Damon Herriman couldn’t get a role. Then Paris Hilton came along

Damon Herriman is about as comfortable with this interview as he’s going to get. I’m probably a bit too comfortable. In my dreams, it’s just the two of us. In reality, it’s the two of us and the Foxtel publicist at the end of the table and the photographer leaning over my shoulder.

“I’m probably not wary enough,” he says of interviews. “But I also don’t have a gotcha question.”

Actor Damon Herriman reckons “life tells you if you’re handsome”. Credit: Janie Barrett

No big secret? “I don’t think so. Not that I’m aware of.”

Bugger.

We’re at Deus Cafe in Camperdown, in Sydney’s inner west, not far from where Herriman lives in Newtown. He’s been in town since the pandemic hit last year, stepping off a plane from the US, where he had finished filming the TV series The Underground Railroad, just days before the borders were shut.

He noodled around at home, doing a bit of writing and celebrated his 50th birthday with a small Zoom party with friends. He’s since finished the third season of the Foxtel comedy Mr Inbetween (hence the Foxtel PR) and he popped over to New Zealand to film the comedy Nude Tuesday with Jemaine Clement and Jackie van Beek. He flashes his bottom and struts in his undies as oily strip club owner Freddy in Mr Inbetween and goes full frontal in Nude Tuesday. It, ah, sounds like a lot.

Damon Herriman as strip club owner Freddy in Mr Inbetween.  Credit: J. Pratley/Foxtel

“I would have been a lot more nervous about it if I was in my 20s or 30s,” he says. “Now, you just get to a point of like, ‘Stuff it, who cares?’ We’ve all got bits. My first day of doing the nudity [in Nude Tuesday] I was on my own. So I was in a car nude, and they called action and I had to run towards the camera. And I’m just like, ‘Wow, I’m just getting nuder the closer I get.’”

Is he looking forward to, ahem, seeing himself on screen?

“Not that bit!” he says, laughing. “I’m probably going to be watching the film forgetting that’s coming up and then just be like, ‘Oh, god, that’s right. Oh god.’”

Herriman’s Really Good BLT from Deus Cafe in Camperdown, Sydney. Credit: Janie Barrett

Bits aside – always an appropriate way to start a conversation – Herriman is delightful company. He takes his work but not himself too seriously and is chatty to a fault. The quietest he gets is while studying the menu, settling on the boastful Really Good BLT – “I mean, it says it’s really good” – with fries and chipotle mayo. I choose the Japanese chicken karage lunch tray, which sounds modest until it lands in front of me.

“You just do not get bread like that in America,” he says of his towering BLT. “I’m sure there are places that you’d be able to track down, but that bread is so Australian to me. Because over there, it’s like a different recipe. It’s almost like cake.”

For someone who has been acting since he was five, there’s little evidence of Tortured Child Star Syndrome or of Sordid Tabloid Past. You won’t find him publicly on social media and the closest he gets to being papped is being snapped this week by the Daily Mail on the set of TV series The Tourist in Adelaide (where the story astutely noted he had his “salt and pepper hair on display”).

“I don’t really have a desire to have to be a public person,” he says. “I like being an actor. But I don’t really want to be me as me. And I also grew up in a time when not bragging about yourself, or what you’ve just done, or what you’re in next, was the norm. And now it’s become the norm to do that stuff.

The Japanese chicken karage lunch tray from Deus Cafe in Camperdown, Sydney.Credit: Janie Barrett

“I don’t judge anyone else for it, because it’s completely the way it is now but, for me, I can’t do that. I can’t have a Twitter account and be like, ‘Hey guys, got this thing coming out.’ It makes me feel queasy. And it’s a shame because you hear people cast jobs now depending on how many [social media] followers you have. And I don’t have any. I’m of no use whatsoever.”

No use is a bit of a stretch. He’s exceptionally good at what he does, disappearing into roles so much he’s become That Guy Who Was In That Thing. You Know, Him. That mulleted sexual shaman in the ABC comedy Laid? Yeah, that was him. What about the blond-streaked music svengali Chris Murphy in the INXS mini-series? Yep. And the transgender analyst on Secret City? Tick.

