Meet the young Australian actor about to become a superstar

Toby Wallace is homeless. “I don’t think I’ve lived anywhere in four or five years,” he says. “As an actor you’re a carny, you’re moving from circus to circus, you’re trying your hardest to hold down some kind of consistency, friends, relationships, everything. I don’t really have a home at the moment.”

On the day in May when we meet at a cafe on Smith Street, Collingwood, Wallace, 28, is staying at his brother’s apartment in Brunswick. The following week, he’s off to Thailand for work. He’s recently been to New Zealand to visit the woman he’s been seeing for the past year, when their schedules allow (she’s in the business too).

He’s done long stints in Los Angeles, both during COVID – “that was a complete catastrophe, but also quite fun. There was literally nothing going on” – and since, crashing at Ben Mendelsohn’s place. He spent nine months in London, too, shooting Danny Boyle’s Sex Pistols miniseries Pistol (he played the band’s guitarist, and author of the memoir on which it was based, Steve Jones), before coming home to make Kitty Green’s outback drama The Royal Hotel, Ron Howard’s big-budget Eden and the indie prison drama Inside, which will screen at the MIFF next month.

Toby Wallace in Inside, which screens at MIFF next month.Credit: Mathew Lynn

To the untrained observer, this version of homelessness sounds pretty glamorous, jet-setting around the world and moving from gig to gig, hanging with the beautiful and famous, getting your face and designer-clad body in magazines. But, Wallace insists, the carny life has “a lot of limitations” too.

“Don’t get me wrong – when it’s good, it’s f---ing awesome,” he says. “When you’re on a bit of a roll or you’ve got a job coming out and you’re in LA going to a bunch of events, it’s pretty nuts. You get invited to crazy parties, there’s famous people there; one of the funnest parts of the job is meeting people you’ve admired and looked up to all your life.

“But 99 per cent of the time you’re not really doing that, you’re spending your time moving from job to job, trying to find the things you’re going to do day to day when you’re not working, which is pretty hard. And when you’re on the job, you’re on the f---ing job. It’s difficult. You’re doing a lot of emotional work.”

Wallace grew up in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs in a family he describes as super academic. His father is in computing, his mother, a former ballerina, is a reflexologist, his sister is in permaculture and his brother has just completed a PhD in corporate law. But young Toby was cut from a different cloth, and was a bit of a disrupter at school.

As a kid, says Wallace, “I was a little ADHD”. Acting helped him find focus. Credit: Simon Schluter

“I was a little ADHD, I couldn’t concentrate on anything, I was a bit chatty,” he says.

What did your report cards say?

“Could pay more attention. Stop letting off fireworks at school. Stuff like that.”

With Bindi Irwin in the kids’ film Return To Nim’s Island (2013).

As a kid, he fell in love with the video camera. “I got really obsessed, making short films with friends. I wanted to direct, so I went and did these little movie-making courses, and this drama class because my brother used to do them.”

The class, in Elsternwick, had a link to a management company, and young Toby was soon put forward for a few auditions. At age 12, he landed his first role, in Kriv Stenders’ film Lucky Country (since retitled Dark Frontier).

“He was so sweet to me,” he says of the Red Dog director. “I was a little kid, I was really excited. My mum had to come on set with me as a chaperone.”

Years later she confessed to her boy that she’d been worried he wouldn’t be able to focus. “But she was like, ‘I’ve never seen you work so hard and be so concentrated and have so much fun, ever’.”

It wasn’t just that acting was a good fit. It was that a movie set, and all its myriad moving parts, captured Wallace’s wild and febrile imagination in a way the classroom simply did not.

As The Kid in The Bikeriders (2023).Credit: Focus Features

“Scenes I wasn’t in, I was by the monitor with Kriv, he would chat me through it. He was a bit mentorish to me, and that seems to have continued through my career. I constantly walk on a job looking for older male mentorship, and sometimes I find an absolute goldie. I’m just always trying to learn from them.”

Stenders remembers Wallace as being “already the total, full package … I remember being continually surprised by his intelligence, his maturity and his natural instincts. And he could also juggle, which we found a way to put in the film.”

Wallace has done the obligatory soapie stint – six episodes on Neighbours in 2012 – but the vast majority of his work has been in features and miniseries. He’s tended towards high-end indie fare: the low-budget Canberra coming-of-age drama Galore (2013), in which he starred opposite Lily Sullivan (with whom he also appeared in the Romper Stomper miniseries) and Puberty Blues’ Ashleigh Cummings; the award-winning Acute Misfortune (2018), in which he played the young journalist Erik Jensen (on whose book the film was based), who gets drawn into the mad, chaotic, dangerous world of ratbag artist Adam Cullen (Daniel Henshall) after he interviews him; Shannon Murphy’s BAFTA-nominated Babyteeth (2019), with Eliza Scanlen as a terminally ill young woman.

More often than not, he’s played a bad boy. Sometimes the roles are big, sometimes they’re not. But even when he’s only on screen for a few minutes – as in Jeff Nichols’ recently released 1960s motorcycle gang movie The Bikeriders or as the estranged son of Guy Pearce’s prison inmate Warren Murfett in Inside – he makes a huge impression.

“Mate, I don’t know if I’m drawing on bits of myself that are a bit bastardly,” he says, describing his past roles as a litany of “evil characters or characters who are pretty unhinged or malevolent”.

“You’ve got to work at it, it’s a skill in itself getting good at those particular types of characters, just as it would be in trying to play a leading man,” he says. “After you play a few of them, people see a vibe, and they go, ‘OK, he can do that, that’s going to work in this role’ because they’ve seen it before. You’ve got it in your toolkit, it starts the ball rolling, and those roles are more accessible to you, I guess.”

