Legendary Aussie actor Anthony LaPaglia returns to Sydney to star in Death of a Salesman
Australian acting great Anthony LaPaglia returns to Sydney to star in Death of a Salesman and in a revealing interview opens up about his own life and how he’d like to eventually depart the planet.
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Anthony LaPaglia has long graced our screens, but over his 39-year strong career has never stood on the Sydney stage … until now.
On Friday the industry veteran makes his debut in his much-anticipated premiere of Death of a Salesman at the Theatre Royal. At 65, he wanted to do live theatre just one more time.
LaPaglia has just finished a triumphant season in Melbourne, the home town of his
wife, actor Alexandra Henkel. But it’s been 43 years since he’s lived in Australia, so the US is definitely home. He’s not sure he could ever live here again, if he’s honest.
“My wife is very keenly Australian, so there’s a balance, and I always enjoy coming back,” says the Emmy, Golden Globe, Tony and AACTA Award winner.
“But I am not sure about actually living here. And it’s not that America is so fantastic. It’s not better or worse; it’s just different, and I’m just used to that mindset now.
“Despite what the two idiot political parties are doing – talking about average life in America – you can’t look at the news in the United States and go ‘that’s America’.
“Yes, we have some factions going on and disrupters like Trump and all that stuff, but in everyday life, Americans are unbelievably polite, and unbelievably supportive.
“If you want to do something, people really genuinely want you to succeed.
“Whereas I find that in Australia, sometimes that’s not quite the case.
“To be honest with you, until very recently I thought there was a bit of (tall poppy syndrome) going on (in Australia), and then I think covid changed a lot of things.
“I’ve noticed in Australia, covid really knocked people around here and people started questioning what they were doing for a living, and realising they don’t need to be in the office every day.
“But also, I think also on a deep psychological level, it knocked a bit of the ‘she’ll be right, mate’ out of Australia.”
STYLE OVER SUBSTANCE
Questioning life, priorities and paths is one ofthe biggest takeaways from Arthur Miller’s famed Death of a Salesman.
LaPaglia stars as Willy Loman, the father and travelling salesman who spends his life working for the American dream.
Work consumes him and he eventually realises he’s been a failure as a father and husband, and one can argue the Pulitzer Prize-winning work is more relevant now than when it was written in 1948. LaPaglia says the character has always spoken to him, for more reasons than one.
“The thing about Arthur’s plays is that they’re universal themes that never go out of date,” he says.
“This play resonates incredibly well, because we do live in that age where people think that it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.
“Like Instagram, it’s not what you say; it’s how you say it. It’s style over substance.
“And Willy’s generation, this is how he feels like he’s gotten ahead, although when it comes down to brass tacks he kind of hasn’t.
“But his older son Biff is really grappling with this and understanding that that’s not true and that everything his father has told him is basically not true.
“On a very deep level, I think Willy understands it. But guys of his generation, it’s not like they had shrinks; what they had instead was inarticulate rage.
“My dad definitely had it. He was from Italy, he did not have a formal education.
“He went to work when he was eight. So his ability to communicate was, that was what he had to work with.
“Which I understand far better now than I did at the time.
“Willy is the same in a lot of ways. He’s not an educated guy, he’s a road salesman, and when he was younger, it worked.
“Now that he’s in his 60s, it’s hard work.
“I mean, my business is the same. I really like what I do, I love my job – but it’s getting tougher and tougher for me when I get a job now and they say ‘well, you’ve got to go here’.
“It’s tougher for me to leave my house. Like, I really like my home.
“And no matter how nice the place is I’m staying in, I still miss home.
“So there’s a lot of things that I relate to. Put it this way: It’s not a huge stretch for me.”
FULL-CIRCLE MOMENT
Coming home to play the part is a full-circle moment for the Without a Trace star, even though this current Sydney run is the first time the Adelaide-born actor has ever performed on a local stage.
“It’s a beautiful place and I am really looking forward to it,” LaPaglia says of Sydney.
“My career started in theatre in New York and for one reason or the other, just because of the way things go in life, I had done quite a bit of theatre and then I started transitioning into TV and movies and other stuff, and then would do an occasional play.
“And then I realised, when this came up, the last play I had done had been 10 years ago, on Broadway in New York.
“And it’s a big commitment when you do one in New York. They want six months out of you and – just life – the economics of your life become more difficult to try and make that kind of commitment to six months.
“So it had been 10 years and this came up and I thought, ‘Well, if I don’t do it now … I’m probably never going to do a play again’.
