by Helen Barlow
Rob Collins may well be the next big thing. Tall and muscular and with charisma to burn, the 43-year- old Indigenous actor has even been touted as a potential James Bond. Born and raised in Darwin, where he still lives with his wife and family, Collins travelled to The Berlin Film Festival to promote Ivan Sen’s Limbo, which world premiered in competition.
“Rob’s great, he’s definitely got a big future,” says Sen, who is best known for Mystery Road, Goldstone, Beneath Clouds and Toomelah. “He just needs to get bigger roles. He’s very, very professional, and very, very dedicated. He can come in, he can change his look and he can change his weight and all kinds of things. In the Mystery Road TV show, people wouldn’t recognise him.”
Collins came to acting late, studying at NIDA from 2011 to 2013. His prominent roles have been in series, including Cleverman about an Indigenous superhero, The Wrong Girl, Glitch and more recently series Mystery Road, Total Control and RFDS, a medical drama centring around the Royal Flying Doctor Service. He also appears in an episode of Ten Pound Poms. Collins has also appeared in movies including Top End Wedding, Extraction and The Drover’s Wife and has a supporting role in an upcoming American movie, Arthur the King, alongside Mark Wahlberg.
Collins has also worked extensively on the stage, touring for two and a half years with The Lion King in the role of Mufasa and he played Lysander in a Sydney Theatre Company production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
In Limbo, Collins has a pivotal role as Charlie, the brother of a missing woman who was deemed murdered 20 years earlier in the fictional town of Limbo (actually Coober Pedy). Drug-addled detective Travis (Simon Baker) is assigned the case. Natasha Wanganeen plays Charlie’s sister.
What is it about this film that attracted you?
“What drew me to it was this character of Charlie, and the fact that he’s been chewed up and spat out by a system that is really not designed for him. It’s a story that is really familiar to me, as a person, as an Aboriginal man. It’s something that is at play, even in the subconscious, even if I live a really privileged life.
“I’ve got everything I could possibly want and I’m in a really happy, contented place. But, every so often I look around at the way things are and think they could be a lot better.”
How did you approach playing Charlie?
“I knew there had to be a level of restraint. Ivan was pushing me in that direction. It was both a challenge and really about feeling free to not speak a large amount of words, to let spaces flow between the characters and to really lean into the sparseness and the silence of the place.”
Charlie has let himself go and drinks too much. He slouches.
“You can’t help but let a character’s psyche inform how you carry yourself, which kind of happened organically with this role. One of the things that I really enjoyed about it was being able to physically transform. I did that in Mystery Road and that was really the first time that I felt transformed as a character, with the hair, the makeup and the teeth. It was the first time where I felt that the aesthetics really helped with portraying the psychology of the character. Every actor talks about transformation and that’s kind of the ideal.”
You wanted to work with Ivan on Limbo?
“I really desperately want to work with Ivan, and I think it was the right project. I’ve been acting for eight years now, but I still feel like I’m developing in many ways. And for any actor who’s developing, you want to work with the best. I’d only met Ivan once before when I was doing Mystery Road. He was kind of a presence there, but he wasn’t on set. He had this reputation for being really keyed-in. If you’re an actor in Australia, I think there are only a handful of directors who are on your bucket list and Ivan was certainly one of those for me. It was a pared down crew, it was Ivan, Simon, Natasha and myself. I guess that speaks to Ivan’s way as well. He’s very unassuming, really warm, and it kind of just was us out in Coober Pedy. It really felt intimate.”
Did you draw on your background for the role?
“Well, you know, every actor draws on their own personal experience, and you can’t help but not draw on where you’re from, and your mob. I’m very proud of being Tiwi and I’m very close to my family over there. Even subconsciously, it’s part of everything that I do.”
You’re married to a journalist, Laetitia Lemke.
“She’s had a long career for the ABC, and she’s recently started working for SBS.”
Has she helped you in your journey to where you are now?
“I really rely on her. There’s not a script that I get that she doesn’t read. She has a knack for seeing the story, because she has to as a journalist, which has been handy for me. She has a kind of shorthand to get the nuts and bolts of a scene or script.”
Why did you want to act in the first place?
“I don’t know. There wasn’t a moment when I decided this would my career. It happened very slowly and organically. My first love was music, and I was doing that with my brother. It kind of just morphed into, well, what’s next? What else? What other fun thing can we do around here in Darwin? There was an acting for camera workshop at a local community arts venue and we did it and we loved it. So that was kind of the start. But we’d grown up on a big diet of Hollywood movies, and we love movies. My brother, sister and I are real film buffs, and we have our own kind of language to the point where it annoys other people.”
