Dissecting Chopper
Underbelly Files – Chopper is set to air over two nights, telling the story of Mark “Chopper” Read’s later years. Aaron Jeffery tells DANIELLE McGRANE what it was like to take on the role of the infamous criminal and how he delved into Read’s psyche.
He’s a character who needs no introduction, and actor Aaron Jeffery knew he was taking on a monumental role playing Mark “Chopper” Read in the latest Underbelly Files instalment.
“Everybody I met had a story about him. Everybody I met wanted to tell me something about him,” Jeffery said.
The actor, originally from New Zealand, plays the infamous criminal in a dramatisation of the latter years of his life. It’s a time when Read is trying to go straight, after his release from prison, but is finding it hard to let go of his past.
Considering the myth that surrounded this character, Jeffery knew he had to dig deep to do him justice.
“What was really important for me was the psychological landscape of his life,” he said.
“You look at the fundamental signature posts of trauma, or whatever had happened in his childhood. That was fundamental to my understanding because it’s a few things, it’s a love story, it’s a whodunit, and it’s the journey of a man trying to integrate a character that was created to survive.”
Physically, Jeffery had his work cut out for him. In contrast to the 2000 movie Chop
per starring Eric Bana, this Chopper had gone to seed so the actor had work to do. But the story also charts the end of Chopper’s life so he had to learn how to transform quickly over a short period of time.
“Obviously I did put on weight. Because we were servicing 25 to 30 years of his life, and we’re doing two telemovies in 22 days, I couldn’t put on a lot of weight and lose it all, so I had to try and find a weight that worked for the whole span of the film. And then I had to lose some at the end to service the cancer part of it,” he said. “I didn’t have any time to lose the weight. I was working, so I just gradually pared myself back.”
It wasn’t just his weight that transformed. Jeffery also took on certain physical mannerisms to help get him into character.
“Obviously, there’s the walk, a kind of a penguintype splaying of the ankles,” he said.
Jeffery is keen to find that point of difference between his Chopper and what Bana had done.
“Mark Read said Eric Bana did Chopper better than he did, so what was I going to do? I was hardly going to try to beat that so I made a decision to make him kind of different, to look at the intonations more than the tonality with his lisp, and accentuate different things to make it my own,” he said. “It’s not a documentary and there was no way I was going to do an imitation or anything close to what Erica Bana does because it was genius. The Chopper movie was when he was in his prime. My character, he’s gone to seed. It’s a very different time in his life.”
Jeffery developed a real understanding for Read during his research. He read several of his books – some he wrote were biographical and others were fiction – but he also developed a sense of how he had come to be the person he was.
“If you look at nature versus nurture I believe that this character was created, not born,” he said.
“In Australia there seems to be this need to have these mythical-like characters. He’s like a modern-day Ned Kelly, and why that is I don’t know. Maybe it’s a historical genetic thing from where we all stem from, or maybe it’s because we’re attracted to these characters because they do and say things that we only dream of.”
Jeffery felt compassion for Read, too, as he researched him and in that found a new way to portray the character.
“What it really was about was garnering the major events in his childhood and how that would have shaped him at a psychological level. That was the most important thing for me,” he said.