’No one gives a sh.t about you in America, not even the government’
The Lincoln Lawyer’s Angus Sampson reflects on a decade of living in LA ahead of his fourth season in Aussie comedy Bump.
It’s not that Angus Sampson lacks confidence, he just doesn’t consider himself anything special. “I’m nice socially, that’s my gift,” he says. “I’m a good dinner party guest and that’s kind of it.”
The Australian actor is continually surprised at the good fortune that runs his way. He can hardly believe American writer and producer David E Kelley cast him, a kid from the suburb of Croydon in Sydney, as a husky-voiced investigator in legal drama The Lincoln Lawyer, which reached Netflix’s Top 10 in 81 countries. To star alongside the “Queen of Australian television” Claudia Karvan in Australian comedy Bump makes him feel “very grateful”. And then there’s the time he played a Minnesotan villain in the TV spin-off of the Coen brothers’ film, Fargo.
“It makes no sense to methat I get offered so many opportunities. Obviously, somewhere it does – but outwardly I go ‘what the f..k, I’m not in shape’,” he gestures down at his torso, dressed comfortably in a navy jumper. “I can’t recite 15 Shakespeare soliloquies. Other people call it an impostor syndrome thing. Whatever. Everyone has impostor syndrome.”
Sampson cut his teeth on roles in Blue Heelers, The Secret Life of Us and Underbelly but has been based in Los Angeles for almost a decade. While he is baffled at his good fortune in a career that has seen him leap from local dramas to blockbusters such as Insidious and Mad Max – next year he will star alongside Chris Hemsworth in George Miller’s Furiosa – he remains certain about one thing: “I’m f..king Australian.”
“If I can have a moment with [the casting directors], I like to think that I can connect with them on a level that basically I’m just telling them my mate’s stories. I’m just telling them stuff about Australia that I love. I always go: at least I have Australia.”
But during the pandemic that sense of belonging was shaken – and it had nothing to do with quarantine or lockdowns. It was the news of Rio Tinto’s blasting of the sacred rock sites at Juukan Gorge in Western Australia’s Pilbara that made him question everything he knew about home.
“Blowing up a cave that had 46,000 years of continuous occupation,” he shakes his head. “[This site is] sure as shit more important than a share price. You go, ‘Who is doing this? Who is allowing this to happen? What is Australia to me?’
“It’s the closest I’ve come in my life to being depressed.”
We’re sitting under the veranda at a University of Sydney campus in the city’s west – not too far from where he went to school – where he is filming the fourth season of Stan series Bump. Dom, his character, is the father of a teen-mum and Karvan’s man-child ex-husband, a pizza-and-beer sort of guy reckoning with loneliness post-separation.
Like his character, Sampson radiates warmth. Completely disarming, he worries more than once that his answer to a question will make him come off “like a wanker”. Not that it really matters; he says he probably won’t read the article so as not to ruin the memory of our pleasant conversation. (“I’ll be like, ‘Why the f..k did she say that?’ Because I’m not writing the article,” he says).
At the start of the interview he playfully takes hold of my background notes on the table and starts to read them. I tell him I’ve done my research: “Your father’s a psychiatrist. You were born in Sydney in 1979. Dressed up as a nurse when you were six.”
Clearly he finds this amusing.
Before the interview I pop in to watch the filming of an office scene starring Nathalie Morris, who plays Sampson’s daughter Ollie, and Paralympian Dylan Alcott, who is her colleague at her first serious job since becoming a mum. Sampson is done for the day but the synopsis for the fourth season suggests his character is still finding his feet and as a middle-aged man will go back to reliving his share house days.
“I don’t want to group Bump as a feminist show but I’m here to make fun of the males,” Sampson says. “I’m here to invite some blokes – and the girls and the non-gender identifying people – to go, ‘That’s my dad’.”
