LEAGUE OF HIS OWN
Footy funnyman Matty Johns will be joined by good friend Matt Nable on Fox League this year, writes Holly Byrnes
ASK Fox League star Matty Johns about his acting career and footy’s funnyman is humble.
“I got offered the co- starring role in [Quentin Tarantino blockbuster] Once Upon A Time
In Hollywood and I had to knock it back,” he says, with a wry smile.
“I was going to be Leonardo DiCaprio [the fi lm’s actual star] opposite Brad Pitt, but my duties here at Fox Sports wouldn’t allow me to do it. Same with [Martin Scorcese fi lm] The Irishman … they gave it to [Robert] De Niro,” he deadpans.
If he needs any advice on juggling acting with his gig on Fox, he can now turn to best mate, former league rival and AACTA-nominated leading man Matt Nable.
Joining the Fox Sports family as the voice of league this year, Nable is adding the voice- over role to his busy slate of screenwriting, acting and producing TV projects for local and international audiences.
The 47-year- old star – whose local credits included Bikie Wars:
Brothers In Arms and Underbelly, before fi nding global fame as
R’as al Gul on DC series Arrow
– gave Johns his fi rst, and last, acting job in The Final Winter, the 2007 debut feature fi lm which married his passion for the code and his writing ambitions.
Their friendship had begun years earlier as they faced off in the former NRL fi rst-grade competition, the Winfield Cup – Johns with the Newcastle Knights and Nable for the Manly Sea Eagles.
But it was a bromance with Nable’s dad, Dave, that brought them together.
“Matt’s dad Dave was our [Newcastle] trainer for the 1995 World Cup and I became good mates with him,” Johns says.
“I remember once going away … footballers on tour and all that … and I just got sick of going to the pub on our days off. So I said to Dave, ‘Do you want to go to Liverpool? Let’s go to the Beatles museum’. So we went there together and all the blokes were going, ‘ What’s doing here?’
Nable chips in: “My father wasn’t the best of drinkers, so that was probably a good thing.”
After giving the game away, Nable chanced his hand writing a feature fi lm set in the league world – encouraged by no less than acclaimed author and Manly tragic, Thomas Keneally.
“I’d seen Matty up at the gym and approached him one day and said, ‘I’m doing this thing and there’s a role in it that I’d love you to do’ and surprisingly he said yes. To get Matthew attached was a really big deal in getting that fi lm made,”
Nable says.
“I was no one, so having him on board and his profi le meant the movie got made, and he did
an amazing job and we became really close mates after that.”
More than a decade later, their next acting project together could be just months away, with Nable teaming up with uber-producer, John Edwards [Love My Way, Offspring,
Gallipoli] to make a “sports-based series”, which he says will involve an acting role for Johns.
Returning the favour, Johns gives Nable’s signing the thumbs up after his Fox Sports boss
Steve Crawley approached the actor and novelist to write and narrate some of the channel’s more theatrical promotions and dramatic introductions to big game days.
“It’s great, it’s really good. Matty will bring that voice as part of the sell of the game.”
Nable’s effusive in his praise of Johns’ commitment and comic talents, building a multimilliondollar TV and radio brand as the “every man”.
“People don’t realise just how hard he works. He’s always immensely prepared and he’s remarkably well read … a very smart man,” Nable says.
“I’ve seen him go through some really difficult times in his career, but at the core of him, he’s just a really good man. He doesn’t judge, or hold himself in an esteem higher than anyone else. He’s a boy from Cessnock, the son of a coal miner, and that’s a big part of who he is.”
Johns, who returns to host another year of his top-rating podcast as well as Fox League programs The Late Show with Matty Johns and Sunday Night
With Matty Johns, is again selfeffacing about his TV trajectory, joking: “If you don’t know, make it up … that’s always been my motto. I’ve built my whole career on bulls---.”
Banter aside, both men have cut the tag unfairly attached to league players as uneducated boofheads – a stereotype Nable, who recently signed a new publishing deal with Hachette, especially “struggled with at times”.
“The truth of the matter is I was never an elite rugby league player … I did play fi rst grade, but I was always on the fringes. But people seem to want to defi ne you with that little part of your life,” he says.
His fourth novel is due out later this year, as well as an August 24 release of a new fi lm,
The Dry, opposite Eric Bana.
The fi lm is adapted from the best- selling Jane Harper novel.
“As you get older,” the father of three ponders, “your ambition changes course and things in my life are much more important than a career. I’ll be fi ne, one way or the other.”
THE LATE SHOW WITH MATTY JOHNS
8.25PM, THURSDAY, FOX LEAGUE