Class working man

It seems like only yesterday he was in Bodyline, but Gary Sweet is now a 30-year veteran of stage and screen

Gary Sweet on Cops LAC

It seems like only yesterday he was in Bodyline, but Gary Sweet is now a 30-year veteran of stage and screen

GARY Sweet is laughing, his head thrown back; it's a warm, smoggy laugh that makes him seem like a darkly mischievous little boy. He reminds me, almost uncannily, of John Hargreaves, another wonderful actor with a cello-timbre guffaw.

Like Sweet does, Hargreaves worked constantly, shifting gears easily between film, television and theatre, although probably best known for the miniseries Scales of Justice and The Dismissal. Sweet has the same crooked grin, sometimes viciously self-deprecating irony, the easy blush, the insouciance and candour. And like Hargreaves, who died in 1996, he can catch you up in a hundred things as he talks.

We're in a coffee shop in Sydney's inner-city Waterloo, in the newly fashionable Danks Street precinct, not far from where Sweet lives with his girlfriend, a Qantas flight attendant. He's telling a story about how he once took a young female film-crew runner for a drink in a Kings Cross pub during the filming of Bodyline, the 1984 TV miniseries that dramatised the events of the 1932-33 English Ashes cricket tour of Australia. Sweet played Don Bradman so successfully it turned him into a highly sought-after commodity as an actor. He was already recognisable for the role of Leslie "Magpie" Maddern in the Crawfords TV series The Sullivans, for which he won the Logie for most popular new talent, but Bradman made him a star. "We were having a chat -- she was a real good sort, you know -- and her bag got stolen with the first day's rushes in it," he says, still aghast at the possibility of the first part of the shoot just disappearing. "We eventually found them in a rubbish bin; her bag was gone but at least the movie was salvaged."

He pauses for a long moment and pulls the plaid cap he's wearing down over his eyes a little, twisting his mouth, one side up, one side down. "Sometimes I don't know how we actually survive what happens to us in this business," he says.

It could have been so different for the occasionally disorderly but always charming, briskly clever actor, 53, whose long career has at times seemed to be full of false starts. Somehow, despite some well-documented personal and marital mishaps -- he has been married and divorced three times, most recently from TV presenter Johanna Griggs -- he has managed to become part of TV's folk memory through a long and assiduous stockpiling of achievements.

He's best known for playing Sergeant Steve "Mickey" McClintock in the long-running Police Rescue, an adrenalin junkie his superiors sometimes found as hard to control as the series bosses did the actor playing him, according to producer John Edwards. Sweet's other TV roles include The Big Sky, The Great Bookie Robbery, Blue Murder, Dogs Head Bay, Stingers and The Circuit.

There have been feature films such as Macbeth, Alexandra's Project and the critically acclaimed The Tracker. He has won numerous other awards, apart from his first Logie, including the AFI award for best actor in a television series (Police Rescue) in 1991 and 1992. He has been successful, but unlike so many actors who find fame he has never lost the common touch. Now he's on a career high again, having just appeared in Seven's Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg epic The Pacific as the tough, hard-cursing drill sergeant Elmo "Gunny" Haney.

He recently finished filming the international production The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, directed by Michael Apted, and has scored another role in a TV series, Cops LAC, an ensemble, character-based police serial for Nine. Produced in-house by the network, the series is described by writer and producer Tim Pye as "like The Bill but with a higher body count".

In a show that emphasises character and incident at the expense of the primacy of story, Sweet has obvious fun as cranky superintendent Jack Finch, boss of the command, alongside Denise Roberts's inspector Diane Pappas and Roy Billing's senior sergeant Graeme Sinclair. He has the sharpest lines and carries much of the show's comedy with his asides, self-mockery and droll iconoclastic wit.

Aimed at a broader audience than Underbelly, with less blood and nudity, the new show could evolve into a long-running amiable commercial package if the first episodes are any indication. The rest of the cast, including Kate Ritchie, is strong, the scripts reasonably convincing and the show has experienced directors such as Geoff Bennett, David Caesar, Karl Zwicky and Daniel Nettheim. Certainly the veteran actor is confident about it, but then a knockabout self-assurance has always been his way.

Born in Melbourne, the still fiercely working-class Sweet -- his father was a fencing contractor, his mother a process worker -- grew up in Warradale, South Australia, and attended Brighton High School in Adelaide. He later obtained a degree and became a teacher. "For a week," he says, a chortle almost taking him over.

"I only went to university because all my mates went and I somehow got this scholarship; my parents expected me to go, so I did," he says. "Halfway through I started doing some drama units, mostly because there were a lot of sheilas doing them, hardly any blokes, and I thought: 'This is all right, isn't it?' " he says. "So I taught briefly and thought I'd try being an actor instead."

