SAWeekend: Gary Sweet on the secret to acting, the joy of playing a villain - and the elusive perfect performance
From The Sullivans to Bradman to three broken marriages, Gary Sweet reveals how he coped with falling from true blue Aussie hero to notorious fodder for the tabloid press.
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Gary Sweet is a little worried this could sound like an obituary, but he ploughs on regardless. There are two types of actors, he muses with the insight of 40 years on screen: the personality actor and the chameleon. “And I really would like to be seen as a chameleon actor,” he says. “Someone who is not afraid to jump into different roles and try something different.”
That’s just as well, because Sweet, now 63, has taken on quite an array of characters of late: a German cannibal in comedy horror flick Two Heads Creek, an ex-wrestler in just-released film Paper Champions, and a butcher possessed by a Vietnamese demon in the new four-part SBS supernatural thriller Hungry Ghosts.
Sweet, who has also been in the ABC outback crime drama Mystery Road recently, is getting plenty of variety – and enough work to keep his face in front of the cameras.
It’s a face that is a little different to that which helped make the former Brighton High School student a national star as Leslie “Magpie” Maddern on The Sullivans in 1981, then as Don Bradman in the miniseries Bodyline in 1984, and as risk-taking hero Steve “Mickey” McClintock in Police Rescue into the 1990s.
These days, the hair may have disappeared, the whiskers turned grey and the lines on his face deepened, but Sweet says he’s never been more comfortable in his own skin, or content with the variety of roles he’s being asked to play.
“Because I behave like an adolescent, people tended over the years to cast me as slightly younger – but I’m happy to play older roles,” he says with a laugh.
“I find the roles more interesting now. A bit more complex. When I started acting, when you’re young and fit, I tended to play a lot of heroes. And heroes are kind of fun to play but they’re not as complex as the bad guys.
“The older you get, you just have more experience. And so you are able to inject the role with a deeper level of life. I’ve always found acting to be a kind of cerebral jigsaw. I want to know where my character fits into the whole story, so I guess you’re just better placed.”
Sweet is only in Hungry Ghosts for one episode, but he’s keen to sing its praises, is open to any question, and sprinkles the conversation with jokes, self-deprecation and reflection. His hair is gone but not the charm.
Filming the show was a new experience, Sweet says, working with a cast of hundreds of Asian-Australian actors and extras and discovering Vietnamese culture – such as the Hungry Ghost religious festival, in which the gates of hell are believed to open, releasing the dead. The SBS scriptwriters take that premise and turn it into a thriller: A tomb opened in Vietnam unleashes a demon and ghosts which haunt four families in contemporary Melbourne, dragging deep secrets and buried trauma from the Vietnam War into the open.
Sweet, playing a Footscray butcher, is temporarily possessed by the demon and finds himself wandering Melbourne in 1970s Vietnam War-era fashion – a body shirt open to the waist, flares and platform shoes. “It reminded me of my old wardrobe,” he jokes.
The actor found the script fascinating, admitting – “to my shame and regret” – little knowledge of Vietnamese culture despite the community’s strong presence nationally for decades. “And I think it’s a significant development in Australian television to have a much more accurate display of contemporary Australian society – and by that I mean there were so many fabulous and talented actors in the show whose faces didn’t look like mine,” he says.
When it airs next week, Hungry Gho sts will likely cause a few pangs among Melburnian viewers whose city, currently in tight lockdown, is shown at its lively, bustling best.
“Dystopian” is how Sweet describes Victoria’s capital these days, with empty streets he’s taken to riding around for exercise now the gyms are closed.
“It’s a strange world at the moment,” he says. “Bleak.”
Perhaps that has given him time to think, because Sweet is happy to analyse and reflect on a career that’s been going for four decades. Age and experience have given him a few insights, he thinks. He even admits a ghost of his own.
THE ACTING DRUG
Sweet’s story has always been presented as one of those sliding doors careers, where he accidentally found success by studying drama as a “soft option” for easy marks while at teachers’ college in Adelaide back in the 1970s. Even better, the classes were heavily dominated by young women.
It’s a nice story that fits his persona: larrikin, laddish, easygoing. But did it really happen like that? “I’ve thought about this a lot, recently,” he says. “I said I was never interested in all that sort of stuff (acting), but you know what? That is such bullshit.
