By Erin Free
“I got kicked in the face,” Sean Keenan laughs when asked how he enjoyed working on his last film, the action flick, Hard Target 2. “I got kicked in the face by Scott Adkins,” he giggles again, referring to the film’s burgeoning action man star, most famous as the hulking butt-kicker from the Undisputed series. Shot in Thailand, the dizzying, all-guns-blazing nature of the shoot (“Everything was safe and very professional, but it was pretty crazy,” Keenan says) was far different to anything that the young actor had experienced previously. But with Hard Target 2 still in post-production, FilmInk actually has Keenan on the line to talk about his new film, Is This The Real World, which is just about to hit cinemas, and is considerably more safely aligned in the actor’s wheelhouse than the aforementioned action belter.
The low budget first feature from Melbourne based writer/director, Martin McKenna, Is This The Real World tracks Keenan’s casually rebellious teen, Mark Blazey, who locks into a relentless battle of wills with his new school’s controlling headmaster, Mr. Rickard (Greg Stone), while courting further danger by romancing his daughter, Kim (Charlotte Best). Meanwhile, Mark’s single mum, Anna (Susie Porter), is trying to hold their family together, while Mark’s older brother, Jimmy (Matt Colwell), is not trying nearly hard enough to keep himself out of prison.
A charismatic scene stealer in the brilliant teen TV series, Puberty Blues, and the unconventional ABC-TV genre-bender, Glitch, Sean Keenan truly steps it up with Is This The Real World, appearing in virtually every scene, and anchoring the entire film. It’s a strong, keenly intelligent performance, as Keenan captures both Mark’s deep well of sensitivity and his proclivity for insolence and petty acts of rebellion. Did the young actor feel the weight of responsibility with his first lead in a feature film? “Pressure can be a good thing, and it can be a bad thing,” Keenan replies. “If you go into a scene feeling pressured, and that kind of pressure is not there in the scene, it can be really bad. And then that can just make any pressure that you’re feeling exponentially worse, and it can just spiral. You just have to be true to the script, and to the character, and to their goals. I approach every job that I do in the same way, in that I always just try to do the best job that I can. Being my first lead role, I actually approached this more with a sense of excitement. Martin was also really open to hashing things out and collaborating, so there was no overbearing pressure from him. You always fret a bit when you get home at night and you think about how you could have done things differently in a scene, but ultimately, you’ve got to trust in your performance.”
Though sharing great moments with his fellow Puberty Blues cast members, Susie Porter and Charlotte Best (“When you know someone in life, it just breaks down any barriers straight away. We’d just finished Puberty Blues, and then we went straight into this. It was like seeing family again”), Keenan’s most epic moments in the film come in his scenes opposite veteran character actor, Greg Stone, who makes his school principal a chilling mix of icy calm and uncontrolled rage. “Greg is such a lovely, caring guy, but he has this ability to gain access to something that allows him to become this malicious person on screen, which is kind of scary,” Keenan says. “When you’re working with a great actor like Greg, it just makes everything easier. Those scenes in the office between us have an almost palpable sense of tension to them. Between takes on those scenes, it was like lockdown. We stayed in isolation, and Martin asked the crew to leave us alone so we wouldn’t be pulled out of the scene. It was a low budget movie, and we shot it in twenty days, so everyone gets in and helps, but on those days, we kept to ourselves between takes.”
Did Keenan notice any major differences between working on Is This The Real World and high quality TV like Puberty Blues? “There’s a lot more freedom,” the actor replies. “Martin could try lots of things visually. In TV, there are a lot of people that you have to answer to. It’s more about getting coverage than trying something interesting. As soon as I met Martin, I knew that he was keen to achieve shots that were quite dynamic, so that was really exciting as an actor.”
The 23-year-old has been acting since his teens. He was in Year Seven in his coastal home town in Western Australia when his school was asked to send along five kids to audition for a new TV series called Lockie Leonard. Seeking out fresh faces, the producers had thrown the casting net far and wide, and Keenan was the happy recipient of that, landing the show’s titular role with no prior on-screen experience. Lockie Leonard ran for two seasons, and Keenan’s career was surprisingly up and running. “I was always happy to get up in front of a crowd, but I never thought of acting as something that you could choose as a career…even though I didn’t really choose it,” he laughs. “It really just happened, and it kind of fell in my lap. When I got the call that I’d got the part, I think was in the backyard picking up dog poo. I was just a kid! I didn’t know anything about TV or how things were made. I thought that everything was shot in order! I didn’t even know that you had to shoot scenes four times. Doing Lockie Leonard was almost like doing an apprenticeship. Then I got an agent, which was something that the producer suggested to my mother. I finished school, took a year off, and then I moved to Sydney, and I was fortunate enough to get the role on Puberty Blues, and it’s just snowballed from there.”
Up next for Sean Keenan is a trip to New York for a six-week intensive acting course, followed by the audition circuit in Los Angeles. “It’s best if you can be there for a while,” he says. “It’s such a learning curve. It can be a little isolating too, if you’re just keeping your head down and going to auditions. It’s not like studying, where you’re with a group of people. And you’ve got to hit the ground running and make the most of your time there. It’s going to be exciting.”
Right now, Sean Keenan is exactly where he wants to be. “Acting is a really, really great job,” he says. “You get to work with amazing people, and you get to bring stories to life, which is fantastic.”
Is This The Real World is available now on iTunes. Click here for all information.
Great article! Convicts has just done a video and interview of Sean Keenan when he was recently in NYC.
Check it out here; http://convicts.nyc/convicts/sean-keenan/