He’s the go-to guy for ethnic diversity. So who is Don Hany?

HE’S a charismatic actor who brings depth to the culturally diverse characters he plays. Who is Don Hany?

Versatile: Hany as Muslim detective Zane Malik in a scene from the SBS crime drama East W

IN profile, he’s magnificent. In fact, the word could have been invented to describe the majestic thrust of his head, the gallant brow and dark, all-seeing eyes, always on the lookout, forever on the hunt.

Shaking down his feathers, the mighty wedge-tailed eagle springs to the sky and begins to climb, unfurling a wing span across two metres. He catches an updraft and is carried further, an airborne symbol of freedom and transcendence. In some religions it is believed that high-soaring eagles touch the face of God and this one, gliding far above the quiet, spiritually restorative bushland of rural Victoria, is as noble as a living thing can be.

Don Hany doesn’t believe in God. He does believe in eagles. The actor’s own gallant brow crinkles watching this one, a 20-year-old named Bart, skim the uppermost branches of a towering eucalypt and head for the sun. They’ve got it going on, these birds. In tune with their ­surrounds, linked to the natural rhythms of the bush, they’ve reached a higher plane in more than a literal sense.

Hany succumbs to the measured tempo of the Macedon Ranges back-country. He thinks about interconnectedness, and weighs up the theory of morphic resonance, the idea that ­similar forms communicate via mysterious ­telepathic links. These birds of prey hunt in pairs and mate for life, he muses. Their religion is each other. “I learnt so much from the eagles,” the 38-year-old says now, back in the urban world of double espressos, blaring car horns and Marimba ringtones.

Hany (pronounced honey) is having lunch high above the Sydney city skyline and talking about his avian co-stars in the new movie ­Healing, an intelligent drama about an Iranian-Australian prisoner who finds peace through the rehabilitation of injured raptors. Bart, the smaller male bird, was used mostly for aerial shots but it was Grace, a glorious, broad-shouldered female, who stole Hany’s heart. Sitting still for up to 45 minutes at a time, with her hard-knuckled talons clutching his right hand, he would stare at the ground and feel the enormous bird’s calmness flow into him.

“The way they operate, things are so simple,” he says. “You realise how absurd things have gotten. You actually couldn’t have designed a more elaborate departure from nature than the way we live now.” He laughs ruefully and says that, back home in Melbourne, he thinks often about the eagles, recalling the soft, swooping sound of their giant wings beating the air. “I think we’ve always tried to explain God or the way that things work without just observing them.”

This is heavy stuff for an actor. But Hany, nature enthusiast, agnostic atheist, first-generation Australian, is also a seeker. Born into a ­vacuum of sorts, to an Iraqi father who shunned the devout Islamic beliefs of his upbringing and a Hungarian mother who rejected communism, he was encouraged to forge his own identity through the investigation of theology and ­metaphysics. His free-thinking father Tawfek, known as Taffy, a classically trained violinist, met his mother Csilla, a doctor of economics, in Budapest in the late 1960s, and each of them forfeited their own strong culture in their flight to Australia. “My parents were both kind of on the run,” Hany says.

And so the son keeps looking, not desperately but curiously, for ideas to tip into the void of belief: particle theory, the parapsychology of Rupert Sheldrake, Rumi the Sufi mystic’s poems, David Attenborough documentaries (he’s watched every one). “I feel as spiritual as anyone who is a devout man or woman of ­religion because I feel that there is a spirituality about anything you observe in nature,” he says. “But I’ve never subscribed to something that denominates me.”

Born in Hornsby, in Sydney’s north, he and his twin brother Roger were raised to be “more ­Australian than most Aussies”. He’s still trying to figure out what that means. “It feels to me like all of our culture is imported,” he says. “Australian life has culturally left a blank page so I really enjoy the challenge of illustrating something over the top of that, shading it in.”

So Hany has become a chameleon, Australia’s go-to guy for small-screen ethnic diversity. ­Protean looks — even the colour of his eyes is open to interpretation — have enabled him to play Bulgarian (Underbelly), Greek (Tangle), ­Russian (False Witness), Irish (The Last Confession of ­Alexander Pearce) and various shades of ­Middle Eastern. “I just enjoy wearing the cultural ­clothing because that does kind of mean I’m something for a bit,” he says. “There is a cultural non-specificity about Australia, so stepping into a culture grounds you in an odd way. It’s probably something I’d have in common with every actor — the idea of being myself is frightening because I don’t know what to do with that. There’s this odd ability to breathe deeper with a mask on.”

