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David Wenham is showing me his scars. “I have 60 stitches on my face from skin cancer removal,” he says, pushing back his sandy blond hair, so I can examine the small mark tucked into his cowlick. The other scar, barely visible, runs down the middle of his forehead, from his hairline to his eyebrow.
“Thankfully, in Brisbane there was an extraordinary plastic surgeon who specialised in facial skin cancers. Unfortunately, he is now retired, so I don’t know what I’m gonna do next, but yeah, I have two lots of 20 stitches – that’s 20 stitches in the deep dermis and 20 stitches on top.”
We stumbled into skin cancers and scars because Wenham – one of our most recognisable and acclaimed actors who is fair of hair and fair of skin – moved to Brisbane a few years ago with his family, after 30-something years of living in Potts Point.
That was a bold choice, especially for someone with his complexion.
“Well, you got me there,” he says, laughing. “And the other day, I had, I can’t tell you how many, burnt off my arms, and I have to have two cut out, scraped and burned coming up.”
I have a big old lumpy scar on my right shoulder from a GP who was a little too cavalier removing a mole.
“Yeah, I have one – strangely – down in the groin area and I went to the ‘butcher’ who did it, and that one scarred,” he says. “And that one, I’m guessing, it probably came from [the 2006 action movie] 300. We shot that, in Montreal during winter, in our leather underpants [Wenham played a buff Spartan soldier] in the studio, and it was like minus 26C outside, and snow up to your knees.
“And, you know, we go into the studio – because it was all green screen and red screen – and spend the whole day in leather underpants. We had to look as though they couldn’t get pasty. So besides spraying colour on us, we had to go to a solarium once every week.
“And the only thing I can think of, obviously, I picked that up from the solarium because there’s no way that was ever exposed to the sun.”
That’s Speedo territory. “Yeah, underneath the Speedo.”
David Wenham had to keep his tan up while filming 300.Warner Bros.
We are sitting at the Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf Restaurant and Bar on a cool Friday, where the weather feels like it has finally committed to autumn (no Speedos here). Wenham is great fun, endlessly self-deprecating and reveals himself to be a Swifty. (What era? “I’ll get in trouble if I say because Millie, my daughter, will read and go, ‘Oh no’, and then I’ll embarrass her.” )
He is in the middle of rehearsals for An Iliad at STC. It’s a hefty one-man show, in which he plays the Poet – aka Homer – who is recounting the tragedies of the Trojan War. He speaks, at one point, in ancient Greek, and recounts a list with 200 items on it. “I’ll be employing the memory palace for that,” he says.
We have already ordered food, as Wenham is on the clock. It’s fish and chips for him (the flathead listed on the menu is not available, so it’s been swapped with a gurnard), and a side of cos salad. He then coaxes me into ordering the grilled Mooloolaba swordfish, to which I add roast spiced carrots, which turn out to be bloody enormous. We settle on sparkling water for drinks, and away we go.
Wenham grew up in Marrickville, in Sydney’s inner west. His family – he was the youngest of seven kids – lived on Illawarra Road, surrounded by Greek migrants.
“It was certainly the least trendy suburb when I grew up,” he says. “I loved it. I absolutely loved it. I was in a minority, being Anglo-Saxon, most of my neighbours were Greek, pretty much all of Illawarra Road, between where I lived and up to Marrickville Road, were all Greeks.
“Andrew, [was] my neighbour. I used to have two dinners every night. I’d have dinner at our place at five o’clock – we always ate very early – then I’d jump the fence and have dinner with Andrew.”
(In a coincidence worthy of the Fates, I was driving on Illawarra Road just before meeting Wenham for lunch when I spotted a Honda Odyssey parked on the side of the road with a sticker on the back that read: “My other car is an Iliad.” )
Fish and chips at The Wharf Restaurant and Bar.Janie Barrett
Wenham never had any great ambitions about being on screen – he saw only one or two films a year when he was growing up – “Disney films, like Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo” – while the TV at home was “always locked on the ABC. So I’ve got a lot of news and current affairs in – This Day Tonight and Four Corners – as a kid, I didn’t really see much entertainment on television”.
