than me, was a doctor. My parents used to have us IQ tested all the time and I was shocked to find out I had a higher IQ than my sister, so they were constantly looking at me like, ‘she’s going to be a doctor, what are you going to do?’ But my brain didn’t function that way and I just did enough to pass high school and wanted to get out of town so badly, I convinced my parents if I signed up for nursing school, I would eventually become a doctor the back way.

Turns out I hate sick people so that lasted about two months! Then I wound up working in a pub in Sydney and the closest I got to acting school was it was a few blocks from NIDA and a bunch of students used to drink in the pub and I’d talk to them about my dreams but I didn’t have the confidence to do anything about them. By the way, the weirdest thing about that pub, the Regent, in Kingsford, was I found out years when Russell Crowe and I became friends that he and his family used to own the pub and he’d lived upstairs in one of the rooms I used to crash in all the time!

I was going camping one day with my surfing buddy and he said, ‘I just have to stop for this audition for a commercial - you should come in because there are always cute girls in the waiting room and maybe we could talk a few into going camping with us!’ So I went in and the casting woman convinced me to sign in too and the next thing I knew I got the commercial, got an agent and after a few more commercials, my first real job was on the TV soap E Street.

I tried to go to a place in Sydney just before I started work on E Street but I didn’t last long because I got into arguments with the teachers because they were mean to people and made girls cry. Most of the stuff I learned, I learned on the job and I read lots of books by acting teachers Sanford Meisner and Uta Hagen and when I got to Hollywood my first film (L.A. Confidential) was with Kevin Spacey and Danny DeVito and I should have paid them for being able to sit and watch the way they worked! It was the opposite of everything I learned in that acting school because there was no angst at all with them. They’d just be chatting right up until they heard ‘action’ and they’d slip right into the scene and go back to their conversation as soon as it was over.

I am not sure, isn’t there anybody else? Funny enough, there are a lot of comparisons with Errol and me, because first, we were both born in Launceston and Errol went to the New Guinea Highlands too, which was a weird coincidence!

I think it’s something like 12 years but we’re never been huge on that kind of stuff because we’re too busy living our lives. I remember about six months ago we were talking about the fact we were coming up on our twelfth anniversary or something and stuff happened and a week ago my wife said, ‘oh it was our anniversary two weeks ago!’ and I was like, ‘OK, give us a kiss, you had enough yet? Are we all OK? Good!’

I’m more spontaneous, I like to buy things out of nowhere because I saw it and was thinking about her. I get a little freaked out by organized celebrations and I think it sometimes put a bit too much pressure on the event if you force yourself out to dinner for it. One year we did it and we ended up having an argument as soon as we sat down at the restaurant. And I’d bought a beautiful necklace for her and had it in my hand to give her the whole way through dinner but because we were having this heated debate, I knew if I handed it over at the end it would feel manipulating, so I gave it to her a couple of days later!

I’m not that interested in knowing things before they happen - although it would have helped with some of my film choices over the years! I guess I’d use it to maybe keep an eye on my daughter; with her being 15 years old, she’s well intended but tricky so it gets complicated!