Adelaide Advertiser August 27, 2005
A sentimental bloke
Edition: 1 - State
Section: Magazine, pg. W20
He watches cricket with his mates and does a good line in self-deprecating humour, but actor William McInnes isn't afraid to show his sensitive side, writes BEN McEACHEN.
THE quintessential Aussie male is not what he once was. Judging by some of the men in our more recent films (Lantana to Three Dollars), the dominance of insensitive louts, distant fathers and stern beer drinkers is diminishing.
Take Look Both Ways, which was shot around Port Adelaide last year and largely financed by the SA Film Corporation and the Adelaide Film Festival's Investment Fund. Not only is it Australia's best adult drama since Lantana - not that the competition has been difficult - but the imaginative "romantic comedy'' about love and death also includes a grown man noticeably panicked by a possible fatal illness.
William McInnes plays a newspaper photographer, Nick, who meets a death-obsessed woman (Justine Clarke) while he has a weekend wait for cancer test results.
As the troubled man who journeys from hidden pain to open angst, McInnes is great. But you would know that if you checked out his best known work, on television series Blue Heelers and SeaChange.
Thing is, you've probably looked past handsome McInnes's sizeable TV and film record. While he's blessed with leading-man looks and charm, McInnes is not as blustery as Russell Crowe, or indie cool as Guy Pearce. He's more chiselled than David Wenham, less theatrical than Geoffrey Rush.
Somewhere between Hugh Jackman and Nathan Phillips (Takeaway, Wolf Creek ) is McInnes, and a more humble, matey Aussie bloke would be hard to find. He would give Jack Thompson a run in the personable stakes.
But McInnes is no superstar and he admits he has struggled to get film work after TV success.
But that should change with the release of Look Both Ways, which has arrived with much hype about it leading the Australian film industry out of the doldrums. On the other hand, McInnes was also in one of those recent "doldrum'' movies, the lame-brained You and Your Stupid Mate.
"I didn't have that much invested in it,'' McInnes kindly admits.
"Oh, you know, it was a particular type of film which was supposed to appeal to a particular audience and people hopped into it a bit. Someone told me David Stratton refused to review it on The Movie Show, so there's a bit of notoriety. You know, it just happens that it didn't work. Some people liked it. . .''
What did he make of it?
"Oh, you know, I enjoyed. . er, it was all right. I'm not going to bag it. Lots of nice people worked on it.''
And as McInnes espouses the talents of his co-stars, Angus Sampson and the aforementioned Phillips, you start to get the idea. McInnes isn't a grandstander or an acting machine calculating every move towards international fame. Even when he mentions that he has tried to get work overseas, his steady self-deprecating humour isn't too far away.
"To be completely honest'' - as if he hadn't been all along - "one thing that irritates me is that I have been offered jobs overseas but other actors get them,'' he says. "Nicole Kidman gets all
my roles. She won an Oscar with a big nose. I've got a big nose - I could have done the role.''
Talking to McInnes about McInnes is to hear a man praise others, easily assess his job, and happily talk about his family and sport. Giving his driver directions to a store so he can pick up a new cricket bat on the way home, McInnes is fired up about the first Ashes test.
I was a bit worried, to tell you the truth,'' he says. ``They put up a fair show, the Poms. But I was so happy with it. "I was sitting with a mate watching it, and they were carrying on
in the first innings, pointing the batsman off to the change rooms and doing windmills.
"I was getting really irritated. I said 'These guys are jokes'. And this mate of mine, he's a Kiwi and a sports photographer, he said 'That's what the Australians have been doing to everyone for
the past 10 years'.''
McInnes is happy to admit that while Look Both Ways - which had its world premiere at the Adelaide Film Festival - has had an overwhelming critical response, there was a dud review somewhere. "Which is good,'' he notes.
"But that night at Adelaide Film Festival, the people really got into it. It's a film that an audience taps in to. It's great to sit in an audience and watch it.''
Look Both Ways is very close to McInnes. His wife, Sarah Watt, wrote and directed it. Which is a big reason why he got the job. But the low-budget corker goes deeper. Watt was diagnosed with breast cancer during the editing of Look Both Ways in early 2004.
"It's sort of an irony, one of those nasty little twists that life chucks up,'' McInnes says, without being dismissive. "But, you know, it's all right. . . It's something that lots of women go through. Worse things happen to people.''
