Q&A: Alexander England, 33, actor

Alexander England on playing the Packers,and how he feels about being described as a ‘grotesque Hemsworth’ on screen.

Talent: Alexander England. Picture: Nic Walker

It’s been two years since the final season of Offspring, in which you played Asher Keddie’s love interest. Do fans still confuse you with your character? In that show I played a pretty warm, lovely guy, an ideal kind of man, and people even now see me and have those warm feelings... They’ll say, “G’day, how do we know each other?”

When in Los Angeles you stay in a share house with a bunch of fellow Aussie actors. Is there more support or competition in that household? Definitely support. It’s natural when you’re in a new environment to look for something familiar and Australians really do band together in LA and New York. It’s [actor] Kick Gurry’s house and it’s always open to other actors coming over. It’s a real little home away from home.

Your new film Little Monsters is a zom-rom-com – when did you first hear about this niche genre? On this film! It just shows what a funny genre mash-up it is: children, zombies, a touch of romance, toilet humour, slapstick. It’s fairly complicated in terms of style but thankfully we manage to pull it off.

How long did it take to get used to seeing your co-star, Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o, as a blood-soaked scream queen? [Director Abe Forsythe] and I had been talking about this film for a while and Lupita getting involved was just a pipe dream. But she loved the script and before we knew it she was sitting in the rehearsal room with us. She’d done a lot of research; she’d hooked up with an Australian teacher to learn specifically about classrooms in Australia.

Popular culture often employs zombies as metaphors. What do the undead symbolise in this movie? The harsh realities of the big, bad world. It’s about what an amazing job teachers do looking after children in the face of certain dangers or dangerous ideas, protecting their innocence and steering them away from the more adult concepts that can very easily invade their worlds through the various screens.

In an early review of Little Monsters, your deadbeat man-child was described as being “like a grotesque Hemsworth”. Fair cop? I’m tall and blond so it’s an easy kind of comparison. My character grows a lot but he does start the film behaving very selfishly and poorly. A lot of humour comes from him being very badly behaved in front of children.

Growing up in Albury, what made you want to become an actor? I always enjoyed jumping up in front of people in school. I remember coming off stage and feeling really elated, a little bit high. In high school my parents bought me a short course at Victorian College of the Arts and I just fell in love with acting.

How have Australian soldiers responded to your recent film Danger Close: The Battle of Long Tan? To see the way it has landed with the community it was made for has been really rewarding. The Vietnam War has been the focus of a huge amount of anti-war films but Danger Close tries to stay apolitical and just show what those men went through.

You played James Packer in Paper Giants 2: Magazine Wars and his uncle Clyde in Power Games: The Packer-Murdoch Story. What is it with you and the Packers? I think it’s just the advantage of being quite tall. The Packers are big, meaty guys and I was able to fit that brief.

Little Monsters is in cinemas now