On the road again
In Darby and Joan, retired detective Jack Darby is on the run from his past when he collides with Joan, a recently widowed nurse on a mission for answers. Series star Bryan Brown talks retirement, his incredible career and the grey nomad experience with
RETIREMENT simply isn’t an option for Bryan Brown. The laidback star, who recently celebrated his 75th birthday and has spent almost 50 years on stage and screen, loves his job far too much to even contemplate slowing down.
“I don’t know what retirement is,” he says with a trademark wry smile.
“What, you stop doing things you like doing? What’s the point of that?
“The other thing is, I’m not one of those blokes that has a shed in the backyard.
“I really admire those blokes that have a shed in the backyard where they work in some job all week and, on the weekend, they go in and they invent or they make or they fix up their house and they’re as happy as Larry. They can’t wait to retire because they’ve got their shed and so they’re never going to be bored. “Well, I don’t have a shed.”
With that in mind, the closest Brown is likely to come to retirement is his latest project, Darby and Joan.
In it, he plays a laconic retired police detective who finds himself teaming up with an tightly wound English woman named Joan (Greta Scacchi) after a crash on an outback road. He’s trying to escape his past and she is on a mission to discover the truth about hers. Together this odd couple travel across Australia in Joan’s caravan, solving a slew of mysteries along the way.
For Brown – a crime buff who has written his own collection of crime stories titled Sweet Jimmy – Darby and Joan was an instantly attractive project and he even had input into some of the plot points.
It was also Brown who suggested Scacchi for the role of Joan, having worked with her on the 2019 movie Palm Beach, directed by his wife Rachel Ward.
“We were like 17 weeks in Queensland because COVID was on and we couldn’t come across the border,” he says of Darby and Joan.
“And people can get sick of you, or you get sick of them when you’re crammed together for 17 weeks.
It’s very easy with Greta.
“It’s very easy for me to go to work and know that I’m going to have a good day.”
After being pigeonholed into sexy femme fatale roles by Hollywood early on in her career, Brown says Scacchi is now relishing her move into character roles.
“Greta is a really good actress,” he says.
“It probably seems like a silly thing to say but she really is a good actress and she just is truthful all the time.
“And she’s real. She doesn’t give a stuff what she looks like. She had all that when she was 30 (in films such as White Mischief and Presumed Innocent). Now it’s who she is, who’s her character. Let’s get on with it. I love that about her.”
Much like Midsomer Murders and Vera, each episode of Darby and Joan involves a self-contained mystery and introduces a new cast of quirky characters played by the likes of Heather Mitchell, Kerry Armstrong, Steve Bisley and Peter O’Brien.
What sets this series apart from the British crime dramas, however, is it all takes place against the stunning backdrop of the Australian bush and features two caravanning retirees as the sleuths rather than brow-beaten cops.
“The grey nomads out there, man they just get around,” he says.
“I went to Broome about 15 or 20 years ago with my wife and kids and my wife’s brother and his kids. And we went out to Fitzroy Crossing and a whole lot of places.
“But it was in Broome that we went on a ride on the camels along the main beach. And we look back and there is caravan after caravan after caravan parked there. And there’s all these all these boomers in the raw! With red arses. They just didn’t give a f--- anymore.
“We’ve been told all our lives that we had to be nice and be good to our kids and all that stuff. Now we don’t care. And if we want to burn our arses, that’s our business.
“I remember smiling at that and thinking: ‘What a lovely way to finally tell people to leave me alone’.”
Though he’s filled with bemused admiration for the sunburned and brazen travellers he spotted on the Broome shorelines, Brown says he’s in no rush to join them any time soon.
That’s because he never has to plan his own adventure when his job as an actor sorts that out for him.
“I’ve travelled a lot more in my life and to places that you’re not supposed to go – like the top of a mountain in Rwanda when I filmed Gorillas in the Mist [in 1988 with Sigourney Weaver],” he exclaims.
“I mean that shouldn’t happen to a kid from the western suburbs of Sydney! And I turned 40 there. That’s not how life’s supposed to work at all.
“And I’ve had private visit to the White House. I’ve had bloody tea with a Kenyan in his mud hut and fallen into the Pearl River in China.”
Even his first job involved travelling (on one of his first-ever plane trips) from his home in
Sydney to Adelaide. By comparison to his later adventures, it wasn’t as exotic or as far afield, but Brown still recalls his delight that “someone was paying me to go there to play cowboys and Indians and putting me on a plane.”
And almost 50 years later, he’s lost none of that excitement and is always looking for the next challenge. Even though Darby and Joan took him away from his family and his home for the longest continuous stretch of his career, he’s open to doing another season, if people wanted it, laughing that it’s Scacchi who has the tougher role.
“Her character talks a lot,” he says. “Mine is a man of few words and so I would say to [the director], ‘I don’t need to say that, or that either,’ and Greta would say ‘I’ll have them [the lines].’
“She must have a bloody good memory.”
Byran Brown: “I don’t know what retirement is. What, you stop doing things you like doing? What’s the point of that?”