Five Bedrooms star Stephen Peacocke reveals hs thoughts about latest TV role and romance
Australian actor Stephen Peacocke has told of what he thought when he first saw the script for his new show, Five Bedrooms, and the TV romance waiting for his character.
He’s never had an Instagram account and wouldn’t know his Tweets from his Snaps. But Australian actor Stephen Peacocke seems to be doing fine without it.
The 37-year-old star of Ten’s new hit Five Bedrooms is not into the modern-day self-promotion social media calls for. Instead, the actor who has based himself in Los Angeles for the past five years prefers to put in the hard yards the old-fashioned way.
And let’s face it, even Chris Hemsworth, who like Peacocke moved to LA after his stint on Home And Away, was a late adopter to social media, opening an Instagram account only a few years ago at the constant urging of family and friends.
“I’ve steered clear of all that stuff, it’s just not for me,” Peacocke tells Insider from his home in Los Angeles. “I’ve got so many mates that love all that stuff, and that’s great, but it’s never been for me. I think I’m too far out of that whole world of technology to make it work.
“Some of my friends are pretty old school like me too, we use the old email addresses and phone numbers to stay in touch. It’s just something I have never been interested in.”
The private actor, who married his university sweetheart Bridgette Sneddon in 2015 after a decade together, keeps a low profile even in the US. The pair will rarely be seen at the usual actor hang-outs and parties and made sure to set up a home outside of the working industry neighbourhoods.
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And while he may not have found that vehicle that will cast him to the top of the pile just yet, he is keeping busy with a good range of diverse roles.
Apart from landing the part of Ben, the resident hot tradie on Five Bedrooms, Peacocke has just finished filming Danger Close: The Battle Of Long Tan with Vikings star Travis Fimmel and Richard Roxburgh (Rake), and he has a part in the new TV series, Les Norton.
Before that, he had decent roles in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot with comedian Tina Fey and fellow Aussie Margot Robbie and a major part in the romantic weepie Me Before You based on the best-selling book by Jojo Moyes.
Despite all this, to Australian audiences in particular, he will always be Daryl “Brax” Braxton from Home And Away.
“Sometimes I think we should have a more specific plan (on when we’ll come home), but we don’t,” he says of plans to return permanently to Australia.
“We’ve travelled the world the last four or five years and it is sometimes difficult but it’s a kind of adventurous lifestyle and we haven’t put a cap on it and that works best for us. We work hard and we’ve made some really good American friends over here and we enjoy it.
“Everyone warned me that I wouldn’t like LA, I’m from Dubbo which is about as far as you can get from LA, but we’ve found a lot to like about America, and we just got our Green Card, so we have to be based here at least six months out of the year.”
Peacocke says his role in Five Bedrooms will hopefully show audiences his range extends well beyond Brax, although he is careful to reiterate he is grateful for the role the Aussie soap has played in his career so far.
His character Ben is one of the standouts on Five Bedrooms, which has a strong cast including Kat Stewart, Katie Robertson, Hugh Sheridan, Roy Joseph and Doris Younane.
It’s that last name that has helped shine the spotlight on Peacocke’s role in the show.
In a moment that had social media lighting up, young, single Ben unexpectedly catches almost-50, separated mother-of-two Heather (played by Younane) in a passionate kiss that nobody saw coming. It’s refreshing plot lines like these that Peacocke says we can expect from the clever writers on the drama.
“ I guess I was (surprised when I saw Ben and Heather get together) it’s not something you see all the time,” he says. “But one of my best mates is in a relationship with a similar age dynamic, a gap of about a decade. I remember saying to the producer and the writers ‘Well done, this actually happens in the wild’.
“The way the episode was written it sort of led the audience down one track and that just happened at the end, which was so nice and refreshing. There was a line in episode four that the writers threw in after we’d rehearsed the scene a few times where Heather says (to Ben) ‘You could have a young girl with fakes tits’ or something funny like that and Ben comes back with ‘Nah, I don’t want fake, I want real’.
“There’s this perception people want all this fake stuff all the time, but I think people actually just want natural. And I think it’s a really cool thing that the writers threw that in, that’s what a lot of people might like about the relationship, I think.”
While Peacocke says he and Bridgette have no real “Hollywood Plan” on how long they will live as expats, he is inspired by those that have come before him.
“It’s kind of like prospecting, you never know if you’re 20m from hitting a chunk of gold or a shovel-full away,” he says.
“You see people like Chris Hemsworth obviously, and I’ve worked with Margot Robbie (on Whiskey Tango Foxtrot) and they came over here and worked really, really hard and they’re also awesome, good people.
“I like to think if you keep those two things in the forefront, above anything else like being famous and all that other stuff that isn’t very interesting to me, then you give yourself the best shot.”
FIVE BEDROOMS, 8:30PM, TEN
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