Actors are liars. Liars and crooks. We have Grant Bowler's word on it - and he really ought to know. The star of Outrageous Fortune has been one, an actor, for 20 years; he has seen the worst of it. He is now seeing some of the best of it. And frankly, if his experience has taught him anything, it's not to trust thespians.
By way of explanation, he launches, as he does often in our telephone chat, into an anecdote, one that he tells with the relish of a pub raconteur. It begins some years ago, perhaps a dozen, when he was in an Aussie drama called Medivac. "This guy comes on the show, and he tells [the cast] this story about this actor he'd worked with and what the actor had been up to: big night out, turned up to work [on Blue Heelers] terribly hungover and was still half-cut while driving a car, a cop car, around.
Now this bloke gets to the end of the story about this actor he'd been working with and all the ins and outs of what had happened and I looked at him and said 'that's me'. He went 'what?' I said 'you're telling a story about me that I tell. You've heard it from somebody else and then you've made it your own story'. I said 'I was there on the day that happened because it was me - and you were nowhere to be f***ing seen'."
Bowler pauses, chortles. "We [actors] lie for a living, you can't get a straight answer out of us - me included." Bounders and cads all. Which is why he generally avoids them "like the plague" when not working. However, to Bowler's charge that they are liars, I would add another. They are bores. Screaming ones.
While interviewing them, particularly well-known ones, might from the outside seem a mildly diverting thing to do, it soon wears thin. While there are gems among them, most fall into two broad categories: the earnest and the self-important. Britons and New Zealanders tend towards the former, Americans the latter. And all have an alarming tendency toward being dull - and saying absolutely nothing about anything while being so. Grant Bowler, I discovered, is not one of these actors.
"Everyone who goes to drama school wants to be the serious type of actor," Bowler rumbles into his cellphone from some noisy streetside cafe in Bondi. He's just ordered a flat white. "You want to be critically acclaimed, tortured, alcoholic ... It's funny, because that's completely changed for me over the years. I don't admire any of that anymore. I actually have a goal of being happy and having a nice life."
After years of what might be seen as steady if unspectacular success in Australia, the 40-year-old is only now finding himself closing in on those ambitions. Last year he spent just six weeks at home in Sydney. For 10 months he was working in Auckland, Los Angeles and New York.
Here, he reprised his role as Wolfgang West in Outrageous Fortune. There, after years of attempting to break in, he appeared as a season regular in hit shows Ugly Betty and Lost. He is chipper about all this. It is, he says, a "purple patch". Though he freely admits that time away from his wife, actress Roxane Wilson, and their two young children hasn't all been a box of birds. "I've got a 4-year-old and 6-year-old that are calling the mailman daddy. My son, when I walked through the door this last time home, he looked at me and he said 'Daddy?' - he said it with an upward inflection ... as in 'are you my Daddy?' Uh-oh ..."
The US jobs, and the serious money - and possible prospects - they mean, were something of an unexpected pay-off after years of being just another Aussie actor trying to get noticed in LA. "I'd love to be the guy who grabs hold the magic carpet every time. But I'm not. I think I did 100-120 auditions [in the US]. I went over three times with the family. Went broke. We'd all come home and I was back doing Outrageous without any idea of how I was going to pull the money together to go again. Then they [Lost's producers] rang off an old audition and said 'do you want to be on our show'." He laughs. "It's hilarious because it was such a tortuous and random route. I don't have a road map." But he does have ambition. I ask what it is. "I want to be president of the world." Well good luck there... "When I am president of the world, you're going to the gulag for that comment. Siberia for you Sunny Jim...
Look, I don't know. I stare at the pinnacle of it all and I see a lot of people running 100 miles an hour to stand still, their marriages are falling apart, they're friggin' miserable. Just being the person that I am, I don't know whether I could bear that. But by the same token, the ultimate goal is to be able to choose my work and to have some financial stability, the equivalent of what I'd have in any career if I'd worked as long and as hard I have."
Bowler could have been a contender. In his late teens, he fancied being a boxer. He'd done plenty of it, martial arts too - "you had to where I lived because if you were going to wear good clothes you were going to get in a fight" - but thought better of it after a conversation with one old bruiser. "I woke up at the last minute when this old pug looked at me and said 'mate, if you can do anything else in this world, do it. Don't do this."'
If he had gone pro-boxing, it would have been honourable enough work for a blue collar kid from Brisbane. Bowler's mother and biological father are New Zealanders. But after his old man buggered off when Bowler was 5 - never to be heard from again - mother and sons (Bowler has an older brother, Brett) moved to Australia. They bounced around plenty. Sydney, Perth, Sydney again, then Brisbane.
