Actor Tom Wright is at the top of his game with Jane Campion television project

A FILM with Jane Campion or a project in the wilds of East Timor, it's all part of Tom Wright's eclectic approach to his work.

Tom Wright

WITH his clear green eyes, unruly hair and quiet intensity, Thomas M. Wright evokes a young Daniel Day-Lewis, and it is not the first time that comparison has been made: Jane Campion said the same thing after meeting him.

Days later, Wright was cast as a lead in the director's latest project, the six-part television series Top of the Lake, which Campion is shooting in New Zealand.

Barefoot, wearing jeans that have almost disintegrated, Wright, 28, gazes out over the Remarkables mountain range in Queenstown, looking very much like a member of the anarchic Black Lung Theatre and Whaling Firm, the fringe theatre troupe he co-founded in Melbourne six years ago. His story is not that of just another actor who took the well-worn path through drama school and soap operas to arrive on the doorstep of fame -- his rise coincides with a theatrical revolution in Australia that has deposited a tight clique of twentysomething young men on to some of the nation's most prestigious stages and beyond.

In the backyard of the house Wright has rented for the five-month shoot with his partner, actress Lotte St Clair, he says: "Things that are occurring around me are pulling me forward faster than my legs can carry me. I haven't stopped working for six years now. I can't remember a period when I haven't been working on more than two or three things at any one time."

Wright helped bring about about an independent theatre renaissance in Melbourne that began when he walked out of the Victorian College of the Arts in 2006. "I had a falling-out with the head of acting, Lindy Davies," he says. "I refused to use the acting process they taught at the school. I said: 'I'll stay here and I'll work harder than everyone else here but I can't use the process.' They said, 'if you do that then you'll have to leave', and so I left."

Six months later he started Black Lung with his friends Thomas Henning and Gareth Davies. The group's early shows were haphazard affairs. They were branded "theatrical terrorists" after hitting a prominent theatre critic in the head with a mandarin during a performance - an accident of alarming accuracy given he was the only person in the audience.

"We created a way of working that was really reckless and really over the edge sometimes to the point where it wasn't guaranteed you'd have the same show night to night. Things fell apart . . . and there were instances where shows had to finish because we were drunk or out of our minds and we were rewriting the scripts."

However, the Black Lung had vision. Not content with the stages on offer at the Adelaide Fringe in 2007, Wright took a lease on an abandoned building and completely renovated it, sticking in a bar and two theatres for the maniacal show Avast. Audiences loved it. One blogger wrote: "I'm absolutely ecstatic - I feel convinced that I have just seen something truly special. In all its anarchic glory, contorting the relationship between audience and actor, Avast is either turning theatre on its head, or killing the medium off. I wandered home thinking that, surely, anything is possible now."

At roughly the same time, another young Melburnian, Simon Stone, was building an independent theatre company of his own, Hayloft Project. Its first shows were less chaotic but still showed a startling maturity and, like Black Lung, garnered a clutch of awards. Both companies took a Shakespearean attitude, sharing the roles of actor, director and writer.

Stone defines his Hayloft and Black Lung contemporaries as "a whole lot of people who are incredibly inspired, incredibly talented, incredibly overly educated, who know everything about the fields that they're working in". They felt they were "being alienated from the culture because like anyone, they wanted to be included earlier than they were necessarily qualified to be . . . and then created their own culture".

Wright and Stone readily admit their companies began as a reaction to Australian theatre in the mid-2000s. "Most mainstage companies in Melbourne at that time were using theatre in a watered down, disinterested and uninspired way," says Wright while Stone, speaking by phone later, cites the "fast food nature of the way that a lot of mainstream theatre was being programmed".

Stone adds: "The argument that a lot of people in my generation, including Tom and various members of Black Lung . . . had is that the theatre tradition often alienates people. That it has become so faithful to its own rituals that it has forgotten how to speak to the audience in the way Shakespeare's theatre spoke to the audience: in a very immediate, innovative and specific way. So that the work that we made . . . and the work that I continue to try and make, does not take for granted the idea that an audience is going to come into the theatre to watch this particular story being told."

