Richard Roxburgh, backgammon and the kid from Parramatta

Rahel Romahn was typecast for years but then everything changed for the Kurdish Australian actor, who is starring alongside Richard Roxburgh in a new film about the detainment of journalist Peter Greste.

A scene from The Correspondent starring Rahel Romahn (centre) and Richard Roxburgh (right)

Rahel Romahn’s charm leaps across the world via Zoom.

He’s in Los Angeles with a green card and the Heath Ledger Scholarship, trying to get a handle on the ecosystem of agents and casting directors and producers and writers who still make Hollywood the preferred destination for actors.

Will we see this Kurdish Australian who spent a year as a refugee in Turkey then a childhood in Parramatta as the sexy New York lawyer in a glossy rom-com?

It was almost unthinkable when Romahn began his acting career almost 20 years ago or even a decade ago when he played the troubled ethnic teenager in a disadvantaged Australian school in the SBS series, The Principal.

For the longest time, this 32-year-old played “50 shades of Middle Eastern person” like so many other ethnic actors in Australia who are so often relegated to the role of the bad guy or the bit parts.

Rahel Romahn & Julian Maround in The Correspondent

It’s better now in an industry that has made efforts to improve the diversity of those we see on screen and stage. Even so, hundreds of Middle Eastern and African actors in Australia exist in something of a parallel universe when it comes to mainstream film and television.

Which is why it’s a shock to discover that the 40 or so non-Anglo actors with speaking roles in The Correspondent – a new feature film about journalist Peter Greste, who was arrested while working for Al Jazeera and held for more than a year in Egyptian jails – are all locals.

There was no difficulty in finding so many Arabic speakers for the movie, which stars Richard Roxburgh as Greste and Yael Stone as the late British journalist Kate Peyton.

In fact, casting director Anousha Zarkesh bowled up more than 300 audition reels to director Kriv Stenders for a range of roles in the film produced by Carmel Travers and her Pop Family Entertainment company.

Not that Stenders needed a tape for Romahn, whom he chose for one of the big roles – cameraman Baher Mohamed, who in December 2013 was arrested along with Greste and Mohamed Fahmy, the Egyptian-born Canadian who was Al Jazeera’s international bureau chief in Cairo at the time.

Stenders directed The Principal and knew Romahn’s range: “Rahel was the very first person I had in mind when I started casting. I really wouldn’t have known what to do if he had said no. He was fabulous. For me, there was no one else who could play that role.”

Stenders, who has been making documentaries, shorts, TV shows and films for more than 30 years, is best known for the 2011 movie Red Dog, which has earned more than $22 million. Based on the true story of a dog that roamed the outback looking for its first owner, is also the highest-selling Australian DVD ever.

Stenders cast well-established actors for key roles, among them Julian Maroun, born in Australia to Lebanese parents, who plays Fahmy; and Mojean Aria the son of Iranian refugees who plays Alaa Abd El-Fattah, a political activist who was in jail with the three Al Jazeera journalists.

Rahel Romahn is the 2022 winner of the Heath Ledger Scholarship announced today, pictured at his home in Westmead. Picture: Toby Zerna

But Zarkesh and Stenders scoured Australia for many others who play Egyptian prisoners and prison officers and African officials and medicos in the film, which was shot entirely in Sydney.

“I basically blitzed the country for a couple of months,” Zarkesh says. “There were a lot of actors who I found who dabbled in amateur theatre groups and had performed in various things, had done extras’ work … And so we found all these incredible young actors who played the political prisoners. When we auditioned them, we just couldn’t believe (how good they were).

“I was in tears half the time when they did their scene because they just had enormous talent.”

Zarkesh, whose father was a long-term political prisoner in Iran, has built a career across 30 years specialising in sourcing ethnic and Indigenous actors. She says there’s been a shift to casting from these groups in recent years with acting schools taking more diverse people.

She says it’s hard to estimate how many Middle Eastern/African actors there are in Australia but says: “Middle East actors are often carrying a lot of pain and a lot of grief in their lives [because of their history] and I think that comes across on the screen – there’s a sense of truth and honesty and authenticity.”

As an Iranian Australian, she says she’s felt the backlash against the Middle East community at times.

“I think we’re carrying, not a chip on our shoulder, but more of an understanding that we’re ‘other’, we’re different,” she says. “We’re ‘other’ in a country that’s very predominantly white, and we’re kind of fighting to stay in there and infiltrate from within and tell our own stories. Now I see young Middle Eastern actors going, ‘you know, it can happen. I can have a career too. It’s OK’.”

Stenders says the pool of Arabic-speaking actors here is a testament to Australian multiculturalism.

“It’s a very, very deep and wide reservoir,” he says. “The Middle Eastern and North African populations have grown. I don’t know whether we could have made this film 20 years ago. Maybe we could have. It definitely would have been harder. But storytelling is maturing in Australia and there are now more opportunities for those guys to play more interesting, richer, deeper roles.”

A couple of years back, Romahn played Mozart in a Red Line Production of Peter Shaffer’s classic work, Amadeus, at the Sydney Opera House. He laughs as he demonstrates the plummy accent he adopted for the role, and recalls that others were amazed that a guy who looked like him could sound like that.

Rahel Romahn as Mozart in Amadeus. Sydney Opera House 2022. Picture: Daniel Boud

But Romahn has been practising accents and moves for years: “I grew up in a very intense, kind of hostile (situation) and my way to deal with those intensities or vicissitudes would be to get in the gym, which was my room with the mirror.

“I was excited by the possibility that I could have been other people, not confined to this one story, which was my life.”

Acting and mimicking others in front of his bedroom mirror was “a coping mechanism” that turned into a love of acting, honing his skills in acting classes and workshops in the suburbs.

