He's just Wilde about Oscar

Daniel Gillies had to dig deep to find the elements he needed to play Oscar Wilde's lover. SUSAN BUDD finds he relished the challenges.

Daniel Gillies looks more like James Dean than Lord Alfred Douglas, the effeminate lover of Oscar Wilde.

Contemporary photographs reveal "Bosie," as he was known, as a slight, cherubic young man with a mass of blond curls. Gillies is a well-muscled 24-year-old, almost 1.8m tall, with dark hair and eyes, graceful but butch.

Yet we must suspend disbelief because he plays Bosie in the Auckland Theatre Production of The Judas Kiss by David Hare.

Gillies was "a bit frightened" of playing a character that Hare portrays as self-centred, an egoist who dumps Wilde when the going gets too tough.

The Judas Kiss is rich in metaphor. Wilde's witticisms sparkle against the sombre background of the disintegration of his life and love, and Gillies is overwhelmingly conscious of the responsibility to find elements of wit and humour in his role. After all, Bosie must have had something other than his chorus girl curls to win the love of Wilde.

While Wilde is painted as positively saintly, Gillies feels Bosie has been somewhat demonised by contrast.

"At 23, he is a young wayward aristocrat, a mother's boy, spoiled and a heavily flawed human being," he says.

"He never takes responsibility and justifies his selfishness by blaming everybody else. But I have never read a positive account of his father."

And it was the Marquess of Queensberry who set Wilde on the path to ruin by accusing him of "posing as a sodomite" and searching London for young men willing to testify against him in court.

Perhaps, by contrast, Wilde was the ideal father. Gillies agrees. "He was offered an alternative world by a wonderful, charming man with the theatre in his grasp."

They had no sex from six months before the trial and he believes Wilde was a paternal figure in a relationship that was one of touching rather than penetrative sex. Gillies involuntarily screws up his face at the last words.

"You need to find what you love about your character to play him," says Gillies. He respects Bosie's strength and tenacity, the fact that he was the last to leave Wilde before the trial.

"He really believed in the ideal of Greek love - I have to respect that. The role is no harder than anything else I have done but it is more challenging. It is another world - I cannot compare it to anything I know," says Gillies.

He plays a scene nude and admits there are times when he has to step outside his comfort zone, but "the play protects you."

Since leaving Unitec in 1996, Gillies has rarely been out of work. He has played Octavius Caesar in Antony and Cleopatra at the Court Theatre and Julius Caesar for the ATC. He won the Chapman Tripp award for Best Male Newcomer in 1999 for Jimmy Sullivan in The God Boy at Downstage Theatre.

He can be seen on television playing Tim O'Connor, a young lawyer in Street Legal, and has just finished playing a "psycho, bad-ass American" in a movie shot in and around Auckland. "It was cool to be playing a villainous character," he says.

But Gillies' proudest achievement was seen by only 400 or 500 people. He wrote and directed Maybe, which had a short season at Unitec.

"It was the most satisfying time," he says. "I am definitely going to direct." Acting is his first love but he sees the move to directing as a natural progression once he has had several years more experience.

"I have always adored theatre. Theatre is truly where I believe acting is taught from head to toe. You have to be so completely immersed. It is where I find complete nourishment."

This year Gillies decided it was time to chill out, so he took off for New York, where he had a ball for two months.

"The universe was looking after me," he grins, his mood a blend of fatalism and superb self-confidence.

* The Judas Kiss by David Hare, ATC, Maidment Theatre, until November 4.