You first completed a business degree, then worked in a government job.
“There was no conversation like I should go and do a business degree. It’s just something I kind of thought I should do. But I’ve retained none of it. It hasn’t been of use to me of late at all.”
You were accepted to study acting at NIDA after they came up to Darwin for auditions.
“From that point on, I’ve just gone on and on, thankfully. I went in as a 30-year-old married man with children, so the practicalities of not being able to work and relying on one income was hard. But I really enjoyed my three years there. It was foundational in terms of my technique, learning about other parts of the world and learning about acting theory. I was able to look at my voice and movement in a way that I hadn’t before. You get to an institution like that, and you’re solely dedicated to doing it from the moment you wake till the moment you sleep. You’ll never have that level of discipline again.”
How did the pandemic impact your work?
“I was strangely busy the whole time. I did RFDS and Total Control and we were out in places like Broken Hill and Winton. Probably because of the size of those places, they were able to put a bubble around production. I did my first international gig during that time as well.”
Arthur The King with Mark Wahlberg and directed by Simon Cellan Jones. What’s it about?
“It’s an adventure racing movie. It’s based on a memoir that Swedish adventure racer Mikael Lindnord wrote about competing in Ecuador. And in that competition, they befriended a dog. Apparently, there are lots of stray dogs in Ecuador and the dog became the unofficial team mascot and travelled with them.”
The story sounds very Hollywood.
“Yeah, that’s it. It became a screenplay and got picked up by Wahlberg’s people, and before you knew it, I was auditioning for it and off to the Dominican Republic. It was a real eye-opener because I hadn’t done a big sprawling Hollywood movie. And I was pleasantly surprised that people were normal and the man himself was really generous and warm – and not what I imagined a Hollywood superstar to be like. If it weren’t for the nine people that follow him constantly, he would just seem like an average guy. It was a fun project and very surreal to be in a resort in the Caribbean at the height of the pandemic.”
What is your role?
“I play the captain of a competing team, kind of the favourite to win. My job basically was to run through the jungle and play mind games with Mark Wahlberg’s team. I’m the stereotypical bad guy of the piece.”
Was it physically demanding?
“Every day on set I was doing something physical like running through the jungle or kayaking. I spent a lot of time on the water, which I love because you don’t really get to do that in Darwin, where there’s always the fear of being bitten by a crocodile.”
You’re still living in Darwin. How does that work for you?
“I do a lot of travel, I’m away from my family a lot. That’s the price I’ve had to pay. But thankfully people are interested in the work that I do, and I keep getting offers to do interesting things. It started as a great experiment – I mean, it makes more sense to be in Sydney or Melbourne or one of the big centres – but I love being home. It’s a really grounding place for me. It’s kind of where my heart and soul is. So, to be able to go back there and then travel to do work now and again, is really like the ideal.”
You’re a handsome guy. You remind me of Eric Bana in some ways…
“Really? Thankyou. I’ll take that any day.”
Have you played a role where your good looks have been utilised?
“I did a show called The Wrong Girl [above], which I really love. It’s based on a series of books by Zoe Foster Blake. That role was very much the handsome chef. It was a nuanced character, but he definitely had a physical presence and was meant to be charismatic. It’s a funny relationship in this industry with looks and acting, and I’ve tried to not let it sway the job I have to do, whatever it is. I just trust whatever aesthetically people see or whatever the work is going to do itself without me. I just do the actor stuff, you know, the thinking about character.”
Would you like to be the next James Bond? Traditionally, the actor is British and I’m not sure Barbara Broccoli wants an Australian Indigenous actor for the role or even a black Brit.
“I think characters are characters and roles are roles. Every actor wants to have a crack at things that are potentially against their type. It’s an iconic role and it would be so much fun. I’d need a good stunt double though. I don’t know if I could leap over buildings or run for extended periods of time. Someone else could do all that stuff.”
You have other upcoming roles in Ten Pound Poms and The Queen of Oz, where you co-star with the director Catherine Tate. Which do you think will be more prominent for you?
“It’s hard to say. I can never pick what’s going to be a success or failure. I have a very bad antenna for that kind of stuff. But they’re both fun UK projects. Catherine Tate is really well-known in the UK, and she’s got a really dedicated following. So, based on that alone, you’d imagine The Queen of Oz might attract attention. Ten Pound Poms had a great cast attached to it as well, Warren Brown is the lead. They’re both great stories, so we’ll see what kind of mark they make.”
Limbo is in cinemas on May 18, 2023
