O CAPTAIN, MY CAPTAIN

Jackson Gallagher plays an AFL captain on Playing For Keeps but his real life is more Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith than football pitch.

Jackson Gallagher plays an AFL jock on Playing For Keeps but his real life is more Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith than football pitch. DNA: In Playing For Keeps you play Connor Marrello, captain of the fictional AFL team, the Southern Jets. What did you draw on to create the character?

Jackson Gallagher: Initially I was a unsure about the character because the football world is foreign to me. I didn’t grow up playing football and it’s far removed from my experiences. So I spent time watching football captains, meeting players, looking at interviews and lots of football itself. I even joined a football club to try and get a feel for the culture. The more I worked on the character, I realised Connor’s a football player but also a young man at a point in his life that I can relate to. It’s that transition where you start to grow from your twenties into your thirties, and the identity politics around that.

DNA readers will also recognise you from Please Like Me, where you played gay [Kyle], and you’re now playing another gay character in the third season of Glitch.

Yes, I play a character called Raff. He’s a milliner and a very fluid kind of person. Sometimes he presents effeminate energies and sometimes more masculine. He’s not defined by boundaries. He has a really beautiful love story with Charlie (Sean Keenan). There’s a wonderful connection between the characters, who are from different eras in history but have both experienced prejudice. How do you feel about the issue some have with straight actors playing a gay role?

I don’t think we are defined by our sexuality so I don’t think characters are defined by their sexuality. I don’t want to play Jackson Gallagher, I want to play people who are experiencing the world in a way that I’m not. I feel very fortunate that I get to play characters who are different to me.

You’ve also worked as a stills photographer for the ABC. Can you tell us about that?

Yes, there are two things I draw parallels with in storytelling. It’s either in front of the camera, where I walk in the shoes of the character from the page, or it’s meeting people and capturing their story through still imagery. These two things have kind of grown side by side for me. I had a job on a film and the stills photographer on set was someone whose work I was aware of. When I met him I had a bit of a fan-boy moment and we struck up a friendship. After I’d finished that film he gave me a call offering me a job and I started a stint as a stills photographer. When I finished school, I moved to New York and had a photography mentor there, an old master who’s now in his nineties. I studied acting there, too.

You’ve taken some great photographs of Sydney Gay And Lesbian Mardi Gras.

I went to Mardi Gras one year as part of the Reach Out float and was shooting photographs and video capturing the parade. The parade is an incredible experience both to participate in and shoot. It has such a wild, loving energy. There is nothing quite like it! Reach Out is a fantastic organisation that helps remove stigma surrounding mental health. They provide invaluable support to young people going through tough times.

If you were gay, who’d be your man crush?

Robert Mapplethorpe. He was strikingly beautiful and a creative force.

What about your music diva?

Patti Smith. It would be great to sit and listen to her talk about her life. She’s certainly lived. I love her writing more than her music. But I’ll also say Jake Shears from Scissor Sisters.

What song gets you onto the dance floor? Shooting Stars by Bag Raiders!

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

Wake up and ask yourself if you’re happy and if you’re not, what can you do to change that. Have you ever had an onset wardrobe malfunction?

It wasn’t my malfunction… I was in a movie and the scene involved my mother and her boyfriend in the bathtub in which I walk in and kill them by electrocution. The woman playing my mother was wearing a merkin, which is a wig for the pubes. After their moment of dying in the bath, the director yelled cut and there was an eerie silence and then the merkin floated to the surface!

Are you into briefs, boxers or free-balling?

I try not to live too much of a routine, so I mix it up!

You’ve just filmed a new movie, The Wheel. What’s that about?

The Wheel is about the not-too-distant future of nanotechnology and running experiments on prisoners to reshape them and make super humans. I worked with a team of Japanese ninjas and a UFC fighter who trained me in six weeks to become a lean, mean fighting machine. It was fucking hard! It broke me. The character I play gets broken and rebuilt. What’s in store for Connor in this season of Playing For Keeps?

Last season we saw his off-field world implode when his affair became known to his fiancée and coach. This season we see him getting a bit older and headed towards the end of his career. I’ve spoken to a lot of guys who used to play the game. Football can become your life. You live and breathe it and then in your late twenties or thirties the career comes to an end. Who the fuck are you outside of that? We see Connor at a point where he’s starting to ask that question. Tell us about how the cast train together.

To bring authenticity to our team dynamic, we have a group of guys, employed as extras, but all part of our team, and we have training sessions with ex-AFL player, Russell Robertson, who takes us through it all like an AFL team. It’s great and bonds the guys, not just the lead actors but the extras, too. It helps to create an authentic feeling on set.

I don’t think we are defined by our sexuality, therefore I don’t think characters are defined by their sexuality.