‘Zero chance’: David Wenham on SeaChange, Diver Dan and his new small screen role

He played a cult role in an iconic Aussie TV series. But David Wenham has revealed why he wouldn’t bring the character back.

David Wenham has found the most quintessentially Australian way to suffer for his art. Reprising his award-winning role as small-time crook Johnny Spitieri for SPIT – the follow-up to his 2003 film Gettin’ Square – saw him once again wearing Spitieri’s signature wardrobe of tight jeans and thongs.

Only this time it wasn’t so easy for the 58-year-old actor.

“There’s a downside to running in thongs,” he tells Stellar with a laugh over a Zoom call from London, where he’s enjoying a much-deserved holiday

“We only wrapped shooting a few weeks ago and my feet are still carrying the scars from doing that. I hadn’t put on thongs for 20-something years, so then spending six weeks in them doing a lot of running and a lot of stunts was pretty unforgiving.”

Blisters and backache aside, Wenham relished revisiting the character. So much so that he’s producing SPIT himself.

‘Time and a place.’ David Wenham has ruled out ever reprising his cult role from SeaChange, Diver Dan. Picture: Joshua Tate

He’s less enthusiastic about returning to another of his most famous roles, adamantly declaring there’s “zero chance” we will ever see him playing SeaChange’s laconic Diver Dan again. “Lightning struck once there,” he explains of the beloved ABC comedy which launched in 1998 and also starred Sigrid Thornton, John Howard and Kerry Armstrong.

“The success of that show was down to that particular group of people at that particular time.”

His laid-back charisma on SeaChange turned Wenham into a somewhat reluctant sex symbol; at one point he was even voted Australia’s Sexiest Man Alive, an accolade he finds both amusing and confusing.

“That happened at a time – not long after I graduated from drama school – when my interest was in ‘characters’ that were further removed from who I am as a person,” Wenham explains. “So the career took a very strange left-hand turn very early on, which was completely unexpected for me. That I was even on the telly and playing leading men left me going, ‘Hang on, but … what’s happened here?’”

Never having taken an interest in presenting himself as the textbook swoon-worthy leading man on screen means that getting older hasn’t particularly fazed Wenham. In fact, ageing is something he’s been ready for since he was in drama school.

David Wenham and co-star Asher Keddie in a scene from the new Aussie drama, Fake. Picture: Paramount+

“I was playing characters that were a lot older than I was at the time,” he says of training at University of Western Sydney’s Theatre Nepean.

“So I was getting make-up pencils and trying to etch lines into my forehead and whatever. “And now I’ve got to the age where none of that is required, because the wear and tear of life is actually just there – which is lovely. You know, I’ve earned it. I’ve earned all those creases and crinkles and wrinkles.”

Likewise, Wenham has always been one to embrace imperfections. And in his new drama series Fake, he does that in spades playing Joe, a conman who woos an unsuspecting journalist (Asher Keddie) he meets on a dating app.

Wenham is quick to assure that his character isn’t simply another “Tinder Swindler” out to score money. Rather, Wenham explains, he is “a fantasist, or even a fabulist” who is based on writer Stephanie Wood’s real-life experiences with a lying Lothario.

The full interview with David Wenham first appeared Sunday’s issue of Stellar. Picture: Steven Chee for Stellar

“When we started on the project and I talked to people about it, it was incredible how many people said: ‘Oh my God, that happened to me,’” he says of online deception. “It’s endemic in the population, as Stephanie found out when she wrote her book about her experience. It makes you think about how much you actually really know about somebody.”

Having been in a relationship with actor Kate Agnew since 1994, Wenham says he finds the world of online dating “completely foreign. And I’m not on social media.

“The only social media I have is what used to be called Twitter. And the only reason I had that was to get information about news and current affairs.

“The rest of social media, personally, doesn’t interest me. I’ve got a bunch of books in front of me here. That’s the world that I like to immerse myself in.”

The actor understands that it’s a very different story for younger generations. And as a father to two daughters – Eliza, 21, and Millie, 15 – Wenham has had a front-row seat to the power that social media now has over some people, and how they relate to one another.

While his daughters’ peers started getting smartphones as soon as they reached high school, Wenham and Agnew believed it was in their girls’ best interests to delay exposure to the online world for as long as possible.

“I remember my eldest daughter coming home from the first day of Year 7, and she said she had felt so isolated,” he recalls of Eliza, who is now a dancer in the Queensland Ballet company.

“She was very upset. She said nobody would just play in the playground anymore. Or even just talk. She said, ‘They’ve all got phones, and they sat there pressing heart buttons.’”

Now they’re older, Wenham says both his daughters “have a presence, but they’re pretty sensible with it”. And as for himself? Wenham answers with a laugh: “I do have a smartphone. But I’m not very smart with it. I just use the dumb functions.”

Fake streams on Thursday on Paramount+. For more from Stellar, click here.

Originally published as ‘Zero chance’: David Wenham on SeaChange, Diver Dan and his new small screen role