By the time Bowler left home he'd lived in 26 different houses and apartments and been to seven schools and the Kiwi kid became an Aussie, though he rather diplomatically (for him) calls himself an "Aus-iwi" these days. "My mother remarried when I was 9 and my [step] dad is the only father I've known. He's about as Australian as you can get. He grew up in the surf clubs and played professional rugby league. He was a tradesman and he speaks once every three and a half weeks. He's just that quintessential, quiet Aussie bloke and he's a very good man."
Out in the suburbs of Bris-vegas, the only kind of acting anyone did was acting up. "I grew up... what's the equivalent?... Christ, you know, well, where the Wests live. You used to get in a fight on the way to the bus stop if you dressed at all differently to anyone else. All you had to do was get a haircut to get in a punch-up. So the idea of acting never crossed my mind. I just assumed that was something other people did, not people where I came from." He's worked a few jobs.
Labourer, in the cut-flower markets, bars, waitering, even sold encyclopedias door-to-door for a week. "That was hell, that went against everything I believe in. I literally just didn't go back one morning, I couldn't do it. You aim at the ones who, funnily enough, are a little towards the lower end of the financial scale and then you just count on their guilt, that they haven't got a set of encyclopedias for their kids, and just try and wind them up." He laughs. "It's not how I like to go about life. I guess in a way as an actor you're selling something all the time - internally - you're selling a lie, basically. But I can't do that, I can't sell to people. Whatever it is, I look at it and say it's just a thing, it's heap of crap, why am I telling them that they need this in their life and that it will make them happy? It's not going to make them happy." He feels the same way about the advertising industry, where he ended up after he'd ditched a communications degree six months in. It was while working as a copywriter that three things happened. The first was that Bowler realised the head copywriter, who had been an actor, was just an ordinary bloke.
QED, ordinary blokes could be actors. The second was, while bored with waiting for his girlfriend to get ready to go out, he flicked through one of her Dolly magazines and came across a story about young Sydney actors and the places they went to learn the craft. The third was he became the last-minute on-screen talent for an ad that his agency was making after the guy who was supposed to do it didn't turn up. "So I jumped in front of the camera. I found it easy. Little did I know that it had very little to do with acting. But I ended up on telly and my mates beat me up, then patted me on the back. I thought 'I can do this' and packed my bags about three months later and moved to Sydney and started acting."
You can take the boy out of Brisbane. But there's no way you can make him be some sort of hippie. After talking his way into Sydney's prestigious National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) - they took just 24 students his year - on the first try, Bowler found himself among an unfamiliar and not entirely pleasant species: showbiz types. "The students were all roaming the halls in their organic hemp pyjamas, eating lentil soup. I was like, 'could I get a leg of beef? And club me another harp seal, I need a steering wheel cover for my car'. It was a bit of a culture shock. And they all seemed to know people or were children of people in the industry, or had grown up in it. I felt like an interloper for a long time."
Mind you, this didn't stop him becoming a bit of a tosser himself. "You sit around in coffee shops competing to see who's the most tortured. I had a fair crack at it. As a young performer I think the common misapprehension is being tortured creates your ability."
For the three years at NIDA, he was "working doors" to pay his way and would sometimes turn up for classes straight from casualty. "I had to hide from my head of acting because he'd come around and I'd be strapped up and he'd [say] 'what's that?' I'd say, 'got stabbed, gotta go!' "They said to me 'you've got to stop this' and I'd say 'well if I stop this I'm broke, I can't keep coming to school. It's the only way I can earn enough money, besides male prostitution, to cover this'."
The classical acting education opened out into a classical theatre career. Bowler signed to an apprenticeship with the Bell Shakespeare Company, Australia's only touring Shakespeare company, in the early 1990s. He stayed two years. "I had been having a good time that second year in the Shakespeare company. I did a lot of drinking - but forgot to save. I got the role in [the Blue Heelers pilot] and talked to my mates, none of whom knew what they were talking about, I realised later. They said they make pilots all the time and they never go, just make the pilot on this thing, it'll give you some bucks and then you won't have to worry about shooting a TV series. I went 'oh good'. Then I shot the friggin' pilot and it became the biggest show in Australian TV history."
