By Dov Kornits
“I was not gonna get this role,” laughs Australian actor, Damon Herriman. “I was not gonna get a call back. Apparently, the producers thought that my take on the character wasn’t quite right.” In a happy twist, Herriman found out that the role that he’d auditioned for – and believed that he’d lost – in the US TV series, Flesh And Bone, might actually still be within his grasp. It just so happened that the director of the series pilot was David Michod, a fellow Aussie and the filmmaker behind the instant classic, Animal Kingdom, and its cruelly under-celebrated follow up, The Rover. Herriman knew Michod “a little”, and shot the director an email letting him know that he’d auditioned for the role. Michod summarily retrieved Herriman’s tape from the “no” pile, and then asked the show’s producers to give the actor some notes and let him throw down another audition. “That one request from him made all the difference,” Herriman reveals. “I got some notes, I did it again, and then I got the role. It went from, ‘No. Absolutely not. Definitely not you’ to one note session, just out of pure luck because I knew David. I think the moral of the story is that they should always give you notes and get you to do it again, because you shouldn’t have to have the luck of knowing the director.”
The lucky ones, however, are the producers of Flesh And Bone. In this series about Claire, a young ballet dancer (Sarah Hay) struggling to stay afloat in New York City, Herriman delivers perfectly pitched, scene stealing support as the shiftless Romeo, a down-on-his-luck neighbour (of sorts) who provides a little unlikely platonic friendship for the new-in-town waif. “I hadn’t intended this, but the producers thought that my initial audition for Romeo came across as a bit scary,” Herriman admits candidly. “They wanted him to be a lot warmer and more reverential and childlike. He sees himself as a servant and provider for others. He always wants to do the right thing because he has something in his past where he didn’t do the right thing. He’s also schizophrenic, so he’s obsessed over this idea that doing the right thing is the way to live your life. I didn’t have that information for the audition; the first time that you put down a take, based on one script, when you haven’t spoken to anyone about it, is a lot of guess work. When I got the notes, Romeo went from being a homeless guy that you might be a bit afraid to talk to into a guy that you could warm to quite quickly.”
This warmth is a vital ingredient for Romeo, who serves almost as a surrogate for the audience, as he’s very much the outsider in this series about the highly competitive, rarefied world of ballet. “That’s one of his main purposes,” Herriman offers. “He gives you a plot line that exists outside the ballet world. Almost the entire show is set in the ballet world, whether they’re actually at the ballet company or not. They’re usually with other people who are from the ballet company or discussing the ballet company. There are certainly other plot lines there – we get to see Claire’s home life back in Pittsburgh, and she works at a strip club at one point – but this one exists very much outside of the ballet world. The Romeo and Claire relationship is very much its own thing. It’s really well done how that progresses throughout the series.”
Flesh And Bone is created by Moira Walley-Beckett, who was one of the producers on the acclaimed Breaking Bad (on which Herriman did a guest spot), which prompts an obvious question: why is TV so damn good right now? “It starts with the writing,” Herriman replies. “You notice it when you read the scripts. You’re not cringing. You’re getting excited as you turn the page. The dialogue feels real, and it feels rich. The characters don’t feel two dimensional, and the stories and the plots are sophisticated. That’s what draws directors like David Michod. You wouldn’t have expected to work with directors like that in TV 10 or 15 years ago. I remember thinking 10 years ago, ‘Would I want to be in a TV show that went for years? I’d go crazy having to go in every day to do a show like that!’ But with the shows now, you don’t feel like that anymore. You actually hope that it keeps going on for years because you love it and you want to see what’s going to happen with your character and where the show’s going to go. It really has changed dramatically. I don’t know how it all started, but I’m glad that it did, because it makes the job so much more pleasurable.”
The role in Flesh And Bone is another on the long list of credits for Herriman, who has been acting since the age of six. His list of local credits – the classic Aussie comedy, The Big Steal; the acclaimed TV series, Love My Way, Offspring, Never Tear Us Apart: The Untold Story Of INXS, and Rake; Neil Armfield’s Candy; Nash Edgerton’s The Square; Russell Crowe’s The Water Diviner; the ensemble comedy, The Little Death; and the ingenious horror flick, 100 Bloody Acres – is an impressive one, but Herriman’s international appearances have been equally eye-catching. Best known as the snaky, duplicitous Dewey Crowe (pictured at top) on the crime series, Justified, Herriman has also featured in Vegas, The Lone Ranger, Battle Creek, and Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar. “I split my time pretty much 50/50 between Australia and America,” the actor explains. “Last year, I was probably in the US more than Australia, and this year, I may end up being here more than there. But it averages out to about half and half. I did another new series in the US last year called Quarry, which should be out in the second half of this year. We’re waiting to see if that’s going to go again, so I might be shooting that again in the second half of the year. I feel like I live in both places. Certainly I think of Australia as home…I’d never call LA home. I’m in each place enough to feel like I’m living in both places. As long as you don’t feel like you’re away for too long, and you can avoid people in the US thinking that you’ve gone and forgetting that you exist, so you can still be considered for work, then that’s great. That’s the perfect setup when that works out.”
Flesh And Bone is released on Blu-ray and DVD on May 18. To win a copy of Flesh And Bone, head to our giveaways page.