Open to questions
DAVID WENHAM GOES BEHIND THE MIC AS HOST OF ABC’S NEW SIX-PART SERIES
In a successful stage and screen career spanning more than three decades, David Wenham has done more interviews than he would care to count. As the star of homegrown hits from SeaChange to Les Norton, and global successes including the Lord Of the Rings trilogy and Iron Fist, the veteran Aussie actor is used to sitting in the hot seat being grilled to promote his many and varied projects.
But for new series The ABC Of, one of a slew of programs celebrating 90 years of the national broadcaster, Wenham has flipped the script: now he’s the one asking the questions of six prominent Australians.
The premise of each episode is to pull clips from the ABC’s extensive archives and, as host, Wenham watches them alongside publisher and ABC chair Ita Buttrose, tennis star and Indigenous advocate Evonne Goolagong Cawley, comedian and mental health proponent Garry McDonald, stand-up and TV host Wil Anderson, journalist Sarah Ferguson and former prime minister John Howard – and then probes them about their memories of the events depicted.
The producers of the show wanted an actor rather than an established interviewer, says Wenham, because they thought it would change the “power dynamic”, adding that he was integrally involved in the program from the get-go.
“It’s less intimidating for the guest and the conversation can potentially lead down roads and avenues that may not have opened up otherwise,” he says. “I felt privileged to be able to sit in that chair and have permission to pretty much ask anything I wanted of the person sitting in front of me.”
As it turned out, he discovered there was a lot of crossover between his established profession and his new venture, although he says he also has a new-found respect for those who interview people for a living. He found each interview, which went for up to two hours without a break (edited down to 30-minute episodes), left him mentally and physically exhausted and says it’s “a skill level that is way beyond my pay grade”.
“The attributes of one job certainly fit the other one,” he says. “Listening is the major component there and I learned very early on to have no expectations of what the interviewee would either say or where they’d go.”
Although Wenham researched the lives of each of the interviewees thoroughly, he was also grateful to have the historical footage to fall back on during the interviews and says the program probably would not have been possible without the “priceless knowledge” of the ABC archive staff. In an odd twist of timing, The ABC Of will air just weeks after the announcement that the ABC will make more than 50 librarian and archivist positions redundant. Wenham blasts the decision as “shortsighted” and says he hopes the show will lead to a rethink of the plan to further digitise the archive system and remove much of the human element.
“That’s our history there,” he says animatedly. “They are our stories and our stories involve us, people, humans, and those people who work in the libraries, they understand that and then can communicate it, whether it be to journalists or people like ourselves who are putting together a show.”
Wenham’s own professional history with the ABC goes back more than 30 years, with bit parts in G.P. and Come in Spinner, before landing bigger roles in Simone de Beauvoir’s Babies and the one that changed his life forever, SeaChange. Wenham still remembers his time playing Diver Dan on the beloved late ’90s drama as “one of the most joyous periods of my life”.
“It doesn’t happen too often in your career,” he says. “It’s happened a few times in mine, whereby the combination of people involved creatively in something is just exactly right … everybody just came together at just the right
moment in their lives to create something special. We didn’t know as we were making it that it was going to be this cultural phenomenon.”
Wenham recalls that he was filming in Hawaii when SeaChange first went to air and returned home to find Diver Dan had made him an instant sex symbol, a label he thought was weird and confronting then – and still does to this day.
“It was hilarious because it’s something that I’ve never seen myself as and in fact, think I am the antithesis of that,” he says with a laugh. “So, to be described as that, I’m still shaking myself and thinking ‘what happened there?’”
Wenham also got a taste of that kind of adulation on a global level a few years later, when he starred as Faramir in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings Trilogy.
“The next generation has started to watch it now, which is a wonderful thing, and they just embrace it as warmly and lovingly as the generation above,” he says.
Wenham is also gracing our screens this week as country singer Hank Snow in Baz Luhrmann’s lavish biopic, Elvis. The pair have collaborated several times in the past and Wenham says he was in awe of the director’s energy and drive in putting the film together in Queensland under very difficult conditions during Covid lockdown.
“He is a showman,” says Wenham. “He was completely on fire on this one and didn’t leave the set at all through the day. We could be shooting for 12 to 15 hours a day and Baz was always present, walking around the set thinking of more opportunities to increase the dramatic impact of what he was doing. It was a joy.”
Wenham also says Luhrmann doesn’t get enough credit for insisting the film be shot in Australia, and creating hundreds of jobs at a time when the film industry was on its knees.
“He’s such an incredible champion of the Australian film industry, which goes really unrecognised actually,” he says. “You just think it’s an international film and yet he makes them in Australia because he wants to, because he loves this place and loves the creative talent here. I can’t speak highly enough of Baz – the cinema world without Baz would be much the less for it.”
The ABC Of, Tuesday, 8pm, ABC. Elvis is in cinemas now.