Hany’s versatility is more than skin-deep. Packing a double-whammy of charisma and technique, he can play seductive, tough, broken or threatening, shouldering his way through scenes with a galvanic fervour or radiating ­vulnerability. A thoroughly committed performance saw him pick up a Silver Logie and two AFI nominations in 2010 for his portrayal of Muslim detective Zane Malik in East West 101, the acclaimed SBS crime drama focusing on racial tensions in western Sydney. (Hany fought tears as he dedicated his Logie to “baba”, his father, who made his acting debut in the series.) Hany also earned accolades for his injured homicide detective in The Broken Shore, last year’s telemovie based on the Peter Temple novel, and won over thousands of women as the hunky workplace fantasy of Asher Keddie’s obstetrician in Offspring.

“He’s the most versatile actor we have in ­Australia,” says multi award-winning television director Peter Andrikidis, who’s worked with Hany on half a dozen projects, including the Australian-Singaporean drama series Serangoon Road and Underbelly. “He certainly represents the new Australia — that mix of cultures.” Andrikidis was among the first to spot Hany’s potential beyond a heart-throb when he cast him in East West 101 in 2007 (along with Iranian- born actress Alin Sumarwata, now Hany’s wife and mother to their two-year-old daughter, Tilda.)

“He’s an intelligent actor; he thinks deeply about what he’s doing,” adds the director, who refers to Hany as his Robert De Niro. “He’s more a Method actor in that it comes from a very deep, authentic place. He keeps changing his look for each role and he loves accents as well — there’s no doubt he can do anything.”

Australian television audiences have seen Hany, in ­various guises, sport a shaved head, long hair, wild bush­ranger beard, trimmed beard and a soul patch. For Healing, his first feature film lead role, he aged up seven years by greying his hair. Pinballing between accents across two decades working consistently in Australian TV drama, Hany has donned so many masks that it’s not inconceivable he’d be unrecognisable on the street. No way, says Healing director Craig Monahan, who saw Hany at Sydney Airport a few weeks after filming wrapped and couldn’t get near him for the throng of female admirers. “Women love him,” Monahan says. “You would call it a smouldering sexuality, wouldn’t you?”

As well as being uniformly good-looking, his characters have this in common: a conflicted identity. “I’ve really enjoyed the challenge of playing characters who don’t feel they fit in or are at least caught between two places,” he says. “As our world shrinks, more and more people actually have that experience and fewer degrees of separation exist between those that don’t.”

Lest anyone think the actor spends his days stuck in the meditative pose of Rodin’s The Thinker, it should be known Hany is as capable of goofing around as the next person. He does a hilarious impression of Attenborough entering a termite mound, the naturalist’s famous conspiratorial whisper escalating to a scream. And he has no qualms regaling a stranger with a graphic and disgustingly funny tale of a recent bout of food poisoning that saw him destroy the immaculately groomed garden of a Japanese friend’s rice-paper house.

When it comes to his work, however, unless it is of consequence, Hany’s not interested. “I’m really fortunate to have been a part of things that want to make a contribution,” he says, his chameleon eyes reflecting the forest-green of his jumper. “It’s hard enough to do things when you believe in what you’re doing. Without that connection, I quickly become as good as two men down. I lose faith in [script]writing when it’s designed to medicate people to sleep at the end of the day or to get us to buy something.”

His East West 101 character, the role that launched his career, is a case in point. Hany’s Egyptian detective, a complex amalgam of ­Muslim, Arab, Australian and police identities, became something of a cult hero and established him as an actor of uncommon integrity. “Don humanised the religion, he humanised the people, which we don’t do enough of,” says Andrikidis. The SBS drama was boldly ambitious and Hany is understandably proud of his role in it. But, he says, “it’s sad that it was so revolutionary”.