“When I was a kid, I loved watching movies. If I ever had a day off school, I’d always watch the midday movie, and my favourite was Errol Flynn’s The Adventures of Robin Hood. I loved it, or anything with knights in it. I remember going to the movies with my brother, when your parents drop you off, and I remember Mutiny on the Bounty with Marlon Brando. It was an escape.
“I’ve said a number of times I had no interest in drama – it was a soft option – but I really think I gravitated towards it because of that escapist thing. It was such a dreamy kind of existence.”
In his final year Sweet performed in several plays, including Entertaining Mr Sloane, What The Butler Saw and some Shakespeare. Up on the stage, looking at the audience, the drug began to seep into his veins.
“It felt exhilarating,” he says. “And I’ll tell you what, that feeling exists sometimes when I’ve done a show when you feel like you’ve actually got that scene or got that character.
“I don’t think I’ve ever, ever nailed what I’ve set out to do for the whole show, but there are moments in it where you can hardly remember what happened afterwards, because you’re so lost in that character. You inherit that character so wholly and completely that everything else … your real life has disappeared …”
Sweet, a talented footy player and Glenelg reserves grand finalist, didn’t last long as a teacher. Somehow, he convinced Crawford Productions to give him a shot in what at the time was an enormously popular wartime family drama set in Melbourne, The Sullivans.
His account of getting a job there is filled with jokes at his own expense. “I’m Gary Sweet from Adelaide and I want to be an actor,” he recalls saying.
They told him to nick off, but he stuck at it. Then he got a call.
“I think it was just persistence, really,” Sweet says. “I’m pretty sure that whoever cast me in that gave me an opportunity because they couldn’t believe my front. And I think they just saw the fact I was really keen, enthusiastic and persistent and I wanted to have a go.”
Whatever attributes he brought beyond determination, looks and charm, Sweet had few technical skills. He thought he’d give it a few years to see how it went, and if it didn’t work out “I’d go back and do something serious, get a real job”.
Like what? “I always dreamt of being orthopaedic surgeon,” Sweet says. But he was a qualified maths and PE teacher? “But I only did it because everyone else did it”.
Medical school never beckoned. In 1982 he won the Logie for best new talent, and then in 1984 scored the plum Bodyline role of The Don, opposite Hugo Weaving as Douglas Jardine, the English captain.
Preparation saw him spend three hours during filming with the great man in Adelaide, but Bradman never spoke to the young actor after the broadcast. “In one of the scenes I had a beer,” Sweet recalls. “And he said, ‘Well, that didn’t happen’. He’d never had a beer after a game. I was at pains to explain it wasn’t a documentary; it was a piece of drama and with that comes dramatic licence.”
The next year Sweet was one of the stars of An Indecent Obsession, the film of Colleen McCullough’s book of sexual tension and jealousy set in a World War II field hospital; and in 1987 in The Lighthorsemen, about Australian mounted troops in Palestine in World War I. He was on his way.
At first, he had no idea about how to really act, or how to run a career. After winning his Sullivans Logie he recalls quizzing Oscar-winning American actor Ernest Borgnine, famous for the TV series McHale’s Navy.
“I said to him, ‘Do you think I should get out of this? I’m worried about being typecast.’ Absolutely away with the fairies, me – not a clue. Not a f..king clue. And he says, ‘Hey, Gary, is it a good show?’ I said, ‘Yes, it is.’ ‘Are you making some money?’ I said ‘Yeah, I am’ … And he said, ‘Well, my advice is to ride that wave as long as you can’.”
Sweet was also learning some important lessons on the set.
“The deeper I got into acting, I realised it wasn’t just showing off,” he says. “There was a process. You needed to research and to learn technique and you needed to listen and respond to the way other actors were performing.”
Sweet studied on the job. “The only thing I knew was that I didn’t know anything. So I wasn’t afraid to ask questions.” He learned how to avoid the furniture, where his lighting was, and how lens size magnified or decreased his performance.
“And when I realised the complexity of it, it drew me in. And also I was seduced by it in a way. It was, I don’t know … when you did nail some small part of a production, that buzz – I couldn’t think of any other job where I’d get that buzz. Those highlights drew me towards it and made me stay, because I would forever seek them.”