“I would liken the acting classes to training on a tennis court, and then when you finally get your opportunity, that’s the Grand Slam,” he says. “In the Australian industry, I was playing 50 shades of Middle Eastern person, but in acting classes, I was doing everything – British dialects, Irish dialects, Spanish and Italian and French.”

Romahn came to Australia at the age of three-and-a half with his parents after fleeing northern Iraq and hiding out for a year with another family in a studio flat in Turkey. Later two older half-siblings joined his family in Sydney. It was a tough experience but Romahn says it added to the emotional depth – “deep sorrow or deep joy” – he brings to his work.

The Correspondent includes significant Arabic dialogue and actors were required to speak Arabic, but with accents varying across the Middle East, most had to be coached in Egyptian Arabic for the Cairo scenes.

Casting Director Anousha Zarkesh and Director Kriv Stenders have just released their movie The Correspondent about Journalist Peter Greste. Jane Dempster/The Australian.

Stenders had help from a young Egyptian-Australian director, Ronnie Riskalla, who was employed with some assistance from the Screen NSW Director’s Attachment Scheme, to advise on cultural and linguistic nuances.

“I didn’t want to have everyone speaking with clipped accents in English,” says Stenders. “And I wanted that for a number of reasons. I wanted it obviously, for the integrity of the film, but I also wanted to put the audience in Peter’s place, which was that a lot of the time (everyone around him) was speaking Arabic, and that added to the confusion, to the terror.”

That sense of isolation and fear of the unknown is at the heart of the movie with the story told entirely through Greste’s eyes. Roxburgh is in every scene detailing the 400 days of the journalist’s incarceration. The camera does not veer off to Australia and the campaign waged for Greste’s release and there is little sense of life outside the cells. And while the film is certainly focused on press freedom, there is not a separate storyline involving other journalists, apart from the story of Kate Peyton. She and Greste were on assignment in Mogadishu, Somalia in 2005 when the BBC journalist was shot dead. Greste’s recurring memories of that event are used to show his gradual understanding of his life and the approach to his career. It’s a nuanced narrative, suggesting a touch of hubris and complacency in his handling of the assignment that day and his mixed emotions when he recalls the tragedy later. Greste, who was a consultant on the film, details the Mogadishu tragedy in his memoir, The First Casualty.

The intense focus of The Correspondent on Greste limited the sets needed and helped financially but it was also an important creative decision.

Says Stenders: “Setting that limit creates a really interesting canvas to work with because when you’re arrested, you never go outside the prison, you never have the liberty of a different vantage point, you are inside it. (So as a viewer, you are) with Peter and feeling and seeing what it would be like to just be inside corridors, offices, prison cells, police vans and courtrooms. That itself is a journey.”

He was also keen to show the wardens were “just as much prisoners of the system” with little freedom to push back against the system. One of the most moving scenes is when the boss of the jail calls in Greste to play backgammon with him, and we are invited to see the jailers as human.

Rahel Romahn in The Correspondent

Backgammon features heavily – the game is played obsessively in many Middle Eastern countries – and some of the loveliest scenes feature Romahn, whose character Baher Mohamed is a sensational backgammon player. Romahn knows how to play the board game but, like other actors, was tutored in the distinctive style played in Egypt.

Romahn says it’s so popular in the region because it connects with the Middle Eastern mindset: “They say chess is the game where you have to think 10 steps ahead, whereas backgammon is the game where, with one roll of the dice, the whole opportunity can change. So there’s this wonderful theological aspect to both of the games – one way, plan ahead, and one way, utilise an opportunity.”

Multicultural Australia has another role to play in The Correspondent.

Greste’s father fled from Latvia during World War 11 and the Latvian government arguably had as much to do with freeing Greste as did the Australian government. Alerted to the incarceration, Latvian authorities put pressure on Cairo via the European Union, which has more leverage with Egypt than does Canberra.

Stenders also has a Latvian background and says: “We grew up when Latvia was occupied by the Soviets and there was a time when we thought that we were never going to be liberated. We got letters from our relatives that were redacted. We were an occupied country.”

He says the strong sense of pride and cultural identity meant the Latvian community here got behind the Greste family’s effort to free Peter.

Stenders, busy editing his next project, a documentary on Joh Bjelke-Petersen, says the movie, made by Pop Family Entertainment, Screen Australia and Screen NSW, is something of a miracle because in general, “these sorts of films don’t get made, these sorts of films don’t get distributed, these sorts of films don’t get financed”.

Roxburgh’s star power will help at the box office. His performance is outstanding and Stenders calls him a master actor: “There’s that breed that has grown up acting, who have learnt their training, their skills. It’s like a master painter or master carpenter – they know their tools, they know their instrument.

Richard Roxburgh in a scene from The Correspondent

“I always liken actors to musical instruments. They make a particular sound. They make a particular music. Richard just happens to be one of those fantastic instruments that can play, and he’s able to really deliver across a very, very strong spectrum.

“He has the right sensibilities and the right kind of, what I call, spiritual qualities to appropriate his character spiritually. That’s more important than the physicality – to capture someone’s soul and to able to kind of convey their spirit or their essence, that’s all that matters.”

In Los Angeles, Rahel Romahn is hoping for an international career. He says that while it’s important to make films about different cultures, he’d like to see an Aussie film showing “a three-dimensional, complex human being, where their diversity, where they’re from culturally, is almost a subtle, if not insignificant, backdrop to the story”.

“It’s up to the pioneers, the Jane Campions, the Justin Kurzels – those guys – to find a way to seamlessly have a more multicultural palette on screen, where the culture is beside the point and it’s more about the talent.”

The Correspondent opens in cinemas on April 17.