careernav.

Career Progression

Unlike many kids, I knew I wanted to be an actor from a very early age. My parents had the foresight to enrol my four siblings and me in a local amateur children’s theatre group. From the moment I stepped onto stage at age 8 and said my one (very crappy) line of dialogue, I was hooked. At age 13 I met my first agent, who signed two of my brothers and I. Within a year, after a few highly unsuccessful attempts at auditioning, I’d done two commercials, both as an extra (non-speaking background actor).

Here I got to observe what happens on the set, including who does what and the importance of staying out of everyone’s way until needed. In 1990 I managed to get a few small guest roles on various television shows. Being untrained, I naturally made a lot of mistakes and gave some terrible performances. This however was the best kind of learning experience I could have had. It was my ‘on the job’ training. I’d always wanted to do comedy, but unfortunately most of the roles that people laughed at weren’t meant to be funny. I was in serious danger of having to look for another career.

At 15 I landed a regular role in a sitcom called Late For School. Haven’t heard of it? That’s because it was awful. And I was awful in it. But my ‘on the job’ training was continuing, while I had a tutor for four days a week for 6 months. After the show was unceremoniously axed I spent the next few years finishing school. I got a few small roles in TV shows, but not a great deal.

At 17, just prior to graduating from secondary school, I auditioned for admission to the Victorian College of the Arts  School of Drama., I got into the third round of auditions, only to be told that I needed to go and get a few years ‘life experience’ before they could accept me. It was the last drama school audition I ever did. I decided, then and there, that I was indeed going to get life experience, vowing to spend my entire life away from drama school. For the next three years I studied Media Arts at RMIT, majoring in Film Production, whilst still doing a few small TV roles in series’ and commercials.

In 1996 I was fortunate enough to land the role of Dale Kerrigan in the film The Castle. This turned out to be more successful than anyone could have imagined, making over 11 million at the Australian box office. It was released in twenty countries worldwide, including the USA, UK, France and Germany. It was also the moment that my dream career turned into a reality. It was during the shooting of the film that I became friends with Eric Bana, with whom I subsequently wrote and acted with on his sketch show Eric. A couple of years later we worked again on the feature film The Nugget. Over the next 10 years I did the films Cut, The Wogboy, Take Away, Thunderstruck, The night we called it a Day and Rogue. I appeared in the TV shows Queen Kat, The Day of the Roses, Flipside (which I also created and wrote), Changi, Sit Down Shut Up, The Secret life of Us, Mary Bryant, The Informant, and False Witness. I performed with the Melbourne Theatre Company in Fred and Dinner.

In 2007 I played the role of Graham Kennedy in the award winning telemovie The King. For that I won the AFI award for best actor in a television drama and the 2008 Silver Logie for Most outstanding actor on Australian television.

This is just one story of a continuing acting career. Every acting career progresses in a different way. Any acting work will provide on-the-job training and “learning by doing”. There is no way of guessing in advance how a particular acting opportunity might affect the career of an actor. A television series may sink without trace after six episodes, or run for twenty years. A film may capture the public imagination and affection as The Castle did, propelling its actors to recognition and perhaps fame and fortune.  For the vast majority of actors , however, the more modest aspiration is to keep working, through the recognition that leads to a continuing flow of acting opportunities that challenge and excite, while hopefully keeping food on the table.