Soon Wright and Stone were commandeering the very stages they had railed against. In 2008, Stephen Armstrong, then executive producer of Melbourne's Malthouse Theatre, had the foresight to give Black Lung a three-month residency. At the same time, one of Hayloft's shows, The Only Child, transferred to Belvoir St Theatre in Sydney. Jane Norris, casting consultant at Mullinars in Melbourne, noticed Wright while he was performing a lead role in Melbourne Theatre Company's Love Song. She had been watching Stone since he was in high school. "They're not like anyone else. The way they deliver lines isn't like anyone else," she says. "They've had to find a real sense of their own identity."

In 2009, Norris put Wright, Stone and another early Black Lung member, Mark Leonard Winter, in front of her husband, director and producer Robert Connelly. He was auditioning young men for Balibo, the film he was making with Anthony LaPaglia about a group of journalists murdered in East Timor in 1975.

Connelly recalls: "They were the first three actors I saw and I cast them all. They're a fearless bunch; they have a kind of confidence that I love working with. It reminded me of the atmosphere when I was working on [1998 film] The Boys with David Wenham, when he was completely unknown. I've been searching for that, to recreate that energy. It's 'we can do anything' and they do, they put everything into it."

These days they're everywhere together. Stone and Wright worked on a translation of Brecht's Baal for a joint Malthouse and Sydney Theatre Company production. Stone directed, Wright starred. Stone's electrifying Thyestes, co-written with Henning, sold out in Melbourne and Sydney. It also starred Henning and Winter, alongside Chris Ryan.

Somehow Wright also found time to go to Queensland to write and co-direct I Feel Awful for the Brisbane Festival, before Wright went back to Sydney to direct Davies in And They Called Him Mr Glamour at Belvoir.

In mid-2011 Stone was appointed resident director at Belvoir while Wright sent off a video audition to Campion for Top of the Lake. Campion watched it, and on January 1, Wright and St Clair - who gave birth to their first child late last month - flew to New Zealand so Wright could take on the part of Johnno.

Top of the Lake is undoubtedly a step up to the big league: the producer is Emile Sherman (The King's Speech, Shame), it has funding from the BBC and US film festival Sundance, and stars Holly Hunter in her first collaboration with Campion since the Oscar-winning The Piano.

According to a media release heralding the project, the series is "a powerful and haunting mystery about the search for happiness in a paradise where honest work is hard to find". The story - co-written by Campion and Gerard Lee - centres on the disappearance of a five-months pregnant 12-year-old named Tui, last seen standing chest deep in a freezing lake.

Alongside Hunter, the cast includes David Wenham, the outstanding Scottish actor Peter Mullan, recently lauded for his role in Tyrannosaur, Lucy Lawless and Elisabeth Moss, the fresh-faced actress best known to television audiences as copywriter Peggy Olsen in the American smash Mad Men.

Wright is clearly in his element in New Zealand, impressed yet unfazed by the size of the production. His response calls to mind something said by Marion Potts, former STC resident director and now artistic director of Malthouse, about Wright and his contemporaries: "What I find more impressive about these artists is their instinct, their tenacity and their self-belief."

Wright's intensive preparation for Johnno involved scrambling down the side of mountains with his on-screen "brothers", martial arts classes, and sitting down with the kind of real-life motley characters that Johnno might be based. He also designed most of the "ink" covering his torso - under his jacket is a mass of temporary tattoos: a few lines of Asian script, a heart (the muscle, not the shape), a skull.

Campion has become his mentor and combatant. "She intends on confronting you and she intends on hurting you sometimes, and she intends on digging things out of you. That's the contract. Even if on a day-to-day basis you resent it, you know it's doing you good," he says.

