Acting is something I love. It’s a great craft that I have a lot of respect for. But I don’t think it’s any greater challenge than teaching 8-year-olds or any other career. In my life, I try not to make it more important than it is and I just hope that rubs off on the people around me.
For Sunday breakfast, I make orange and ricotta pancakes, crepes and eggs. You know men, we usually go for breakfast because it’s the easiest thing to cook and then we try to make it seem fancy.
The definition of being good is being able to make it look easy.
At the end of drama school, I made a contract with myself: I’d try acting for five years. I was 26. I had already spent eight years working in restaurants and gas stations. So I had seen enough small businesses to understand that that’s what acting is: a small business.
Because I believe actually the more you do something, the less frightening it becomes because you start to realize the outcome is not as important as you think.
Comic book fans have loved Wolverine, and all the ‘X-Men’ characters, for more than the action. I think that’s what set it apart from many of the other comic books. In the case of Wolverine, when he appeared, he was a revolution really. He was the first anti-hero.
I had spent some time in the outback, but to meet Aboriginals and work with them was wonderful. It gave me a great appreciation of how tough life is and about the indomitable spirit that the Aboriginal people have always possessed.
And I think that, of course, there is some dysfunction of needing to be liked or noticed or to feel part of things, something going on there for most actors. For some there’s not and I think they really struggle with it.
I just find the evangelical church too, well, restrictive. But the School of Practical Philosophy is nonconfrontational. We believe there are many forms of Scripture. What is true is true and will never change, whether it’s in the Bible or in Shakespeare. It’s about oneness.
I have lots of older siblings, and as they started to leave the house, I went from cooking once a week to twice, three times, and so on. After a while, it was just like making the bed.
To make films like ‘X-Men’ work commercially – and also have some class – is one of the hardest things there is to do. I want to be seen to be able to cross lots of genres and still be ‘fair dinkum,’ as we say in Australia, which means genuine and true and, well, unique.
My favorite play in drama school was ‘The Bacchae.’ It’s about a king who literally gets eaten alive by all the women in the play in a kind of orgy – it’s related to the word ‘bacchanal’ – and I loved that idea of animalistic chaos and following our own desires.
As an actor, you have many tools – your body, your voice, your emotions, mentally. In film, you have your eyes because they communicate your thought process. In fact, generally in film, what you don’t say is more important than what you say. That’s not so much the case for stage.
My friends say, ‘Man you’re going to have kids sleeping on pillowcases with your face on it! You’re going to be on toothbrushes and magnets and stuff.’ I guess now that I’m a dad, I’m thrilled about that.
Sometimes you have to go places with characters and emotions within yourself you don’t want to do, but you have a duty to the story and as a storyteller to do it.
The last 10 years I have had to bulk up for roles and I’m naturally skinny, so I have eaten and killed so many chickens! I wouldn’t even want to count. I need to balance that out.
It’s always interesting – how do you actually convey thought through song? We’re used to the convention on stage. In film, we used to be used to it, and now sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. You need to be fresh and really look at the material.
I’m doing a new musical on Broadway, which opens in October called ‘The Boy from Oz,’ where I play Peter Allen. For those of you who don’t know, he became first famous in America for marrying Liza Minelli.
I was brought up in a way that when you’re at a dinner party, you don’t grab a chip unless it’s been offered to everyone else. It’s the manners of being brought up by English parents.
I’m not a kid. You don’t get in this business for anonymity. It’s not like I have posters of myself on the wall, but at the same time, I’m kind of ready for a little bit of it, but I worry for my little one, and my family – their privacy. That’s what I’m more protective of.