Bryan Brown argues he’s still in his prime but worries for Australia’s ‘dead white men’

Bryan Brown has cornered the market in playing the great Australian bloke. But the 71-year-old, still in his acting prime, worries for other men his age who are not so lucky.

Bryan Brown will be honoured at this week's 2018 AACTA awards, ahead of starring alongside Phoebe Tonkin in Stan drama series, Bloom. Picture: Stan

It’s weeks out from this year’s rugby league finals series and diehard St George Dragons fan, Bryan Brown sighs like a man who has watched his team rise, but mostly fall for a large part of his 71 years of this sporting life.

“I’ve had a depressing few months. It is sport and things happen that you don’t expect. They lost their confidence, but then they showed a bit of something,” he perks up. “You live in hope,” he adds.

For the acclaimed actor, who will be honoured with the Longord Lyell prize at the Australian Academy of Cinema, and TV Arts (ACTAAs) awards, hope and optimism have been a key ingredients to his career success and longevity.

The ‘boy from Bankstown’ never thought the world of acting would open up for working class kids like him - but undetered he took himself to England and the foreign world of performing Shakespeare and the classics.

Despite winning a contract at the National Theatre, he would return to Australia on a holiday in the early 1980s and find a more permanent place for himself “telling our stories” in the burgeoning film and TV industry here.

Vital ... Brown will be honoured at next week's 2018 AACTA awards, ahead of starring alongside Phoebe Tonkin in Stan drama series, Bloom. Picture: Supplied/Stan

After impressing in roles in Breaker Morant and A Town Like Alice, Hollywood would tempt him overseas again: notably in sci-fi series, FX, then opposite Tom Cruise in Cocktail 25 years ago.

Marrying English beauty and accomplished actor/writer/director Rachel Ward, they would raise one of the most creative families in the country and nurture their passion for storytelling together.

But his latest role, in Stan’s upcoming Australian drama series, Bloom (out January 01), Brown plays a man forced to reflect on aging and the march of time.

Ray’s Alzheimer’s-stricken wife, Gwen (played by double Oscar-nominee Jacki Weaver in her older years, and Phoebe Tonkin when they were newlywed) eats a magical berry which returns her to her youth.

Watching Brown wrap his arms around Weaver, and tenderly guide her away from screaming locals during one episode of her character’s delirium is incredibly touching - remarkably, the first time these two giants of the local industry have worked together.

“I’ve met her a couple of times,” he tells INSIDER “but that’s all, so it’s a delight, because we are the same age and have a lot of stuff ... it’s like, ‘it’s our turn now.’”

While both are still in top career form, Brown is well aware other men his age, in his and other industries, are not so lucky.

Touching ... Brown worked with Jacki Weaver for the first time in their careers on Bloom. Picture: Supplied/Stan

“I’m still very active in all the things I do. I still surf. I still make movies. I still act in movies. I probably do more things involved with creativity than I ever did,” he says.

“I’m a patron of the Bankstown Arts Centre, where I grew up. I’m an ambassador for different things that keep me involved with young people in creative ways. So I participate a fair bit in the world. But it’s got to be very difficult for some people to be engaged. I was only talking to people recently, who were saying ... a man ‘I’m 58, a very capable person, I don’t have a job and I can’t get hired.’

“Then I was talking to a friend whose husband is in finance. Very solid job, very good at what he does, and they’re like ‘we just glad he’s got a job because in the finance sector people are getting put off and younger people are getting the jobs.’ Suddenly,” Brown argues, “the dead white male exits.”

He explains the term is one raised with him recently by a playwright mate “and refers to that period that’s happening now, where careers once went to 65 and retirement ... where it’s ending earlier through circumstainces and there isn’t anything else to go to. I never really noticed it before ... in my game I get to play at that age. Now that I”m older, I get to play an older bloke but it hasn’t just suddenly stopped. I mean, I’m lucky ... I still get the opportunity to work in the game that I like doing.”

Brown will receive the Longford Lyell award at this week’s AACTAs. Picture: Supplied/Stan

He worries for those who don’t: “if you’re not engaged in things, I think you can get in a very dark place.”

Weaver’s making the most of her third act renaissance overseas, but Brown is committed to keep plying his trade locally.

“I don’t need to [work in Hollywood]. I mean, I know what I do, I know why I live the way I live. I can’t tell Australian stories in Hollywood, now can I?”

Added vitality comes from working with his wife, who directed him and actor/writer daughter, Matilda in Palm Beach (out next year); as well as involving himself with his other children’s working lives, also in the arts.

“I get great enjoyment in that,” he says, of the family business.

“[Matilda, pregnant with his first grandchild] is a fabulously talented young lady and we have great conversations about writing and art and storytelling and have worked together and probably will again. It’s the same with my other kids. My other daughter [Rosie] is a designer and we talk about what she’s doing and her ideas on things; and my son [Joe] is a graphic artist and we talk about things we might do together in terms of storytelling and animation,” he enthuses. “You know, that’s all good fun.”