The Blue Heelers Bowler signed to was a show for adults. However, and to his annoyance, the long-running drama soon morphed into an early-evening family show. "I liked the job I signed on to, which was the slightly harder-edged version. I never sat comfortably in the family version. It just bored me to tears as an actor, being asked to play this halfwit constable who'd wander around in the background staring at the grass looking for clues. It really ground you down. I'm not knocking the show, but it was just not a good fit. I was the first one to bail, and believe me I bailed as soon as I possibly could. And I've never regretted that, ever. "If I'm unhappy in a job I become useless. I can feel myself punching the clock and then I get really, really uncomfortable."
Regrets, Bowler has a few, and he's not afraid to mention them. "Are there any jobs I regret? Oh f*** yeah. There are things I've had to do that I didn't want to do at the time, I still hide from today. I did an episode of Farscape, that weird half-puppet/sci-fi show." Not good? "No, not good at all. I had a mohawk and was painted bright purple with gold flecks. For some people it would be heaven on a stick, they love that whole thing. I hate it. In fact, I was being looked at seriously for a sci-fi series that was going in the States last year ... I rang my agent and said 'I'm not going in' and she went 'are you insane? This thing will go for five years' and I said 'listen, if I go on as full-time on a sci-fi show you will find me naked from the waist down swinging by a rope in the starship command set at the wrap party at the end of the first year. I'll kill myself.' She went 'fair enough'." Outrageous Fortune - his first and, so far, only job here - features at the other end of the spectrum.
Wolfgang West has been, season after season, a catalyst for the bad stuff, with the most explosive storylines going his way. In other words, Bowler bloody loves him and the show. Outrageous co-writer James Griffin says Bowler's brought a rough, sexual edge to Wolf, as well as a danger and intensity that wasn't on the page.
However there were mutters among local thespians back in 2005, when the first series went to air, that a New Zealand actor should have been cast. "With all due respect to the male acting fraternity of New Zealand," Griffin says, "the sort thing that we wanted in the character of Wolfgang West is really hard to find amongst Kiwi bloke actors, even the really good ones. They're all a bit... nice." Robyn Malcolm's first thoughts on sighting Bowler were "big and rude", but reckons he combines the best in actors, he's easy-going and demanding. "He is absolutely present, completely fearless and he expects the same back. Wolf is the supposed villain of the show and Grant has never made the actor/ego mistake of trying to get the audience to like him or hate him. As a result, Wolf is a complex and compelling character."
Bowler, interestingly enough, believes others on the show - he doesn't say who - have made this actor/ego mistake. "I've seen the progression in Outrageous from characters who were truly working class, where they didn't stop to dwell on their own feelings and their own turmoil, who did what people have to do, which is just keep moving forward. "What I've noticed in the last couple of seasons is you have an enormous number of characters howling for themselves.
In fact in some episodes, two or three times. These characters are crying for their own predicament. It's actors wanting to be popular: 'my character has done something bad so what I'll do is burst into tears and that way, because they see me crying, the audience will like me again'. It's a symptom of getting too many awards, basically." Another thing he says he's spotted from a distance about the show, since it's become such a success, is there's been "a lot wrangling about who is responsible" for that success. "It's ludicrous. It's basically the sign of people who have never been in a success before - that one will put the cat among the pigeons. But here's the thing, it's about chemistry, it's about nobody, it's about everybody."
With that sort of, well, outrageous talk, it's probably just as well he's got other work on. Whether it will be in the US remains, for the moment, uncertain. He has no idea if he will repeat the role of Captain Gault on Lost - "they keep it secret, even from themselves". But there have been "rumblings" about a reprise of his Connor Owens character on Ugly Betty, a stint which comes to a conclusion on our screens this week - "I know they'll love to have me back."
And he'd like to be back too; Betty, like Outrageous Fortune, was another rare encounter with the aforementioned chemistry. Still he's confident of more work in the States. Three series in three years means he's in "a pretty good spot from what I understand. I'm not worried". The third, HBO's 12 Miles Of Bad Road, died during the writers' strike last year.
More concerning is what he calls a "pandemic" of "neutered males" in scripts. "Television is a bloody powerful medium which is why I have this desperation to keep some of the rough edges in. And I don't mean rough as in abusive or anything like that, what I mean is keep the behaviour slightly messy. Because people's behaviour is messy.
"I like playing men. I'm not being facetious. I don't like playing boys. And I don't like playing this post-modern, new millennium boy-man thing. I'm not into it, I'm sorry. It's a phase, it's a really unfortunate one and people, in 100 years, are going to look back and go 'Jesus Christ, they look like the French during [the reign] of Louis XIV'. The cuffs and the makeup - they're all frigging waxed! They have no body hair!"
Spoken like a true wolfman.
Lone wolf
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