“A lot of [East West 101] was an attempt to not make a show about multiculturalism,” he says. “Really it was just an exercise in colour-blind casting. It was just who you would encounter in the western suburbs of Sydney.” Australian popular culture resolutely ignores the reality of a multicultural society, he says. “It’s amazing how our television can depict just one part of our culture and how generally satisfying that can be for Australian audiences’ appetites.”

Shows like East West 101 and the award-winning ABC series Redfern Now, which explores contemporary inner-city indigenous life, challenge stereotypes but do little to reverse the on-screen marginalisation of non-white minorities. “I think we’re in the phase where we are still making shows dedicated to achieving that effect, which is in fact a few steps ahead of actually seeing any of that take effect,” he says. “What we need to do is cast Australians you see walking down Pitt Street and create stories around the diversity of our people as opposed to making shows about multiculturalism or about racial tension in our cities. All those shows end up doing is making a gap between our mainstream audience and our minority audiences.”

Like the mechanic who drives a backfiring jalopy or the nurse who eats junk food, Aust­ralia’s talented pool of creatives “somehow hasn’t been able to connect with our own audiences”.

Plump tears wobble down fresh-shaven cheeks as Hany thumbs through his late grandfather’s yellowing documents in the home of his Hungarian aunt. It’s one of the more affecting scenes in the April 2013 episode of the SBS documentary series Who Do You Think You Are? which saw Hany tracing the branch of his family tree that led not to the ancient and troubled land of his father, but to his mother’s birthplace, a country with a turbulent history of its own. During that recorded journey he learnt about the cold-war involvement of his communist grandfather, a man his mother had always characterised as ­violent and controlling. “My mother’s family at the time were incredibly jealous she had come to the West,” Hany says now. “They always thought she would return.”

Both parents were wide-eyed about the opportunities offered in 1970s Australia. “They called me Donald and my brother Roger, after [TV newsreader] Roger Climpson — two British names that stood out like dogs’ balls at school where it was all Troy and Wayne and Nathan,” he laughs. School was on the NSW Central Coast; after two years in the Netherlands as an exchange student, Hany returned to Sydney to study drama at the ­University of Western Sydney’s now-defunct Theatre Nepean. He and his brother, a musician, shared a brick Victorian house in the western Sydney suburb of Canterbury and spent many weekends in the ­cultural melting pots of Lakemba and Campsie among “the squashed cabbage leaves and ­people shouting”. “We felt strangely at home because everyone there was from somewhere else,” he says.

Hany recently shot a pilot for US network ABC’s new medical drama, Warriors, his first Hollywood gig. If the pilot is given the green light to become a series, the actor will relocate to Los Angeles, where he lived briefly in 2005 while shooting Winning the Peace, an award-winning short film in which he played an Iraqi-American Marine. “I was pleasantly surprised at how open [casting agents] were there,” he says. “I’m just an American guy there — there’s a much broader diaspora, and network television and storytellers across the board have absorbed it and embraced it wholly. They’ve got whole departments within the networks devoted to diversity.”

Communing with the venerable old-growth redwoods of California might be a good place for Hany to be when his next project airs in Australia. The Foxtel miniseries Devil’s Playground, in which he stars opposite Jack Thompson and Toni Collette, controversially tackles the cover- up of sexual abuse in the Australian Catholic Church in the 1980s. Hany plays a Catholic bishop and admits to being “a bit concerned” about the potential fallout. “We didn’t set out to demonise the Church,” he says. “We really wanted to give voice to the victims and to keep devoted Catholics’ faith intact.” But the show, a follow-up to Fred Schepisi’s classic 1976 drama The Devil’s Playground, doesn’t pull any punches either. “How the Church has responded to these allegations shows that there’s less than an honestly sympathetic ear listening,” Hany says. “Protecting the Church does seem to be a priority at times and that’s where it feels so unjust because people’s lives have been absolutely ruined. There’s no remuneration that can make that a small problem.”

It was on the set of Devil’s Playground that Hany discovered a fellow traveller. Jack Thompson is a nature-lover too, and gave him a book called The Spell of the Sensuous, which ponders man’s estrangement from nature. “You just float on an ocean when Jack talks,” Hany says, his eyes deepening to amber. “He’s just one with everything and everything is one with him. He’s so cool. I was like a dry kitchen sponge around him. I was like, ‘Just talk, man, just talk.’ ” He would understand about the eagles.

Healing is in cinemas now