By Travis Johnson
Self-deprecating and completely devoid of pretension, Bryan Brown would never describe himself as a legend. The thing is, he most definitely is one. He’s the quintessential Australian actor, now in the sixth decade of a performing career that has seen him make an indelible mark on our cultural landscape. Starting off in the theatre in the mid-1960s, he began taking supporting screen roles in the ’70s that soon gave way to featured performances in the likes Stir and The Odd Angry Shot, before increasingly high profile turns in the likes of Breaker Morant and The Thorn Birds saw Hollywood begin to take notice.
Despite sharing the screen with Sigourney Weaver in Gorillas in the Mist and Tom Cruise in Cocktail – not to mention Brian Dennehy in the F/X duology – the allure of tinsel town soon wore off, and Brown returned to Sydney to raise a family with his wife, Rachel Ward, and to continue entertaining both television and cinema audiences, racking up appearances in everything from Two Hands to Mullet, Dirty Deeds, Australia, and even Gods of Egypt.
Yet he still considers himself a jobbing actor, someone always happy to be in work in what can be a pretty feast-or-famine industry. When we ask how he came on board Australia Day, his third collaboration with director Kriv Stenders following Kill Me Three Times and Red Dog: True Blue, he answers plainly, “Well, the biggest reason is they asked me.”
In point of fact, Brown had passed on an earlier draft of the script, but when Stenders came on board, the story had been polished enough to warrant another look. “It’s a really hard question to say why does something attract you,” Brown tells us. “First of all I have to go: do I like the story? And I went, well, there’s quite a story in there, quite a lot of truths in there that I haven’t seen before. It’s a pretty…” he searches for the word. “…game sort of movie, I thought. I liked the Australia that it shows – you’ve got an Asian Australian, a Greek Australian, an Indigenous Australian. I liked the fact that there were three stories, and I liked the way it came home. So I was only too happy to go ahead and do it then.”
Set on a sweltering hot Australia Day in Brisbane, the film, written by Stephen M. Irwin, follows multiple interconnected storylines. In one an Indigenous cop (Shari Sebbens) tries to track down a runaway girl following a fatal car accident. In another, the son of immigrants (Elias Anton) is tortured in a suburban garage by a coterie of drunk white youths who are convinced he has raped the sister of one of them. And in the third, a young Asian woman, Lan Chang (Jenny Wu) flees for her life from sex slavers, coming into the orbit of a potential saviour in the form of Terry Friedman (Brown).
However, Brown’s Terry has his own agenda. A Vietnam veteran and farmer, he has recently lost the family property, and that loss has left him in desperate straits. “It’s not easy to describe him because he’s a very emotional bloke,” Brown explains. “And there’s a lot of stuff happened to him that’s thrown him all over the place. He’s made a decision on this day to do something that’s pretty irrational, but it makes sense to him.”
Lan’s sudden appearance changes all that, as Terry can’t help but help. “He’s a fella that’s been to Vietnam. He’s used to being a soldier, he’s used to doing what a soldier does, which is go in and try to help people – forget the politics of it, as a soldier you’re there because it’s the right thing to do, to make life better for some people, so that’s in him. It’s a good character because there’s a lot of emotions running through the guy, but he’s not letting them out. And he gets forced to sort of let them out into someone else’s problem.”
He faces a problem of his own, though, with communication being difficult due to Lan’s lack of English. According to Brown, however, that restriction didn’t present much of an obstacle when it came to performing opposite Wu. “You’re just trying to be honest to the character,” he says. “The situation as set up is a pretty good situation. You meet someone who jumps into your truck – what’s all that about? Oh, they’re in trouble? Oh shit, well, okay, I’ve got a bit of time, let’s go see what your problem is. Seems to be someone after her – let’s go somewhere and try and sort this out.”
Effectively, Terry reacts instinctively to the situation presented – which neatly mirrors Brown’s approach to acting. When asked if he does much research into his characters – say, looking into the plight of farmers losing their property, or incidence rates of sex salver,y for example – he demurs. It is, he feels, unnecessary – at least in this case.
“It doesn’t demand that, it demands ‘where is this character emotionally?’” he says. “And the scenes were sort of laid down that made sense, where I could take this character emotionally through those steps. I just had to make sure that they made sense to me, that the character’s choices made sense to me, and they did. Basically, if the thing’s written down well, I just let go and let the instincts take over.
“I’m a pretty instinctive actor, really.” he adds.
For this film, the veteran shares almost all his scenes with the relatively inexperienced Jenny Wu, who made her screen debut in 2015 in Dean Francis’ Drown. Brown is effusive in his praise of his young co-star, saying, “Oh, she’s a really good actress. It’s quite funny – we had a rehearsal in Sydney before we went up, and within about 20 seconds of the first bit of rehearsal I went, ‘Well, this girl really knows what she’s doing so let’s just get on with it.’ She didn’t need anything from me. What she needed from me was to present her with a Terry – that’s what she needed. And what I needed from her was to present this young girl who she plays, and to be honest to that character.”
And while at base he hopes that audiences simply enjoy the film – “you hope that there’s a good drama in there and there’s an emotional connection” – Brown admits to being proud of the way Australia Day attempts to depict an Australia markedly different than the one seen on our screens at the dawn of his career.
“I think probably the biggest thing you draw from it when you’re watching is that the face of Australia is changing.” he muses. “It’s not just Anglo any more. Since the Second World War Australia has been becoming a much richer, more culturally diverse nation which presents lot of opportunities and interesting things to us, and I think that’s probably what you walk away with. If we’d have made this 40 years ago it would have been all Anglos.”
Australia Day is in cinemas now. read our review here.