Geoffrey Wright, the writer-director of Romper Stomper, says: “Women describe Toby as ‘dirty-sexy’, and by that I think they mean he plays attractive corruption extremely well. There’s really nobody else in the world selling the things that Toby sells on screen as effectively as he does. He makes it look easy.”

Shannon Murphy, his Babyteeth director, notes a duality in him, a softness coupled with an edginess. “He’s a crazy pray mantis,” she says, “with those spindly long legs and ability to be loveable and eat you at the same time. There’s no one like him.”

Kitty Green, who directed him as a charming but dangerous habitue of The Royal Hotel, remembers asking her star, Julia Garner, for her thoughts before casting him.

“She selected Toby from a long list [of actors] and I remember her asking, ‘Does Toby have fire in his eyes? We need someone with fire in their eyes’.” So Green called Thomas M. Wright, who had directed Wallace in Acute Misfortune, to ask his thoughts. “And Tom’s response was, ‘Toby has an entire ocean in his eyes’. I met with Toby the next day and he was perfect.”

Wallace does want to stretch, though, and take on other sorts of roles. “There’s a romantic drama I want to do at the end of the year that I’m excited about, if it happens,” he says. But he’s not concerned – not yet, anyway – about being typecast.

“I’m still enjoying those types of roles. I love playing those roles. All my favourite actors play roles like that.”

The stars of Danny Boyle’s Pistol (from left): Jacob Slater as Paul Cook, Anson Boon as John Lydon, Wallace as Steve Jones and Christian Lees as Glen Matlock.Credit: FX

To a degree, he says he’s deliberately steered himself towards that work, because it’s what interests him, and because it’s worked for him.

“Acting’s a bit like blackjack,” he observes. “You’ve got to be pretty lucky, but there is a little bit of technique to it.”

Those classes Wallace did as a kid are it in terms of formal training. He has otherwise relied on instinct and native talent. And he’s pretty disdainful of the idea that there’s a science to it, other than being open and ready to innovate in the moment.

“I don’t really think you can teach acting,” he says. “You can probably teach script analysis, but even then you don’t want to over-prepare and psychoanalyse too much because it will ruin whatever choices you have.

“One acting coach said it really well: ‘I don’t teach acting, I teach empowerment’. And I agree with that. If you feel empowered in yourself, it probably makes you a better actor, right?”

It’s all about getting out of your own way, he says, because no matter how well prepared you might be for any given scene, “on the day, everything’s going to be different”.

“The set’s gonna look different, the actor across from you is going to be doing something completely different to what you thought they were going to do. There’s almost no way to prepare for it, really. So you’ve just got to try to relax enough that you can make choices within the moment.”

Wallace has worked with actors who are technicians, but “they’re not usually my favourite actors. I don’t find them really relatable.” He’s not a big believer in the method, either. “If feelings or memories or whatever come up when you’re playing a character, that’s great. That stuff is gonna come up every now and again because we’re human beings, and awesome. But you can’t f---ing manifest it.”

A lot of the mystique around acting is just “wankiness”, Wallace says. Most of the time, a scene is just two people “throwing a bunch of shit at the wall … hoping something sticks”. No one really knows what they’re doing, he adds. “Anyone who says they know exactly what they’re doing with acting is lying.”

The one thing he does know about acting, though, is that he can’t imagine doing anything else – well, except directing. He’s trying to develop his own stories now, as a first step towards being able to make them. But writing is hard because “it kind of requires a lot of boredom and a lot of energy that you don’t really know where else to put”.

There is a sense that the adult Wallace is not that far removed from the kid at school who was, in his own words, “a little bit ADHD”.

With Hugo Weaving and Jessica Henwick in The Royal Hotel.Credit: See Saw Films

“Maybe it’s too psychoanalytical, but I’ve always felt quite rambunctious,” he says. “I kind of walk into rooms kicking my feet around and making lots of noise, and I think it’s actually because I feel quite sensitive, a little vulnerable, a little scared, and I kind of want to make a lot of noise so people notice I’m around.”

His role models in the business are people who share that energy – actors like Mendelsohn, whose toughness masks a gentle interior, or Colin Friels, whom Wallace describes as “funny, rebellious in all the ways I want to be, pretty loud”. Friels can spin a story, Wallace adds – “a lot of it probably isn’t true, but it’s f---ing entertaining”. He has an affinity with guys like that, he says, “because I know where it’s coming from”.

As for where he’s going, well, that’s hard to say.

In the TV series Romper Stomper (2018), Wallace played a Nazi skinhead.Credit: Stan

I ask Wallace if he has a sense of where he’d like to be five years from now, and he initially treats it like the job-interview question it is. “I want to be the CEO of a big studio,” he says in a mock American accent.

But then he lets his guard down, and answers seriously.

He’s become pretty adept at living out of backpacks, duffel bags and suitcases. He’s a big fan of Marie Kondo’s KonMari method, and is an expert at folding and tidying. “If you had told me five or six years ago that is what I’d be obsessed with, I’d have said what are you talking about?” But what this most restless of spirits is looking forward to most is standing still for a while, and finding a place to call home.

“Five years from now I really hope I have a consistent partner, I hope I own a house that I live in, I want a coffee shop down the road that I go to every day,” he says.

“I want to live in a really great city like London or New York, with a great friendship group, and I want to play some kind of sport every day, football or something like that. That would make me feel at peace. It would make me feel really great.”

The Bikeriders is currently showing in cinemas. Inside screens on August 9, 14 and 22 as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival’s Bright Horizons program; director Charles Williams will attend all three screenings. http://miff.com.au

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