Richard Roxburgh: ‘I keep my inner child alive’
HE’S known for his rakish ways onscreen, but behind the scenes Richard Roxburgh is all about that family life.
Stellar
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THERE might be only one true Cleaver Greene, but it turns out that there are plenty of mini-me versions of the roguish character from Rake running around Australia — particularly of the small and/or furry variety.
“I have bumped into people who called their dog Cleaver, and I have had people in shopping centres come over and say, ‘This is my baby, Cleaver,’” laughs Richard Roxburgh, the co-creator, producer and star who plays Greene in the series that returns tonight on the ABC.
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While the womanising, heavy-drinking barrister might be an unexpected source of inspiration for the parents of Australia, the man behind the morally suspect smooth talker is something of a shoo-in for namesake worthiness.
Roxburgh has clocked up more than 30 years as acting royalty, with a stint on Broadway, blockbuster films and cult TV shows on his résumé, as well as a children’s book he wrote and illustrated (the latter being something he describes as a love letter to the three children he shares with food personality Silvia Colloca). It’s why he was tapped by menswear label Van Heusen to front their Mentors campaign, alongside other inspiring Australian men.
Yet while Roxburgh happily mugs for the camera as the campaign is shot on the shores of Sydney Harbour, when he sits down with Stellar he says that such external acclaim has little bearing on his sense of success.
“I’m just living my life and doing my best, and if people like some of the things that I do then that’s fabulous, but it’s more to do with the way that I feel about where I am, always. Otherwise, if you have an ear too much to what everybody else’s expectations are, then you can get lost in trying to follow that, or predict it,” he says. “You only have to be a success in your own terms, and what that means is following your own internal leadership, which is a constantly evolving conversation.”
At 56, it’s taken a while for Roxburgh, who fell in love with acting at 16 after scoring the lead role in his school’s production of Death Of A Salesman, to tune into that conversation. “When you first come out of drama school, you’re still a bamboozlement of insecurities and needs and aspirations and hopes and dreams. There’s a relief in letting go of that.”
His secret, he laughs, is “ignoring all the people’s cries for you to quit along the way. I’m a person who needs to be kept in a sense of the adventure of things, so I suppose there’s a kind of childlike quality that you have to have, and you have to keep alive in you.”
And having children, Raphael, 11, Miro, seven, and Luna, one, has helped with that. “Once you’re in that world with those bright eyes looking up at you in that magical mystery tour of childhood, it’s very good for keeping your own child alive... it’s not to say that I don’t have self-doubt, as I’ve been plagued with it, but I think you’ve just got to keep your kid engaged.”
He relishes life as a father, despite acknowledging you “need the patience of a saint” to be a parent. “At times you just don’t, and they drive you crazy and you pop your top. I’ll go away and go, ‘Oh god, that was a shameful display on my part.’ They’re now of an age where I can go back and say, ‘OK guys, I’m sorry.’”
Even if he shares the worries of most parents, he hopes his children would describe him as “fun, playful and very present”. And he’s not just speaking philosophically.
“Part of the joy of being an actor is also that you get months of complete liberty in-between things,” he says. “Those spaces used to be filled with terrible doubt: ‘Oh god, what am I doing next, it’s all shrivelled on the vine, my life is nothing.’ And now it’s just filled with, ‘Kids, I’m here! Now I can roll around with you idiots and go down to the beach’ — and it’s nice. I never lose sight of how lucky this life is.”