The Luminaries: Ewen Leslie shifts from gaslighter to gaslightee

Ewen Leslie is one of Australia’s great screen and stage talents – and he has a knack for getting killed off.

When Ewen Leslie asked director Claire McCarthy what movies he should watch to prepare for his role on The Luminaries, she suggested Gaslight, George Cukor’s 1944 thriller starring Ingrid Bergman.

The film is about a young woman whose emotionally abusive husband manipulates her into believing she’s crazy. This film – and its 1938 British predecessor on which it’s based – is where the modern conception of gaslighting comes from.

“I’d never seen it before and I watched it, and I was like, oh man, I should’ve watched this for The Cry!” Leslie told news.com.au over video from his home in Sydney.

It’s quite the swing to go from being the gaslighter to the gaslightee, but that’s how it played out for Leslie, who went from drama The Cry, where he portrayed a controlling narcissist to The Luminaries, a lavish period production in which his character is a stooge in other people’s schemes.

“It was the complete opposite. I was the one who was sort of this pawn at the centre of all these different characters’ machinations.

“He’s a tragic character who doesn’t realise he’s a tragic character. He’s in these scenes where he has no idea there are enormous stakes, and that was part of the fun, the joy of playing someone that was very open-hearted, kind of wore his heart on his sleeve.”

Ewen Leslie with Eve Hewson in The Luminaries. Picture: Paramount+

The Luminaries has something of a luminous source – Eleanor Catton’s Man Booker Prize-winning 2013 novel. Adapted by Catton, the six-episode series is set during New Zealand’s 19th century gold rush, centred on a group of prospectors whose desires for fortune leads to schemes, revenge and death.

In a cast that includes Eva Green, Eve Hewson, Himesh Patel, Yoson An, Marton Csokas and Richard Te Are, Leslie plays Crosbie Wells, a character he described as a “mass of contradictions”.

“He’s someone who has this enormous heart and innocence to him,” Leslie said. “And he was brought up in a brothel, so he’s brought up with enormous respect for women and he was someone that you could feel very safe with.

“But at the same time, in an instant, he was someone who could be very ferocious. He had this vulnerability that could turn on a dime as well.

“It was fun to play someone like that because I don’t normally get to play people like that.”

Ewen Leslie and Eva Green in The Luminaries.

In a career that has spanned almost three decades, starting as a child actor on Ship To Shore, a free-hearted character like Crosbie has been rare in Leslie’s filmography.

He’s better known for a clutch of serious, brooding types contending with dark pasts, including the detective on The Gloaming, or as a young man making his way to his father’s homeland in Dead Europe, or as Henry, the broken-hearted father in The Daughter.

The explosion in TV series in the past few years has been a boon for Leslie, who’d previously primarily worked in film or theatre.

“When I first graduated and moved to Sydney 20 years ago [from WA], and the audition would come through and it would be, ‘Ah, it’s a TV thing’ but then it would be, ‘Oh wow, it’s a film, I’m going to get to do a movie.’

“And it’s not that it’s completely flipped, I love cinema and I love some of the films I’ve been involved in, but TV now has just become a different thing. It’s been said by so many people, you can take a much more novelistic approach to it and you can tell a longer story over a longer period of time.”

That most of the TV projects he’s been involved in lately, including the farce Operation Buffalo, morality and family drama Safe Harbour and the second series of Top of the Lake have been miniseries hasn’t been deliberate.

“That’s just been completely by chance. I would happily be doing Safe Harbour season eight right now.

“Sometimes I’ve thought, ‘Wow, I wish I didn’t die at the end of that one so I could go again.”

In The Luminaries, Leslie first appears as a corpse – filmed in “freezing cold New Zealand at 11pm, in my undies and an actor’s wondering how they use that scalpel on my chest” – so even if Catton’s book hadn’t been turned into a self-contained miniseries, there was no chance of that.

As gaslighter-in-chief in The Cry. Picture: ABC

When Australia plunged into the Covid pandemic early last year, Leslie, his partner, TV producer Nicole O’Donohue, and their two kids moved from Bondi to the NSW south coast for six months, where her family lives.

When they returned to Sydney, they decamped to the inner west, which worked out well – as well as it could – during the city’s second lockdown with their new home’s 5km radius including bustling neighbourhoods with great food and parks.

But the disruption has made it hard to pursue work outside of his state border, whether that was elsewhere in Australia or overseas.

And he’s in a much better position than the vast majority of an industry hit hard by the pandemic, with productions and performances cancelled and little to no government support.

“There are the actors that work a lot and get a lot of opportunities and I’ve been that person, and then there are also the people who haven’t yet been given the opportunities and who are not working as much, and I’ve also been that person.

Ewen Leslie has been an actor for three decades. Picture: Josh Woning/AAP

“The last couple of years, largely because of Covid, that discrepancy has been more pronounced than it normally is. There are people who were rehearsing plays at the beginning of 2020 and were meant to open that still haven’t opened.”

He asked if politicians who deemed arts workers as “non-essential” and who denied them the same support handed out to other industries ever wondered how those Netflix shows they and their families watched during lockdown came to be.

But he, like many other Australians who can see the tantalising end of the pandemic as we’ve known it, was optimistic about what’s ahead.

“It’s been a really tough time for our industry but things are starting to open up and there’s a lot of light at the end of the tunnel. It feels exciting at the moment.”

From November 15, Leslie will be treading the boards again for the Sydney Theatre Company’s three-person production of Julius Caesar.

Ewen Leslie will be in Julius Caesar with Geraldine Hakewill and Zahra Newman. Picture: Daniel Boud

Despite spending more than a decade appearing in multiple productions most years, including Simon Stone’s The Wild Duck, which Stone adapted for screen as The Daughter, the Melbourne Theatre Company’s Richard III and STC’s War Of The Roses, Leslie hasn’t done theatre in six years.

He felt apprehensive about his return to the stage.

“But even if I hadn’t been on for like six weeks, I [don’t know I’d feel differently],” he said. “Every play I’ve ever done, it’s only two weeks after that that I think back and go, ‘Ohmigod, how did I do that?’

“I don’t mean in terms of ‘I’m amazing’, I mean in terms of standing in front of so many people and putting yourself out there. But I’ve really missed it and I’ve had great opportunities the past six years with screen stuff, but I’m really looking forward to doing that again.”

The Luminaries starts on Paramount+ on Sunday, October 31

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