It was only when his parents bought him a subscription to the theatre (“I was a naughty boy at school, and a teacher basically brought up the idea that I should go to acting class”), and he started going with his dad on Monday nights, that he began to see a future in it, but not as a leading man.
“I never thought that I’d be playing leading men, ever,” he says. “I wanted to play characters that were further removed from who I was as a person, and that always excited me. Then my career took a very strange left-hand turn, which I didn’t anticipate, and I found myself playing leading roles, which I found puzzling at first, and then I followed that.”
After the usual pattern of supporting roles in local TV soaps – A Country Practice, GP, Blue Heelers etc – his big breakthrough on film came in 1998 with The Boys, which was loosely based on the infamous Anita Cobby murder. Wenham played the psychopathic Brett Sprague – the same role he played in the stage version some years earlier – and it was the beginning of a Wenham speciality: off-kilter men, often with mullets, who were cajoling or threatening, usually both. He was sometimes funny (Gettin’ Square), sometimes heroic (Lord of the Rings), but always unsettling (Fake).
The same year The Boys came out, Wenham took another sharp turn, playing dishy Diver Dan in the ABC dramedy SeaChange. That he was suddenly this sex symbol was, to him, quite baffling.
The swordfish.Janie Barrett
“When I started [on SeaChange], I know it seems bizarre to say, but I never saw myself as the leading man in that series,” he says. “I just thought I was this, you know, offbeat fisherman who happened to be just another one of the characters within the town.
“And I was very surprised – I was away during the whole time that the first season aired, I was in Hawaii shooting a movie called Molokai – I came back, and suddenly, I was a known public figure, which was very different to when I left for Hawaii some months earlier.”
You were lusted after, David!
“Very, very, very odd. I suppose the upside is it gave my family and friends many hours, days and weeks and months of mirth at my expense. Homer Simpson would have said, you know, ‘They weren’t necessarily laughing at me. They were laughing towards me’.”
Slightly less unsettling was his Lord of the Rings experience, in which he played the wise warrior and leader Faramir (still hunky, but this time on a horse). You were our Boxing Day tradition for three years, I tell him.
“That’s right! What do you do once it’s over? You start watching the extended version.”
He still has Faramir’s sword – gifted to him by director Peter Jackson – and the clapperboard from his final scene. What did he do? “It was a very short action thing – waiting, watching, listening, and then running around the corner.”
Wenham as Diver Dan with Sigrid Thornton as Laura. He never expected to be playing love interests. ABC TV
Apart from SeaChange and Lord of the Rings, he gets most often approached about 300. “That one was critically slammed, but has become a huge cult classic,” he says. “It’s so strange, the amount of people that come up say, ‘Oh, please do it. Is there a possibility of a sequel?’ And I know the answer to that: zero chance.”
With so much experience under his belt – Wenham is now 60 – is acting harder or easier for him now?
“It’s probably against what you would think. It becomes harder, for many reasons,” he says. “A lot of people are very surprised by children’s performances on film – ‘Oh, my god, that performance is extraordinary’ – to me, I don’t think it is extraordinary because that’s what kids do. They play. They imagine.
“It’s very easy to act when you’re young. It’s harder when you get older because as you go through life, you start to accumulate baggage, and also people, especially if you’ve done a bit, people know your work, and it’s harder to surprise people, in a way, but that’s the thing that does genuinely fuel me. I like subverting people’s expectations.”
The bill.
Our time is up, and Wenham has rehearsal to head back to. He says he rarely watches the things he makes, instead he finds the most satisfaction in their creation.
“That’s my happy place,” he says. “It’s like, yeah, I’ve done it. I was there. I’m in the present, moving on. That’s my happy place at the moment, in the rehearsal room, playing and creating from a little spark on the first day to see what happens four weeks later. That’s the thing that really fires me.”
An Iliad is at the Wharf 1 Theatre from April 13 to June 14.
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