“And this is a play I’ve always wanted to do, and Neil Armfield is someone that I’ve worked with now three times, and I love working with him, he’s an amazing director.
“And all the elements were there; everything was good. There was a strike going on in LA for eight months, although that wouldn’t have mattered. I would have done it anyway, without the strike, because it was just, it was just time for me to.
“If I hadn’t done this, I probably would have never done it again.
“I wanted to give it one more crack.
“But in saying that, it was a bit nerve-racking, after 10 years.
“Because even after all these years, those fears are still as important, if you want to deliver your best performance.
“If you’re not terrified, you shouldn’t be doing it. Terrified is good.
“Terrified means that you care.
“But there are different kinds of terrified. Being prepared and terrified is different than being unprepared and terrified – and I prefer the being prepared and terrified.
“Unless somebody’s phone’s going off, I will shoot them a glare, but outside of that, I’m just too involved in the play to look at the audience.”
LaPaglia has been in dozens of acclaimed films and series over the years – Boy Swallows Universe more recently, Lantana and Frasier to name a few – but a role he’s still revered for is another father figure, that of Michael Andretti in Melina Marchetta’s Looking For Alibrandi.
“I have many daughters around the world,” he laughs, and adds many second and third-generation Italian Australians connected with the story of Josie Alibrandi’s childhood.
Luckily for him, dad isn’t a hard role to play. In fact, in his real life, it’s the one of which he’s most proud.
“My daughter (Bridget) is 21 now, and I remember 13, 14, 15 – that’s a couple of tough years,” LaPaglia laughs.
“Mine came good at about 17.
“My only advice to you is, if it’s not life-threatening to them, choose the path of least resistance. It’s not worth it.
“I used to watch my ex-wife (My Big Fat Greek Wedding actor Gia Carides) get into these Churchillian battles with her, and like, why?
“I was a lot more easygoing with it, because being a rebel without a clue when I was young, I remember what it was like as a teenager.
“You think you know everything. You think your parents are idiots. Your kids realise that you’re not God.
“And on two levels that’s really difficult. On one level for them, to realise that you’re not God is really hard, and it’s hard for you, too, because everything you’ve told them up until now has been gospel, and hopefully what you’ve been telling them is truthful – to a degree,” he laughs.
Now, he and Bridget are, by his own admission, best mates. Not that they weren’t before, but when she turned 18 and moved to New York to go to college, their connection cemented. “But I was always the ‘go to’ guy in the family when it came to problems,” LaPaglia says. “She spoke to me about a lot of stuff, and the thing is, is to be open.
“This is what I used to say to my daughter, because they want to start going out to parties and stuff at this age, right? And you want to know everything: who’s there, who’s the mother, who’s the father?
“What I always said to my daughter was this: If you are in a difficult situation, I don’t care if you smoke marijuana, if you’ve tried alcohol. If you don’t feel safe, you call me, give me the address, I will come and pick you up and I will not ask you a single question.
“I won’t ask you what happened, who did what. I will just drive you home and let you go to bed, and you don’t ever have to talk to me about it again, unless you want to.
“And it worked.
“I was just glad that she didn’t put herself in harm’s way. Because I think kids are afraid to call their parents and they end up with a more difficult situation.
“Like I said to her, there’s no Spanish Inquisition. I’m just gonna calmly pick you up, take you home, and I’ll be really glad to have got you and you’re not in danger.
“And that’s all that mattered.
“Interestingly, after a couple of those, the next day, she would tell me the amount that she could tell me.”
I WOULD HAVE BEEN ALL OVER INSTA
LaPaglia feels being a parent is another aspect of Death of a Salesman that the audience will connect with.
“Parents, in particular, you get the young guy’s point of view,” he says of the play.
“He wants to hustle, he wants to make it. The other one, he's a bit older and having a bit more of a crisis of ‘Well, is this what I want?’.
“And I think the ‘Is this what I want?’ crisis is very big right now with the millennials.
“Because, look, if Instagram been available to me, back in the 1912s when I was teenager,” he jokes, “I would have been all over it. I love technology.
“So I don’t even blame Instagram or TikTok or any of that stuff.
“I would be the first person to be on it. That I didn’t grow up with it is a blessing for me, because I’m not influenced by it at all. I never go on it.
“People have made sites for me because they think it’s good for your career exposure. I don’t think it means a damn thing, not to somebody in my age bracket.
“And people actually get to make a living this way, which I really admire. You don’t have to go and do sort of drudgery of a job; if you’ve got some kind of talent or some kind of appeal, you can start a YouTube podcast. And as with all things, like movies, some of it – a good 80 per cent – is kind of shit – but there’s 20 per cent that’s really quite good.
