‘I don’t think it’s a compliment!’: William McInnes on being a hit in the US
There is no such thing as interviewing William McInnes; you are merely in his presence, hoping to get half a question in, as he booms away and then throws in a song for good measure. Cheese, rugby league, the Logies, parenting, book festivals. He can cover it all.
He’s here – in theory – to talk about the second season of NCIS: Sydney, the local Paramount+ spin-off of the iconic American series centred around the Naval Criminal Investigative Service team that has been running for more than 20 years. When the Australian version debuted in the United States in November 2023, it racked up more than 5 million viewers for its first episode, and went on to become CBS’s No.1 primetime entertainment show.
The NCIS: Sydney cast (from left) Tuuli Narkle as AFP Liaison Officer Constable Evie Cooper, Sean Sagar as Special Agent DeShawn Jackson, Mavournee Hazel as forensic pathologist Bluebird Gleeson, William McInnes as forensic pathologist Dr Roy Penrose and Todd Lasance as AFP Liaison Officer Sergeant J.D. Dempsey.
They’re bonkers numbers, but they go to show how important brand recognition is when it comes to launching in the US. NCIS: Sydney showrunner Morgan O’Neill even told The New York Times he was happy to follow the series’ well-established formula of a dead body in the first five minutes, investigate it, solve it, rinse and repeat. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” he said.
And while NCIS is a known quantity, the real revelation in the US has been McInnes, who plays Dr Roy Penrose, the grumpy forensic pathologist who is as handy with a scalpel as he is with a quip. Suddenly, McInnes has an international profile, with reviewers pointing readers to his early work in the “underrated cop drama”, Blue Heelers.
“Someone sent me a review about this thing, and they said the pathologist part is played by an Australian actor called William McInnes, who looks like the Bundaberg Bear come to life,” he says. “I said, ‘I don’t think it’s a compliment!’”
Hasn’t he heard about the numbers – that the first episode in the US was watched by just under 10 million people, when broadcast and streaming numbers were combined. That’s huge!
Mavournee Hazel and William McInnes in NCIS: Sydney.
“I don’t have to because I’m the polar bear who rumbles around the background,” he says. “But they give me all these bloody medical things that I cannot say. Last season, a guy, he died, and I had to say, ‘This man died of a major – it was supposed to be a cardiac event – and I kept on saying ‘cardio event’, like Jane Fonda! Honestly, what are my cultural references? They’re all 1980s. He was doing Aerobics Oz Style and just exploded.”
Of all the NCIS: Sydney cast – co-stars Todd Lasance, Olivia Swann, Tuuli Narkle, Sean Sagar and Mavournee Hazel – McInnes is the one that sticks out like a sore thumb. The show feels like the last thing he needs in a career that’s already packed with roles on the “national treasure” bingo card. So why did he do it?
“It knows what it is,” he says, after singing the first half of his answer (“One of these things is not like the other …”).
William McInnes as the blustering boss, Lindsay Cunningham, in The Newsreader.
“So that’s a relief. It’s not bad Chekhov. What’s that great expression? Carpark Chekhov! It’s nice. It’s just a show that sets out to entertain. It’s a part of a franchise that knows what it is, and you can have a bit of fun with it. Some people might not like it, but people who watch it like it, so it’s good.”
That answer seems to sum up McInnes’ approach to acting entirely. He’s not interested in faffing, he’s there for the story, the audience and working with people who are fair and decent. He name-checks the NCIS: Sydney showrunner and producer – O’Neill and Michelle Bennett – several times, praises the cast and crew of The Newsreader, as well as his old Blue Heelers colleagues (Lisa McCune, hard worker; John Wood, funny old coot).
The original cast of Blue Heelers, Grant Bowler, Lisa McCune, William McInnes, John Wood and Martin Sacks.
“He was the first grown-up who I came across acting, who thought it was a good thing for a man to do,” McInnes says of Wood. “I thought, ‘That’s quite interesting’. He moaned about it, and he said, ‘Oh, you know, it drives me up the wall, but it’s a good thing to tell people’s stories.’ And I kind of thought, well, that is a nice thing to learn. I’m still a bit iffy about it, but I always remember him, and he was always very polite to people.”
Does McInnes feel like he’s an elder statesman of acting now? Surely, at 61, he’s the one the cast are looking up to?
“I’m just a bloke who’s been around for a while,” he says. “I wrote something once for the Herald about acting … an actor is like a dairy product. You start off as a fresh cup of milk. And then the actor’s nightmare is you open up the fridge door and, oh, it’s gone off, and you just get turfed. So you’ve got to downstream yourself – cottage cheese, hard cheese, probiotic yoghurt. That’s what I am.”
Why does he think he’s lasted so long?
“It’s how you sound, and how you look,” he says. “It’s arbitrary. You can be the most talented person and you never get a look-in. And I’ve always been a type …”
Which is?
“Well, in Blue Heelers, I was reasonably good-looking from a certain angle, and I was tall and I was thin and I had a big voice. So I was a bloke-bloke in Blue Heelers, but then you go to SeaChange, and I was Roger Moore’s Antipodean cousin from one angle, shot right. But then you turn back into, sort of, a bloke again …”
Sigrid Thornton and William McInnes in the original SeaChange.
What is he now?
“Well, a big bloke. A Bundaberg Bear bloke. But that means I get to do The Newsreader, where they let me free-range a bit.”
Free-range is an understatement – McInnes bellows and steams so much in the ABC drama that at times he looks seriously unwell. A doctor even called him up.
“This bloke rang up after he saw the show and said, ‘Are you all right?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, what do you mean?’ And he said, ‘I just saw you on the telly and I was wondering about your left right descending aorta.’ And I said, ‘You saw me last week! It’s telly, it’s play-acting.’ And he said, ‘Oh right. William, I never made this phone call’.”
Our interview is nearly at an end. The PR has popped in to express bafflement as to why we are talking about cheese, but McInnes does have one parting thought: “It’s such a tiny world, isn’t it? That’s why you don’t want to shit in the nest. Because now wherever you go, if you bullshit and you carry on, it’ll catch up with you.”
Or, at the very least, give you a pretty good career.
Season two of NCIS: Sydney streams on Paramount+ from February 7.
Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.