1. "CHARACTER BUILDING"
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Copyright 2005 Nationwide News Pty Limited
The Weekend Australian
February 19, 2005 Saturday Preprints Edition
SECTION: REVIEW; Arts; Pg. B16
LENGTH: 1697 words
HEADLINE:
Character building
SOURCE: MATP
BYLINE: Miriam Cosic
BODY:
It's a far cry from his usual cool.
After three years away from the stage, David Wenham is tackling histrionic hero Cyrano de Bergerac, writes Miriam
Cosic
ACTOR David Wenham has a nice line in self-deprecation. He seems closer to the easygoing Diver Dan,
the role in the television series SeaChange that made him a household name in Australia, than to the coldly menacing Brett
Sprague in the confronting movie The Boys, which made his reputation as one of the finest actors at work in the country
today.
There is certainly nothing intimidating about him this morning, none of the warning signals that often flash
when actors are pressed with questions about their motivations or their private life. The only thing that unnerves him
is the air conditioning, which occasionally roars like a jet engine taking off. It's as though he has nothing better to
do than to talk to a perfect stranger about what it is that makes him tick.
"People will probably be thinking,
what's this person who works in film doing, having a go on stage?" he says during a break in rehearsals for Cyrano
de Bergerac, which opens at the Melbourne Theatre Company next week. "It's a bit of a delicious irony, really, because I spent
years working in theatre."
That in itself is an understatement. Wenham has been obsessed with theatre all his life;
even at drama school, becoming a movie star was not what interested him. And as for celebrity: reality TV, he points out,
has put that in its proper perspective.
Simon Phillips, MTC's artistic director, calls Wenham the "foremost character
actor of his generation". Yet, going on the evidence of his previous work, it's hard to imagine him in the expansive, swashbuckling,
histrionic role of Cyrano, the golden-tongued yet lovelorn soldier, defeated in his most intimate ambitions by his tragic
understanding of his own ugliness. That nose!
Phillips, who is directing Wenham in the title role of Edmond Rostand's
classic play, has no doubt what he will bring to the stage. "He's a very, very deft character actor," Phillips says. "If
you think that he managed to make himself into a heart-throb on SeaChange, and into one of the most dangerous men
in the world in The Boys, that is a very useful quality for someone like Cyrano.
"He needs to be able to hover
between those two things: because of his appearance, Cyrano has sublimated his love into violence. It's flashy violence,
it's elegant violence, but it's violence nevertheless."
For all their apparent dissimilarity, however, Diver Dan and Brett Sprague shared an intrinsic quality of emotional distance.
Wenham's co-star in The Boys, Toni Collette, has said that she looked into the pale eyes of Sprague on set and, chillingly,
saw nothing. And the blondly boyish Diver Dan, let's face it, would hardly have seemed heart-throb material if he'd been
holding up the local bar: shortish and slightly weedy, with ginger stubble and a dry line in humour, just another
of the quirky characters that made the fictional town of Pearl Bay so endearingly funny. We took our cues from Sigrid
Thornton's Laura who, despite her quick intelligence and lawyerly logic, inexplicably found his elusiveness and lack
of passion irresistible.
Cyrano, by contrast, has to be earthily present, emotionally larger than life, if the
role is to work. After all, Rostand wrote the play in 1897 in express reaction to the naturalism of contemporary playwrights
such as Ibsen and Zola. Cool is clearly not what's required.
In the pause that stretches after I point this out,
you can almost hear Wenham thinking: Hello? I'm an actor. Instead he muses dryly, "I certainly wouldn't describe Cyrano
as cool. The play would go on for 10 hours ..."
The role is something he and Phillips have discussed, on and off,
for years. It's three years since Wenham last appeared on stage -- in True West, also with the MTC, though he has
never worked with Phillips before. With a bagful of film and theatre awards, and well-crafted parts in movies as varied
as The Boys, The Lord of the Rings, Van Helsing, Moulin Rouge and The Bank behind him, he's in the happy position of being
able to choose his parts. He also has a partner, actor Kate Agnew, and a baby daughter, Eliza Jane, to consider. "I've got
to the stage in my life, particularly with theatre, that I only want to be involved in productions that I would really
want to see myself, because it's very, very easy to produce mediocre theatre," he says.
Returning to the stage,
he agrees, is a chance to sharpen his craft. "Oh god, yes," he says. It's a locution he uses often, rapid-fire, in answering
questions. "I haven't worked so hard in some time. It sharpens you creatively; it's certainly sharpening me intellectually.
It's challenging; it's like exercising muscles ..."
Cyrano is obviously a hell of a workout. Just talking about
it raises his energy level. Diver Dan disappears completely and he becomes loquacious, stacking clauses and superlatives
against each other as his mind seems to race ahead of his tongue.
