LaPaglia enjoys being under the wire
Australian acting legend Anthony LaPaglia talks with James Croot about football, frightening little kids and playing A Month of Sundays’ Frank Mollard.
Anthony LaPaglia admits playing Frank Mollard in his new film A Month of Sundays was one of the most difficult tasks of his career. But it wasn’t the character’s melancholic air or existential crisis that had the 57-year-old actor confounded, it was the fact he was a real estate agent.
‘‘I’m not very fond of real estate agents. They’re one below car salesmen in my book,’’ he chuckles down the phoneline from his home in Los Angeles, knowing, of course, full well that his father was a car dealer and one of his brothers is a car wholesaler.
‘‘My experience with Aussie real estate agents has not been good. But even without that prejudice, it was not a world I was familiar with, so I had to become familiar with it.’’
And so how did he go about that? ‘‘You know what – I actually talked to a couple of real estate agents and used my own experience involving real estate in Australia. It is so different to the States – that whole idea that everything has to go to auction doesn’t exist in the US. You can make a bid on a house, you don’t get caught up in the nightmare frenzy of competitiveness.
‘‘To me, auctions prey on the base elements in humans – people get swept up in them and overpay.’’
A depiction of a brief auction ‘‘frenzy’’ aside, LaPaglia admits it was the ‘‘quietness’’ of writerdirector Matthew Saville’s story about Mollard’s attempts to move on after his divorce and death of his mother that attracted him to Sundays.
‘‘It’s a bit like a still life painting really – not that you want to say that about a film. But, it has that kind of quality. It’s a snapshot of a certain period of time. There are no pyrotechnics, it’s just kind of more about what’s happening emotionally between the people involved.
‘‘It has that very under-the-wire, very Australian humour. The drama just kind of smoulders away and you almost miss it if you’re not paying attention.’’
LaPaglia says he was also intrigued by the script because it provided a good example of how ‘‘Australian men of a certain age communicate with each other’’.
‘‘They kind of sit in silence and grunt and throw out the odd oneliner, but there’s still a closeness in the friendship.
‘‘I think that’s a very unique thing to Australia. When you’re in the US, everybody wants to tell you everything about themselves in three-and-a-half minutes. In Australia, it would take a lifetime to get an eighth of that information out of somebody.’’
One person who LaPaglia had no such trouble talking at length with was his Kiwi-born co-star John Clarke, best known on this side of the Ditch as the creator of the iconic comedic character Fred Dagg.
However, he confesses he had no idea who the 67-year-old was before hitting the set. ‘‘I’m never going to hear the end of this,’’ LaPaglia sighs.
‘‘I’d been away from Australia for a long time and I wasn’t familiar with what a legend John was. After the second take on the first day, I was like ‘where did you find this guy? He’s amazing’. It was just my ignorance.
‘‘Pretty quickly I learned I was about to get schooled by the master. He’s amazing and, on top of that, he’s a really wonderful human being – one of the nicest men I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with.’’
Despite still mainly working in the US (where he has had a successful career, highlighted by his starring role in the longrunning police procedural Without a Trace for seven seasons in the noughties), Sundays hasn’t been
‘I’m not very fond of real estate agents. They’re one below car salesmen in my book.’ Anthony LaPaglia
the only project to have drawn him ‘‘home’’ in the past year or so. There was 1970s-set drama Holding the Man and the second series of conspiracy thriller The Code.
‘‘It hasn’t really been a conscious effort to come back, it’s just that I liked the projects better than anything I was reading here.’’
Unfortunately for the footballloving LaPaglia, none of them coincided with Australia hosting and winning the Asian Cup last year. ‘‘Somehow, they all circumnavigated the cup,’’ he says glumly. However, the former Adelaide City goalkeeper and Sydney FC part-owner says he followed the recent European Championships very closely.
‘‘I thought Italy were fantastic [LaPaglia is the offspring of an Italian father and a Dutch mother].
‘‘I had no expectations for them, but they had some really great, younger players who were really exciting to watch. Unfortunately, they went out to Germany on penalties, which is a bad way for any team to go out.
‘‘I also can’t help but wonder if the rise of the smaller teams like Iceland didn’t have something to do with the revamp of Fifa – perhaps no one’s fixing games any more,’’ La Paglia jokes.
He also found it interesting that Portugal basically won the final without Cristiano Ronaldo. ‘‘Sometimes when you have a big star like that it cripples the team.’’
So what must it be like then to have the likes of Jason Statham and former Chelsea player Frank Leboeuf in his Hollywood United team?
LaPaglia, the former club president, says he has all but removed himself from the club, except for playing 7-a-side on a Saturday morning.
‘‘There was just too much drama, too many headaches – especially trying to convince people that nobody was going to the World Cup. I like to play just for pleasure.’’
Constantly on the lookout for new challenges, LaPaglia has recently started work on his first horror film, The Conjuring spin-off-sequel, Annabelle 2.
‘‘I’m getting a great deal of joy out of walking around the set scaring young children.
‘‘Doesn’t matter if it is in the script or not, but my character just seems to miraculously appear in doorways. Actually, I’ve tried to tease them, but these very sophisticated Hollywood kids are hard to trick – if anything, they scare me.’’
A Month of Sundays (PG) is now screening.