Dom so far has been pretty unlucky, having weathered redundancy, separation and his ex-wife’s coming out to hook up with his sister. But Sampson insists Dom isn’t dumb or daft; he’s just a bloke who is happiest when the whole family is together.
“I asked my sister that once about my own father, who just retired after 46 years at Westmead [hospital in western Sydney] as a psychiatrist. He’s happiest when we all sleep at his house, be it on the floor; it’s uncomfortable for everyone but him. And that’s how I got into Dom.”
Bump reunited producers John Edwards and Karvan, also the show’s creator, who had worked together on Australian series, Love My Way, which followed a group of 30-something Sydneysiders through a turbulent time in their lives. Sampson had worked with them on seminal Aussie dramas The Secret Life of Us and Spirited. When Edwards got in touch with him during the pandemic and asked if he would like to do Bump, the actor was spending time with his family on his farm in regional Victoria.
“I was like, I’d do anything to avail myself to work with those two again,” he says. “And John was like, ‘Would you do quarantine?’ I said, ‘Absolutely’.”
So he flew to Sydney and did two weeks of isolation.
“I didn’t wear clothes for 14 days, I ate four meals, I think I lost 7kg. Every kilometre that the Tour de France cyclists did, I did a push-up for that day. They call it the Tour de Push. So if they cycle 183km, you’d have to do 183 push-ups.”
I joke that this act of hotel endurance is reminiscent of The Mule, the 2014 film he co-wrote and co-directed. Sampson plays a young Aussie bloke caught up in a poorly executed cocaine-smuggling exercise from Thailand. When the police arrest him at the airport and take him to a hotel for observation he refuses to use the loo because he knows they can only detain him for seven days without evidence – which he has ingested. The film also stars Hugo Weaving, Ewen Leslie and Noni Hazlehurst. It was such a fulfilling project that when it was finished Sampson decided to pack up his family and move to LA in search of the next opportunity.
“After having made The Mule in Australia I was really exhausted and felt like nothing would sort of compare to being responsible across so many aspects,” he says.
“I didn’t feel like coming in for two scenes on a limited series about Kerry Packer’s nephew or neighbour, or Kerry Packer’s hairdresser – there seemed to be a Kerry Packer obsession at the time. We didn’t go to LA to be famous or anything. We just wanted a lifestyle change from Melbourne.”
Doing James Wan’s first Insidious film had put a bit of money in the bank and the franchise was starting to gain momentum so he was able to move to the US “without having to really Charlie-hustle too much”. Roles in Mad Max: Fury Road, The Walking Dead, Fargo and The Lincoln Lawyer followed. Based on Michael Connelly’s book series about LA defence lawyer Mickey Haller – on fire in the courtroom but bombing in love – The Lincoln Lawyer has been renewed for a third season.
Initially there doesn’t seem to be much behind Sampson’s cool gravelly voiced Cisco, Mickey’s investigator and right-hand man who cruises LA on his Harley-Davidson, but as the series progresses it’s clear he is trying to put his connections to a bikie gang behind him to make an honest life with his fiancee Lorna.
Sampson continues to rent a home in LA but has bought a farmhouse in Victoria’s Macedon Ranges where he is building a “nice little tribe” of friends, including Succession star Sarah Snook. “She is famous beyond anyone in Australia’s realisation in America – she’s a goddess there - but to see her wandering around rural Victoria in a pair overalls and buying bread and stuff you just go ‘ledge’,” he throws his hands up “like what a ledge!”
There’s a sense that despite his success, he refuses to be changed by Los Angeles. He insists this isn’t the case.
“I want to be changed,” he says. “I just don’t have an interest in Australian actors in America. You become very close with other expats when you’re a foreigner. I think what’s interesting is meeting Uruguayans and Kenyans and Dominican Republicans.
“But the one thing that’s very apparent is that no one gives a shit about you in America, not even the government. And not that they give a shit about you here, but you can jump up and down and say, ‘They should give a shit’.”
Season 4 of Bump premieres on December 26 on Stan.
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