His first professional job was as the male love interest in a low-budget horror movie in 1980, directed by sexploitation producer John D. Lamond, called Nightmares. It featured lots of nudity and many fairly brutal glass slashings. "Terrible, diabolical," Sweet says, brushing away the memory. "I only got about two grand but I thought acting was, you know, all right."

Then, somehow, he found himself cast in the long-running The Sullivans after, he says, "rather amateurishly" auditioning for the production company. "It was only meant to be a three-week job but it kind of developed into 2 1/2 years. The only thing I had going for me was I knew I couldn't act, but I spent a lot of time asking questions."

He was surrounded by experienced, even veteran, actors such as Norman Yemm, Vicki Hammond and Michael Caton, generous with their time and willing to be interrogated by the young actor. "I kept asking questions and kind of watched intently and listened to them all the time," Sweet says. "I learned acting the way others learn a trade, on the job, and to this day I'm not very creative but I'm reasonably interpretative."

He has never forgotten one piece of advice Yemm passed on. "He said, 'Now listen Sweetie, I'll give you your first acting lesson: say your lines but for Christ's sake, don't act.' " It's advice, thankfully, he's never followed. Sweet says, acknowledging the paradox, that the older he gets as an actor the more inclined he is to think that less is less, not less is more. "I reckon if it's truthful then it can't ever be too big; whereas in those old days it was throw the anchors out, son, ease it all back," he says.

"These days I just do my stuff and they deal with it. It's out of your hands, after all, as soon as you've done it. You may as well never look at rushes because you're only going to be disappointed. You always think, too, when you see the final thing cut together, 'Didn't I do a better take than that?' or 'Didn't I have another go at that?' "

He suggests that for him, working in TV drama is like being in a jigsaw or a complex puzzle. "You never know the whole picture so you just have to somehow find your way through it, episode by episode," he says. "Often you don't have a clue where it's all going, especially in a series, because you never know the ending. You just have to find some position in the flow, the scheme of things."

He says TV acting is about immersion, and complete engagement. "When I was nervous when I started -- I'm never anxious now -- I was either under-prepared or I was worried about how I was looking or sounding; I hadn't committed entirely to a character."

This, he feels, is the biggest trap for young or inexperienced actors. "Once you commit, it absolves you of all personal responsibility. It's not you after all, it's the character doing these things; this represents a kind of delicious freedom and you can just float and go with moments."

While this sounds slightly metaphysical, or even mystical, Sweet is disdainful of any self-reflexive shenanigans used by actors; any so-called "method" introversion that allows them to wander their own interiors indulgently. He finds character quickly, capable of intense concentration and emotional intensity drawn from the hundreds of hours spent performing in all sorts of conditions in front of a camera. I acted with him on Police Rescue, astonished at the way he found character as soon as the director called "action".

He says he likes to always use a football analogy -- as a student he played AFL for South Australian team Glenelg -- to describe his approach to acting. "I don't actually go and get the ball, but if you've got it and you pass it to me I can do something with it, you know what I mean?" He laughs at this, another boisterous chuckle. "When it's my turn to act, then I know I better do something." But he does emphasise the importance of listening absorbedly to the other actors. "A lot of actors just don't listen, they just get their lines out, and then glaze over," he says intently." Sometimes you want to shout, 'Wait a minute mate, I'm still talking to you' ."

I suspect Cops LAC is a bit of a doddle for this accomplished performer, especially after the gruelling shoot of the remarkable The Circuit in Broome just a few years ago. SBS's wrenching outback courtroom drama series was brilliant TV and Sweet's performance as magistrate Peter Lockhart was that of an actor at the peak of his form. He read the scripts and went to Broome, where he spent time at the magistrates court watching the officials deal with Aboriginal juvenile offenders.

"It broke my heart and I couldn't stop weeping; I felt so guilty and ashamed and miserable basically at my own neglect, my lack of understanding."

He began to spend time with the local Aboriginal elders and became committed to a much more involved and political approach to acting the part of Lockhart. "It was a big change for me," he says quietly. He's a little sombre suddenly, and there's no sign of a joke for the first time since we began speaking. "I wanted to change the perception Australians have about the indigenous population because perception so often becomes reality, and I felt if I could do something, anything, to change it then maybe I could help change that reality."

There's something oddly gallant about Sweet for all his larrikin assertiveness, quick wit and inability not to send up every idea that comes his way. The atmosphere around him, like that of the older generation of actors he started with, is always convivial and inquiring. Like them he's never going to be pushed around by the circumstances of the world, by banalities such as unpaid phone bills, missing shirt buttons and broken hearts.

It's easy to believe he won't have all that much trouble fighting and controlling crime in the inner city, the harbourside and the eastern beaches of Sydney in his new show.

Cops LAC, Thursday, 8.30pm, Nine.