Perhaps, but not many have made a lauded movie which has remarkable echoes of their real life.
In Look Both Ways, Nick struggles to tell anybody about his situation. Watt did a similar thing when she was first told of her condition. "I'd taken the kids up the coast, to have a holiday with them,'' the doting dad says about son Clem, 11, and daughter Stella, 7.
"And she gets diagnosed, which is a really dreadful thing.'' It took Watt several days to tell him, for fear of ruining a perfectly good vacation.
"How long before she told us? A week. I could have killed her,'' says McInnes, loving sadness tinging his humour.
"She didn't want to ruin our holiday. She's got a wide streak of steel to her character. I mean, she comes from pioneer stock. She's ace, I really. . .''
How is she now?
"Yeah, she's OK. Yeah, she's pretty good as far as we know. The doctors are all pretty happy. So touch wood and we'll see how we go. "But just getting on with life, that's the trick. Not being held hostage by it. Which is easy for me to say, but she's really a terrific person to be with.''
McInnes and Watt have experienced a "roller-coaster ride'' in the past 12 months. The sorts of highs and lows which make for, well, a movie.
Or perhaps a book. Which could happen, considering McInnes is now a published author. As fate would have it, the understated and open bloke has a new movie and book launched in the same month. A Man's Got to Have a Hobby is an entertaining memoir about his Queensland childhood in Redcliffe, 40km south of Brisbane.
Well, sort of.
"It's more about what happens when you go back to where you grew up, and some of the stuff you realise that what you thought was pretty stupid, in life it turns out to be the most important stuff.''
With everything on the up and up, McInnes the actor should get another boost when we get to see him alongside Susan Sarandon and Sam Neill in Irresistible, which was recently filmed in Melbourne.
"Basically, I'm just telling Sam Neill where the toilet is in the film,'' McInnes quips.
Describing everybody involved with the project as "nice'', McInnes easily sums up his laid-back approach to acting. "Any job you can walk away from with a nice couple of friends and a funny story is all right, I reckon.''
So that's McInnes's plan? It's that simple?
"I don't have a grand plan,'' he happily admits. "My main ambition now is to get my hands on this cricket bat.''
Edition: 1 - State
Section: Magazine, pg. W20
He watches cricket with his mates and does a good line in self-deprecating humour, but actor William McInnes isn't afraid to show his sensitive side, writes BEN McEACHEN.
THE quintessential Aussie male is not what he once was. Judging by some of the men in our more recent films (Lantana to Three Dollars), the dominance of insensitive louts, distant fathers and stern beer drinkers is diminishing.
Take Look Both Ways, which was shot around Port Adelaide last year and largely financed by the SA Film Corporation and the Adelaide Film Festival's Investment Fund. Not only is it Australia's best adult drama since Lantana - not that the competition has been difficult - but the imaginative "romantic comedy'' about love and death also includes a grown man noticeably panicked by a possible fatal illness.
William McInnes plays a newspaper photographer, Nick, who meets a death-obsessed woman (Justine Clarke) while he has a weekend wait for cancer test results.
As the troubled man who journeys from hidden pain to open angst, McInnes is great. But you would know that if you checked out his best known work, on television series Blue Heelers and SeaChange.
Thing is, you've probably looked past handsome McInnes's sizeable TV and film record. While he's blessed with leading-man looks and charm, McInnes is not as blustery as Russell Crowe, or indie cool as Guy Pearce. He's more chiselled than David Wenham, less theatrical than Geoffrey Rush.
Somewhere between Hugh Jackman and Nathan Phillips (Takeaway, Wolf Creek ) is McInnes, and a more humble, matey Aussie bloke would be hard to find. He would give Jack Thompson a run in the personable stakes.
But McInnes is no superstar and he admits he has struggled to get film work after TV success.
But that should change with the release of Look Both Ways, which has arrived with much hype about it leading the Australian film industry out of the doldrums. On the other hand, McInnes was also in one of those recent "doldrum'' movies, the lame-brained You and Your Stupid Mate.
"I didn't have that much invested in it,'' McInnes kindly admits.
"Oh, you know, it was a particular type of film which was supposed to appeal to a particular audience and people hopped into it a bit. Someone told me David Stratton refused to review it on The Movie Show, so there's a bit of notoriety. You know, it just happens that it didn't work. Some people liked it. . .''
