Strange and wonderful magic
ACTOR Aden Young always felt like an outsider. Even when he first encountered acting, he was sure he didn’t belong.
Born in Canada, Young’s family moved to Australia when he was 9. ‘‘My mother is Australian. She would tell us about Australia. She was drowning in nostalgia,’’ he says.
‘‘My father was an American in Canada, and he didn’t have any next-of-kin and we went over [to Australia[ for this holiday. My father stayed in Canada to work. We had the time of our life. But he got very ill, and they decided it would be best if we all moved to Australia, and he came out to check it out – of course this was all unbeknownst to us. We were just having a holiday.’’
The family never went back. It was a shock to Young and his four siblings to learn they wouldn’t even return for their things. ‘‘I held on to my Canadian identity out of spite,’’ he says, sitting straight in his chair, ‘‘because if you don’t let me go back I’m not going to let it go. I held on to it, it was a case of, ‘You’re not going to take that too’.’’
Young’s sense of alienation has proven perfect for his role as Daniel Holden in Rectify, which is now entering its fourth and last season on Sky TV’s Rialto Channel.
He plays an ex-con who spent 19 years on Death Row, only to be found innocent and released. How this outcast confronts a world he doesn’t comprehend creates the conflict of the series.
‘‘From an early age I had an understanding of what it was to be shuffled out of a place into another place that was not of your choosing,’’ he says. ‘‘You can’t fight. My brother and I stayed with an aunt who went to work in the morning and left us to wander the streets. It was a different world back then, you could wander the streets,’’ he says.
Young refused to forsake his Canadian heritage and insisted on playing hockey.
‘‘So my father had to get up and drive us to an ice rink in the middle of the summer. It was only when I was about 14 when I started discovering marijuana and football and began to play a lot of sport, it made me feel I was at least part of a team.’’
But that didn’t last, and Young, 44, found acting equally foreign. ‘‘I was chasing a girl, chased her to drama school. And it was four hours: singing, dancing, improvisation, and text ...
‘‘I was a big rugby player and had muscles where there shouldn’t be muscles yet. I embarrassed myself. I didn’t have the right clothes, everyone else was dressed in the right clothes. I literally looked like I’d fallen into a cartoon, and I decided that was it, my dramatic career was at an end. That was a joy, and she [the girl] wasn’t even worth it because there’s no way that me being there was going to impress her. So I would find maybe another way to impress her.’’
When he left the class, he got lost in the building. ‘‘I stumbled into the theatre and it was from Monty Python, it was truly illuminating. It felt like there was a fanfare. There was a man sweeping on the stage, the houselights were down, but on. All the focus was there: this old man was sweeping the stage, obviously out of place because [the set] was a sitting-room, 1880s drama,’’ he recalls.
‘‘It was absurd. I just saw him, and the story of him, and the absurdity of him being in that place, and I thought, ‘If you stayed here you could tell people what you think about the world. Wouldn’t that be interesting because you think it’s pretty weird, don’t you? You’ve never really fit in, have you? And nobody really understands you, do they? You’ve always been an outsider. Maybe this would be a way that they would understand what I’m talking about when I said this thing last week. I could just show them’.’’
He did show them in films like Killer Elite, Black Rose and I, Frankenstein. The father of two boys, Young married his longtime sweetheart, actress-singer Loene Carmen, two years ago.
The night his first son was born, he’d gone out for one last hurrah when he got the call that the baby was coming. He says he tried to sober up by gulping four bananas and six cups of coffee, but in the end, his sister drove them to the hospital.
The birth of his son marked a new beginning, he says. ‘‘Everything I did up to that point was perfect, every single breath was taken at the right time, every mistake was made exactly on cue, because without that, he wouldn’t have been there. And I recognised that ...
‘‘Some things are out of our control. For a man who’s not a Christian, I believe in the way of time and the way of faith and the human being – so it actually wiped the slate clean. It said, ‘No matter what you think you did ever in your life to hurt anyone, it all starts here, because that’s perfection right there in front of you’.’’
‘ From an early age I had an understanding of what it was to be shuffled out of a place into another place that was not of your choosing.’ ADEN YOUNG
● Rectify 8.30pm, Tuesdays, Rialto