Still, all through the ’80s he had little confidence. “You know, for a long time I felt like an impostor, until suddenly – and it happened overnight– I felt competent and confident enough to take on a leading role and that was Police Rescuein the late ’80s and early ’90s.”
Sweet says he finally felt he knew enough to have the confidence to portray a character. “Not only could I perform the script, but I also thought I could actually inject something into it that could flesh that character out.”
It worked – he won several best actor prizes at both the Logies and the Australian Film Industry awards for the show.
The confidence proved to be cathartic. “The thing about acting is you create a character, or somebody creates it for you, and then you develop it – and when you commit to that character, it absolves you all personal responsibility on the screen,” he explains.
“Once you do that, then you are completely liberated. You are completely free to make an absolute dick of yourself on screen if you have to. Because it’s not you. It’s very liberating and that gives you great confidence.”
He found that in the stage musical of Muriel’s Weddingin 2017, when focusing on his character got him through his worries about his singing voice.
“Once you commit and stop thinking about yourself, and think your character is singing this song, it enabled me to relax,” he says. “What initially was the most terrifying part of the show became the thing I looked forward to most.”
It also worked well for playing bad guys. While some in the industry advised Sweet against swapping his hero persona for a villain, he found it too exciting to resist.
“The complexity of the villain was so interesting for me,” he says of his role in Blue Murder, where he played notorious hit man Christopher Dale Flannery. “I really wanted to explore it as far as I could, and it was really great to be able to do that, and that was a turning point for me.”
But Sweet was also sometimes seen as the villain off screen as well. His lifestyle made him good value for the women’s magazines and gossip columns. He liked a drink and a smoke, liked the ladies, and fostered what he calls a “notorious” image. Structure, authority and responsibility, he’s said, were all problems for him.
Testament to that were his three marriages – in 1981 to actress Lenore Smith, in 1987 to lawyer Jill Miller, and in 1995, to swimmer and TV host Johanna Griggs, then 21 – which all ended in divorce.
The split with Griggs, with whom he had two children, put a dent in his image. “Bounder” was used in more than one media story. Sweet called the press coverage “vicious, personal and ill-informed”.
That’s the ghost in his story, the character he reckons he created for himself. Sweet says he built a persona that didn’t seem to care too much as a bit of a defence mechanism – “if I did fail, I’d already said I didn’t really care”.
“Looking back that’s my appraisal of it – I kind of wanted to be notorious rather than famous,” he says. “I could never live up to the person that not only the press portrayed me as, but my own doing. I manufactured it by never denying anything. If you don’t deny stuff, they take it as read you’ve done it. Kind of came back to bite me on the arse a bit as I got older.”
It’s not clear what he means, since he can’t give an example. But Sweet has rarely shied away from discussing his rollercoaster personal life.
In 2014, while appearing as a thrice-married bloke on House Husbands – “I thought it was a documentary” – he reflected on why marriage was hard, concluding that after the honeymoon was over, a lot of couples wanted to change things about their partners.
He’d mellowed, he said, and understood now partners had to embrace each other’s flaws. “You realise nobody’s perfect, and this is what the package is; this is what you wanted at the start.”
Sweet has now been with girlfriend Nadia Dyall for 16 years, and they have two young children (in total he has six, aged three to 32). “I’m prolific,” he laughs.
He hopes that will be true of his continuing career, and with two little kids, he’ll need the money. One model for longevity is his Hungry Ghosts co-star, Aussie acting legend Bryan Brown, who at 73 is 10 years older. Sweet says being older seems to throw up a greater variety of roles.
“When I started, I fought every war from the Crimean to Vietnam,” he says. “Then I played every cop you can get. As I got older, I kept getting promoted. I finished up, the last character I played was the commissioner of police. And I rang my agent and I said, ‘That’s it; I can’t play any more cops because I can’t go any higher’.”
But Sweet says he there are plenty of other roles in him yet.
“Yeah, I plan to continue until I nail it … and then I’m going to f..k off out of it because there’ll be no point going on, because I’ll have finally achieved what I’ve been trying to do for the last 40 years: get it right. I’m not very confident that will ever happen.”
Hungry Ghosts screens Monday, August 24 to Thursday, August 27 at 9.30pm on SBS and SBS On Demand