“What we’re witnessing is the emergence of a new way of communicating and it’s only going to get more strange and dystopian, as AI starts to develop.
“But the one thing you’re not going to be able to replace is theatre.
“I feel like theatre will gain in popularity, simply because even movies I think will end up being AI.
“You won’t even need actors any more. It’s possible. It’s not good enough yet, but it’s not far.
“That’s why actors are licensing their images. But we’ll see. Who knows, maybe the audience wants real – let’s see.”
And real he is. And to keep it real, LaPaglia has a rule which will mean he won’t read this magazine story, or any other, good or bad. Ever.
“The first thing I do is I don’t read anything about myself, ever,” he says. “Positive, negative – it doesn’t matter.
“It’s just a good practice to not.”
Publicly, LaPaglia doesn’t like to give too much away. In fact, he’s doing the opposite when it comes to his information online, so this interview is refreshingly candid.
“The minute you signed on to Facebook and Instagram, and TikTok, you gave everything away for free,” he says.
“You gave your whole life to the government.
“Because if you don’t think that Mark Zuckerberg or his other tech drivers don’t work with the government, you’re out of your mind.
“Of course they do. They don’t have to ever do mass surveillance; we’ve done it to ourselves, quite happily. Why do you think they give the service away for free?
“Here’s my advice to anyone that’s on it: Start decreasing your fingerprint.
“And wait till you try to start to decrease your fingerprint and find out just how hard it is to do.
“I had to hire someone. There are companies you can hire that will gradually remove your information.”
LEAVE IT WITH ME, KID
LaPaglia is in Sydney for a few months andthen it’s back to LA. He hasn’t been here for a decade, and loves that not much has changed.
“My wife is from Melbourne, so whenever we come back to Australia it’s to visit Melbourne. I haven’t been to Sydney, I think, for at least 10 years, and it hasn’t really changed that much which is really comforting,” he says.
“I like the beaches here.”
LaPaglia’s earliest credit was a 1985 part in Steven Spielberg’s TV show Amazing Stories, followed by his first feature film, Cold Steel, in 1987. But it was someone backing him for the 1990 Alan Alda-directed hit Betsy’s Wedding that changed everything, he says.
“I was very dedicated to learning the craft of acting,” LaPaglia says.
“I didn’t think that I didn’t have to know anything. So I studied a lot.
“There were victories and defeats – plenty along the way.
“I think it was the first time that somebody really went to bat for me, which is quite unusual. When I did Betsy’s Wedding, the studio wanted to hire somebody else, and Alan Alda and Marty Bregman, who was the producer, I had done a big table read for them. We did two in a row.
“And after the two readings, they said ‘We want you to do this part’.
“And I really hadn’t done that much.
“And the studio wanted someone who had a name. Marty Bregman, who is one of the old-time gangster producers, and he just looked at me and he said ‘Leave it with me, kid’. And I remember leaving that reading and saying to my agent, ‘I think they just offered me the part’.
“And my agent said, ‘Oh, I hate when they do that. You’re not gonna get this part – they want a name, blah, blah, blah’. Two weeks later, I had the part.
“Marty Bregman went to war with the studio to get me in it. Having someone believing you like that is rare.
“And that definitely jump-started my career.
“I’d already been doing theatre and a lot of off-Broadway productions, but it’s different.
“At that time, they were separate industries. So if you did theatre, you did theatre; if you did movies you did movies. The transition between theatre and movies was a bit more acceptable. But television was considered low grade.
“So, anyway, I made sure I was always prepared. But I was very, very lucky in that opportunities and certain people came into my life and helped me get there.
“I didn’t do it all by myself.
THE FUTURE
With three hip replacements under his belt, the known football fanatic can’t take to the pitch any longer. LaPaglia played in the National Soccer League for Adelaide City and West Adelaide back in the 1980s and was a part owner of Sydney FC until 16 years ago.
“I’m pretty happy with most of it,” he says of the life he’s created since his first foray into acting. “I have three dogs. One dog in particular, a husky, who is like my buddy.
“My wife makes me very happy. I have a very comfortable, quiet life that I enjoy.
“I have reached that point, sadly, where I have lost a few friends, you know, just to time.
“I’m more on that end of it now, unfortunately.
“But I’m not going to step back. I hope I drop dead on stage, personally. That’d be the perfect way to go.”
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Originally published as Legendary Aussie actor Anthony LaPaglia returns to Sydney to star in Death of a Salesman
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