"It's a play that has intrigued me and fascinated
me for some time now," he says. "It's one of the most beautiful stories going around, and deals with interesting subject
matter -- exterior beauty versus inner beauty, among other things. And it's a really terrifically structured play. The
adaptation that Andrew Upton has done is really quite fabulous. There's nothing extraneous in it at all; there are
no loose ends. "
"Anyone who's interested in studying writing for the stage need go no further than to look at
this play for how wonderfully structured it is. It's five acts of big epic theatre -- it covers wars, love scenes on the
balcony, huge set pieces, sword fights, wonderful verse, and then it goes into really wonderful free-flowing descriptive
prose ... The characters are wonderfully carved, they're so rich. And Cyrano obviously is a gift for an actor because
there is so much there to work with. And then the other characters -- Roxanne is a gorgeous character, and what a
journey she's got through five acts of action ..."
And so on. Upton's adaptation, first performed by the Sydney
Theatre Company six years ago, is intended to make the language, and the cadences of it, more contemporary without
updating the drama. "We're still the Gascon cadets and we're still fighting the Spanish," Wenham says.
Fencing lessons
when he was 14, stage combat work in Hamlet, and expert coaching from swordsmen and fight co-ordinators for The Lord of
the Rings will come in handy. And he will be kitted up with a prosthetic nose. That's not something that can be left
to the imagination, Phillips says. "The audience does need to be confronted with how the odds are stacked against him,"
he explains. "He's lived with this terrible thing, this ugly thing that has blackened his life. For that tiny moment early
in the play he dares to hope that Roxanne may see through it."
Wenham grew up in a working-class suburb of Sydney,
the youngest of seven children in a family with no interest whatsoever in the performing arts. But his parents were
extraordinarily encouraging of this cuckoo in their nest. Strapped for cash, they gave him birthday presents of theatre
subscriptions to a pro-am company that staged plays in the city on weekends. His father would go to university book
sales, load up cartons with everything he could find on theatre, pay a couple of dollars for the lot, then cart them home
on the bus for his son.
"It was a terrific thing for my father to do," Wenham says fondly. "We used to go to
Sunday matinees at the Nimrod Theatre together and that was just the best time ever. My father now, even though he's in
his 80s and I obviously don't live at home any more, still goes to the theatre by himself, to the matinees.
There's been a joint love of the theatre that grew out of that."
Eventually Wenham went to the University of Western
Sydney, Nepean, to study acting -- he was rejected by the National Institute of Dramatic Art. He had no ambition to
be in movies. "I thought those actors came from a different planet," he says. "The height of my ambition when I was at
drama school was to eventually be accepted into what became the Belvoir St Theatre company."
He took small parts
in TV, in A Country Practice, GP and Blue Heelers. But he also appeared at Belvoir in the 1990s, in Hamlet and The Tempest.
In 1991, he created the role of Brett Sprague in the original stage play of The Boys at Griffin Theatre.
Six years
later, that play -- like another he appeared in, Cosi -- was made into a movie. Theatre, he says, is much more difficult than
film. "You have a much bigger support system as an actor on film and there's more time to achieve exactly what you
want to do, even though you don't have a structured rehearsal period. When you're doing a film, you have the luxury of
more than one take,more than one go at little pieces at a time. In a play, you have four weeks toachieve everything
and then you're up there on your own."
It's not only about working in real time: every night the audience, the
ambience and the experience of acting are different. "That's part of the appeal of it," he says. "You are entering into
dangerous territory and it's extremely precarious but you also enter into it with a wonderful, child-like excitement
at the possibility of it all."
The storytelling aspect of his craft is what fascinates Wenham these days. He would
like to direct films. "As a young actor, you're always concerned with doing the best that you can, you're focusing entirely
on yourself. I don't do that any more," he says. "Even with the play here at the moment, I'm concerned with every
other little bit that's occurring on stage and I want everything to be as brilliant as it possibly can be."
It's
not about control. "Oh god, no," he says, quickly, and you believe him. "As a director, I would want to empower everybody
else, as much as possible, to bring out what they've got in such a way that they could reach the peak of their performance."
Melbourne Theatre Company's production of Cyrano de Bergerac is at the Playhouse, Melbourne, February 23 to April
2.
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2. "DAVID KNOWS BEST"
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1 of 5 DOCUMENTS
Copyright 2005 Nationwide News Pty Limited
Herald Sun (Melbourne, Australia)
February 19, 2005 Saturday
SECTION: WEEKEND; Pg. W03
LENGTH: 967 words
HEADLINE: David knows best
BYLINE:
HARBANT GILL
BODY:
Being a good father is more important to David Wenham than being on Hollywood's
A-list, writes Harbant Gill
THE shock of being ugly, laughs David Wenham, is not something he needs to get used
to.