"The thing about Jane is she's just such an assured filmmaker. There's a lot of busy-ness and hair pulling and teeth gnawing in this industry unnecessarily. Jane cares when she needs to care and when she doesn't she turns off entirely."

WRIGHT pauses and we watch the bright afternoon sun spill down the mountains on to sparkling Lake Wakatipu. He can be forgiven for needing a moment - Wright is also in the midst of developing a new project with Henning for Black Lung that will take him to the remote East Timorese jungle.

Tentatively titled Savages, the East Timor project has attracted finance from a dazzling array of bodies, including the Australia Council Major Festivals Initiative, the Brisbane and Darwin festivals, Arts House, Stealth Agency and Arts Victoria. Wright promises "this is the first time anyone's ever done anything remotely like this, ever".

The show, which will also involve local artists, has not yet been written but the concept sounds wild.

"We've spent two years accumulating this colossal amount of finance to take a group of Australian artists to the most isolated, easternmost point of Timor, to an abandoned Portuguese colonial hotel in Tutuala where we'll increase their electricity capacity, get running water, build a tent city and work there for two months in complete isolation to create what we're going to create.

"This won't be a traditional piece of theatre. It will contain their stories, it will contain our stories, we're all musicians so there'll be music. It'll be right 'up river'."

The uncompromising filmmaker Amiel Courtin-Wilson is on board to film several stages of the production. His record will become part of the show and be shown to audiences beyond East Timor. Courtin-Wilson directed Bastardy, the acclaimed documentary about [Aboriginal actor] Jack Charles, and his most recent work, Hail, was selected for the Venice International Film Festival. It's the international festivals circuit Wright has his eye on. "This is us shifting . . . to an international arts festival standard. If the Black Lung is to continue then I think we want to do that. I don't think any of us are really that interested in just doing plays. If we wanted to do that I think we'd probably create a different company."

The project arose out of Wright's experience making Balibo in East Timor in 2008 and is testament to his entrepreneurial spirit and charisma. "While we were making that film I became really close friends with former Australian Defence Force major Michael Stone, who was chief military adviser to the President [Jose Ramos-Horta] at that time. I knew I wanted to try and facilitate something in East Timor and Mick started flying me back and forward from the country. I flew back to Timor five times in the three years following the shoot.

"I'm working with some of the formative artists of the nation and they've become a number of my closest friends. Literally, guys who are living in slum conditions yet whose sculptures are adorning the President's house. They're in an extraordinarily rare position to really be able to determine the artistic direction of a country.

"I'm there stepping to one side to talk with the President or someone like [former Victorian premier] Steve Bracks, who has been a real supporter, and with Mick, and the next night I'm sleeping in these slums and being surrounded by dogs and living with these guys who have nothing. One of the guys we're working with on this production had never been to Australia before a brief development period that we just did. There's a lot to learn from one another."

Connelly was the one to take Wright and the rest of the Balibo actors to East Timor, where he says he "put them through their paces; they slept on the floor of the hut where the journalists stayed".

He is understandably proud Wright has chosen to return with Black Lung. "I'm delighted, I'm excited by it. We constantly fight against an ordinariness in our artistic endeavours and they are a breath of fresh air; they really are willing to go their own way. It's intoxicating, actually, the originality of their vision is so strong. At such a young age they're punching above their weight. The way you feel when you come of one of their shows is exhilarating."

BACK in Queenstown, the shadows on the Remarkables' steep slopes are lengthening and the encroaching autumn chill - or, more likely, pure restlessness - has Wright wriggling in his seat. The man is in perpetual motion. Where does the energy to make all this art come from?

"I can't find any other reason to be alive," comes the answer.

That is unlikely to change even with his new baby. Assuming he can safeguard everyone's wellbeing, Wright intends for the trio to head to East Timor together.

"They're a part of this," he says. "Suddenly you see a new life and your own life is reframed in a way that I'm sure will be unalterable. To feel time bend ahead of you, to feel its closeness behind you as well, that's a profound thing to take into a time like this in making and telling stories."