For the past 15 years he’s split his time between here and Los Angeles, where his US breakthrough came as dim redneck Dewey Crowe in the cable series Justified, as well as bit parts on CSI, Breaking Bad and a clutch of shows where hitman/detective/murder/thriller essentially sum up the plot.

He’s so changeable on screen it’s hard to believe he was ever typecast as the supportive best friend (The Big Steal) or the thwarted love interest (Love My Way), but for years in Australia he couldn’t even get into auditions as casting agents and directors couldn’t see him any other way.

Enter US reality TV star and hotel heiress Paris Hilton. Her 2005 schlock horror movie House of Wax was being filmed on the Gold Coast and Herriman managed to snag an audition for one of the few roles they were seeing Australian actors for.

Herriman in his breakout role in the 2005 film House of Wax. 

“It was probably one of the first times I played someone other than a best friend or a nerd from the office,” he says. “[The character] was this like someone out of Deliverance, this kind of inbred, Southern redneck. And I just did not get auditions for those roles in Australia normally.

“And maybe because it was an American production, there was no preconception. The casting director was not so blurred by what he’d seen me do before. And I actually went to that audition looking very much like this inbred trucker. I put dirt on my face, and I put twigs in my bottom lip. So it juts out kind of like [he pulls out his bottom lip] this.”

Twigs?

“Yeah, I got them from my yard.”

He landed the part and ever since it’s been a rich seam of dirtbags and villains, dodgy priests and murderous soldiers. He reached “peak psycho” in 2019 when he was cast as Charles Manson twice – in Netflix series Mindhunter and in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood. Serial killers, it seems, are like buses: you wait for one, then two come at once. It all got a bit much.

“There was a period there where I did The Nightingale, Judy and Punch, Lambs of God and two Charles Mansons all within two years, and they were all horrible people,” he says. “And that was the point where I went, ‘OK’. And occasionally someone would say, ‘You’ve become the go-to bad guy, haven’t you?’ And I was like, I don’t really want to be the go-to anything.”

Looking at him – the man who loves a slice from The Pie Tin and once wore a white skivvy on the Don Lane show as an eight-year-old – there’s little evidence of any latent evil lurking within. I’m pretty sure Charles Manson wasn’t refilling anyone’s water like Herriman does. What does he think people were seeing in him?

The receipt for lunch with Damon Herriman at Deus Cafe in Camperdown.

“It’s probably something to do with not having a conventional-looking handsome, symmetrical face, you know, that’s part of it.”

You don’t think you’re handsome? (He is.)

“No!” he says, laughing. “I mean, you know if you’re handsome or not, because life tells you. It’s not just a personal opinion. There’s a level of good-looking that certain actors have that means that they are probably less likely to get the bad guy roles, and you are more likely to. Couple that with the fact that I love playing characters, something that’s far away from me, that looks, acts, behaves, speaks differently. And those are often the bad guys as well.”

So living in LA hasn’t turned him into a looks-obsessed monster? “I don’t think so. I mean, you spend enough time there and you could see how that could happen. Every time I come home, there’s an instant feeling of being brought back to normality and down to earth. But yeah, if you’re over there for a while, you know, every actor you meet has sparkling white teeth. And you think, ‘I never thought my teeth weren’t white enough. But now I have the least white teeth of anyone in this room.’”

Wait – it gets worse.

“I remember somebody wrote in an article about the character I played [in Justified], Dewey Crowe, and there was something about how they loved the look of the character, particularly the teeth they made. It’s my teeth! It was my teeth. But clearly on screen they were hideous enough to think these had been specifically made for this redneck.”

He shrugs. “Oh, come on. Like, my bottom teeth are crooked, all right.”

Season three of Mr Inbetween begins on Foxtel on May 26.

Deus Cafe, 98-104 Parramatta Road, Camperdown. Phone [phone]. Open Sunday-Thursday 7am-3pm; Fridays 4am-9pm