"Look, I tell you what, when I wake up in the morning all I have to do is look in the mirror and I'm very accepting
of that fact," he says before his first stupendous-snoz fitting for his role as Cyrano in Cyrano de Bergerac.
Wenham
hasn't spent hours pondering what life would be like for an ugly man who can't get the chick, but what's interesting to
him is how the physically disadvantaged can have great lives.
He cites Wendy Harmer's "wonderful, real-life" Australian
Story of the young child whose cleft palate was no impediment to success or acceptance.
And he speaks of the Hawaii
leper colony he lived in for four months for Molokai: The Story of Father Damien as the "best experience I've ever had"professionally.
"Here
were people who suffered the most horrendous existence but were certainly the most accepting people I've ever come across
and possibly the happiest people I have ever encountered in my life," Wenham says.
"They are extremely accepting
of their fate. They harbour no bitterness or resentment whatsoever. There's a huge amount of dignity. They sing all the
time. It makes you soar.
"Accept who you are, and then no matter what you are dealt with in life . . .that just
opens you up and you can live your life to the fullest."
Indeed, that appears to be how Wenham himself faces life.
He is not seduced by the Hollywood hype nor dazzled by his international successes such as The Lord of the Rings,
largely because his working-class blueprint defines his core values.
"The draw of fame and fortune was never
a factor. I love acting. I love being other characters, I love playing with other actors, whether on stage or on film.
It's something that gives me an incredible amount of joy and fulfilment.
"That's my motivating factor; to create
and to entertain people. That gives me the greatest joy, not how many zeros are in my bank account or how many magazines
I can appear in. That's fluff and bubbles," says the youngest of seven children.
"We didn't have much money growing
up. We lived in an environment where there was no need for anything other than friendship and support within the family
and the community for happiness. It was as simple as that."
Wenham's father worked in accounts in the same Sydney company
for 49 years.
"And my mother, besides being a full-time mother, could still juggle being a secretary
at a school. I can't fathom how she did it," says Wenham, who has a 16-month-old daughter, Eliza Jane, with actor partner
Kate Agnew.
"There were always meals on the table. She made most of our clothes and she worked. God almighty, how
on earth did she do it?"
Wenham's childhood love of putting on puppet and ventriloquist shows in the dining room,
with his sister selling tickets for 2c each, coupled with a great drama teacher at school led to drama studies at the
University of Western Sydney after a NIDA rejection. Soon the Marrickville boy was on stage and TV, where he won
hearts as Diver Dan in SeaChange.
A string of roles followed -- Cosi, The Boys, Better Than Sex, Moulin Rouge,
The Bank and Gettin' Square and on to international fame with the Rings trilogy and Van Helsing.
"I never knew
I could ultimately make a career out of it," Wenham says. "I never thought I'd ever be involved in movies . . . movie
stars, it was as though they were born in another place, on another planet."
At times he stills finds it surreal to
be on the set of a blockbuster he has been courted for.
"There are moments when I do pinch myself and think I have
been really bloody lucky. Like The Lord of the Rings, there was one particular day when I was on my horse and there were
about 100 horsemen around me and a huge camera. In fact, they built a road for this particular camera to go along as a tracking
vehicle.
"On that particular day I looked around and thought, 'This is extraordinary. I would never have even dreamt
of being involved in something like this'."
What keeps Wenham level-headed comes back to what he values most --
acting, his family and his "very small" circle of friends.
WENHAM treasures his private life, which is often invaded
by the paparazzi.
"It's not something I enjoy, no," he says. "It's not fun when not long after your baby's
born and you're out maybe going shopping and somebody alerts you in a carpark that somebody's hidden behind a car taking
photographs. No, it's not fun. But I try to accept that part as best I can and try not to let it affect me.
"I live
a very, very normal life and what I do hasn't changed the way I live my life, and it's something that I'm very proud of
and very happy because of it."
Wenham is glad he has never known the despair of Cyrano, a real person who yearned
for the unattainable all his life and died unfulfilled.
"I've certainly known longing, but not like that, no. Only
for people I am already involved with, whether it be my partner or my family, I know that sort of longing.
"That's
sometimes unbearable, but it's fabulous, it's a great thing to love somebody so much," he says of time away from his little
girl, whom he talks to every day on the phone.
"I make sure I'm never away for any great time when I'm interstate,
and if we go overseas I try to make sure they come with me. If I'm interstate I try to pop home, even if it's just
for a night."
Being a father, says Wenham, is "the greatest thing that I've ever done and ever will do. Definitely".
David
Wenham stars as Cyrano in the Melbourne Theatre Company's Cyrano de Bergerac, Feb 19-April 2, Playhouse, Arts Centre.
Tickets:
$66.50/$15. Ph: 1300 136 166 or www.mtc.com.au
LOAD-DATE: February 18, 2005
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