Born to be Warne: Meet the Perth actor selected to play the spin king

One of the biggest challenges making a television series based on a real-life figure, especially one whose image looms large in the popular consciousness, is finding an actor who resembles the subject of the story (or at least close enough as not to distract).

The producers of Nine’s two-part series on the life of Australian cricket legend Shane Warne lucked out with Alex Williams, who not only had the moves to convince as arguably the greatest bowler of all time: he had the blonde hair, the right shaped face and the easy charisma.

Williams is not exact replica of the first bowler in test history to take 700 wickets. But watching the series, which begins tonight on Nine and continues tomorrow, you’re able to forget you’re watching an actor and see the man whose life had more twists and turns than Warne’s famous “ball of the century”.

Alex Williams stars as Shane Warne in the two-part biopic miniseries Warnie.Credit: Nine

Williams himself doesn’t think he looks that much like Warne. “I’m not as plump,” laughs the Perth-born WAAPA graduate over the phone from Sydney, where he is now based.

However, Williams believes he had the basics – the hair colour, the skin tone, the face shape – to allow the make-up people to work their magic.

“Some eras were easier to achieve than others. If we had been shooting for half a year instead of six weeks we could have recreated his hair in different eras a little more intricately,” explains Williams.

“Our job as filmmakers is not to exactly reproduce Shane and the world in which he lived. That would be a documentary. But I was ultimately happy with the look we achieved.”

He also reveals that the food he went to bulk up was not Warne’s beloved pizza but Guinness and doughnuts.

It was not just the sun-kissed Australian good looks that connects Williams to Warne. The 32-year-old Mt Lawley High-educated actor grew up in a cricket-mad family.

“Test cricket was the sound of summer,” he remembers. “It was always on in the background. Someone would yell, ‘Warnie’s on!’ and we would all scramble into the loungeroom because we knew something was going to happen.”

Despite his passion for the game and his own prowess as a cricketer during his teen years, Williams threw himself into researching Warne, the working-class kid from Victoria whose achievements on the field and after-hours headline-grabbling lifestyle made him sporting rock star whose passing in 2022 was mourned by a celebrity line-up the envy of a Hollywood awards show.

“When you play a real-life character you sometime faced with very little information. Fortunately, Shane’s life has been heavily documented. There’s even video from his early years. And he wrote a lot about himself. So for me it was complete immersion – reading everything I can, having the interviews on in the background in the house all day,” he says.

While Warne was one of the biggest personalities in Australian sporting history, the personification of the loveable larrikin, Williams says that he was careful not to lapse into giving us a cartoon version of the legendary leggie.

“The key with playing real people is to avoid caricature and build a three-dimensional person,” argues Williams.

In 2012, Williams played another high-profile Australian, Julian Assange, in Robert Connolly’s telemovie Underground, about the Wikileaks founder’s years as a teenage hacker.Credit: Joe Armao

“You work hard getting all those tics and idiosyncrasies right, all those micro moments. But in the end you put them all together then reduce them down. You start big then pare back. Ultimately, what you are trying to do is distil it down to the essence of the man. Getting the vowels right and the idiosyncrasies is just study. Capturing the truth of the person is the goal.”

That essence has something to do with the way in which Warne maintained his high spirits even during the darkest days of his career, which was routinely interrupted by injury and off-field scandals that forced him to sit on the sidelines on several occasions and threatened to bring his world crashing down. It also denied him what he most craved: the Australian captaincy.

“He had conflict within himself – between the person he wanted to be and the person he was. But that is a struggle many of us have,” explains Williams.

“But he never lost that lust for life. He was a fun and magnetic person. So many people were drawn to him for good reason. He would walk into a room and all eyes were on him. That’s not something learned. It is something you are born with.”

When it comes to getting under the skin or real people few Australian actors have had as much experience as Williams, who was done, according to his calculation, seven biopics.

He first caught our attention playing the young Julian Assange in Robert Connolly’s 2012 drama Underground. He went on to play Kirk Pengilly in the series INXS: Never Tear Us Apart (2014), John “Slug” Harvey in Brock (2014) and Mike Vaughn in Friday on My Mind (2017).

“My interchangeable face is a tool,” he says. “I am able to change face and my body. I don’t have strong features which enables me to play a range of characters.”

Not surprisingly, when Nine announced just months after the cricketer’s death it was making a Shane Warne biopic there was considerable blowback, with his daughter Brooke expressing her outrage on Instagram.

Shane Warne (Alex Williams) with Simone Callahan (Marny Kennedy) in happier times.Credit: Nine

“Do you have any respect for Dad and his family. You are beyond disrespectful,” said Brooke.

Relations between Nine and the Warne camp have warmed a little, with Brooke confirming they had met with the producers and will hold judgement until they have seen the show.

Other members of the Warne inner circle, including his brother Jason and father Keith, have seen the show and pleased with the result, according to Nine spokesman I talked to earlier this week.

Williams is reluctant to comment on the storm that has swirled around the series since it was announced and no doubt will grow larger over the next two nights as it goes to air.

However, he says that nothing is in the show that is not on the public record and that intentions of the filmmakers was to celebrate Shane Warne, not tear him down.

“It was made from a place of love,” Williams says.

“Shane didn’t shy away from the scandals. He didn’t shy away from the mistakes he made. And the show doesn’t either. That would not have been the show people would have wanted. A revisionist history of someone’s life isn’t very interesting.”

Warnie is on Nine tonight at 7pm and tomorrow at 7.30pm.