What did he make of it?
"Oh, you know, I enjoyed. . er, it was all right. I'm not going to bag it. Lots of nice people worked on it.''
And as McInnes espouses the talents of his co-stars, Angus Sampson and the aforementioned Phillips, you start to get the idea. McInnes isn't a grandstander or an acting machine calculating every move towards international fame. Even when he mentions that he has tried to get work overseas, his steady self-deprecating humour isn't too far away.
"To be completely honest'' - as if he hadn't been all along - "one thing that irritates me is that I have been offered jobs overseas but other actors get them,'' he says. "Nicole Kidman gets all
my roles. She won an Oscar with a big nose. I've got a big nose - I could have done the role.''
Talking to McInnes about McInnes is to hear a man praise others, easily assess his job, and happily talk about his family and sport. Giving his driver directions to a store so he can pick up a new cricket bat on the way home, McInnes is fired up about the first Ashes test.
I was a bit worried, to tell you the truth,'' he says. ``They put up a fair show, the Poms. But I was so happy with it. "I was sitting with a mate watching it, and they were carrying on
in the first innings, pointing the batsman off to the change rooms and doing windmills.
"I was getting really irritated. I said 'These guys are jokes'. And this mate of mine, he's a Kiwi and a sports photographer, he said 'That's what the Australians have been doing to everyone for
the past 10 years'.''
McInnes is happy to admit that while Look Both Ways - which had its world premiere at the Adelaide Film Festival - has had an overwhelming critical response, there was a dud review somewhere. "Which is good,'' he notes.
"But that night at Adelaide Film Festival, the people really got into it. It's a film that an audience taps in to. It's great to sit in an audience and watch it.''
Look Both Ways is very close to McInnes. His wife, Sarah Watt, wrote and directed it. Which is a big reason why he got the job. But the low-budget corker goes deeper. Watt was diagnosed with breast cancer during the editing of Look Both Ways in early 2004.
"It's sort of an irony, one of those nasty little twists that life chucks up,'' McInnes says, without being dismissive. "But, you know, it's all right. . . It's something that lots of women go through. Worse things happen to people.''
Perhaps, but not many have made a lauded movie which has remarkable echoes of their real life.
In Look Both Ways, Nick struggles to tell anybody about his situation. Watt did a similar thing when she was first told of her condition. "I'd taken the kids up the coast, to have a holiday with them,'' the doting dad says about son Clem, 11, and daughter Stella, 7.
"And she gets diagnosed, which is a really dreadful thing.'' It took Watt several days to tell him, for fear of ruining a perfectly good vacation.
"How long before she told us? A week. I could have killed her,'' says McInnes, loving sadness tinging his humour.
"She didn't want to ruin our holiday. She's got a wide streak of steel to her character. I mean, she comes from pioneer stock. She's ace, I really. . .''
How is she now?
"Yeah, she's OK. Yeah, she's pretty good as far as we know. The doctors are all pretty happy. So touch wood and we'll see how we go. "But just getting on with life, that's the trick. Not being held hostage by it. Which is easy for me to say, but she's really a terrific person to be with.''
McInnes and Watt have experienced a "roller-coaster ride'' in the past 12 months. The sorts of highs and lows which make for, well, a movie.
Or perhaps a book. Which could happen, considering McInnes is now a published author. As fate would have it, the understated and open bloke has a new movie and book launched in the same month. A Man's Got to Have a Hobby is an entertaining memoir about his Queensland childhood in Redcliffe, 40km south of Brisbane.
Well, sort of.
"It's more about what happens when you go back to where you grew up, and some of the stuff you realise that what you thought was pretty stupid, in life it turns out to be the most important stuff.''
With everything on the up and up, McInnes the actor should get another boost when we get to see him alongside Susan Sarandon and Sam Neill in Irresistible, which was recently filmed in Melbourne.
"Basically, I'm just telling Sam Neill where the toilet is in the film,'' McInnes quips.
Describing everybody involved with the project as "nice'', McInnes easily sums up his laid-back approach to acting. "Any job you can walk away from with a nice couple of friends and a funny story is all right, I reckon.''
So that's McInnes's plan? It's that simple?
"I don't have a grand plan,'' he happily admits. "My main ambition now is to get my hands on this cricket bat.''
posted by WilliamWatch at 7:58 PM
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