Is Rob Collins the next James Bond?
He’s blazed a trail from Darwin to Hollywood. And Rob Collins has his sights set high.
He knows this foreshore well. Casuarina Beach and its gallant namesake trees. The ancient rock walls of Dripstone Cliffs, banded in ochre and salmon- pink stripes, ridges like overstretched muscles. Just over the horizon, past the Larrakia sacred site of Old Man Rock and a lurking croc or two, lie the Tiwi Islands, home of his ancestors. This is Rob Collins’ Darwin: the Top End town where he was born and raised, the place that holds his heart. Improbably, it’s an outpost from which the 41-year-old NIDA-trained actor has launched and sustained a rocketing, soon-to-go-international career.
The sky burns bright as he leaps from rock to rock, a model of agility and grace on this hot, dry-season morning, despite the niggles of “a gammy knee and a gammy ankle and a gammy shoulder”. The genre-jumping star of Cleverman, The Wrong Girl, Mystery Road and Glitch was in peak condition the first three months of this year. Had to be: he spent it sea-kayaking and hiking through the tropical forests of the Dominican Republic for a highly physical role opposite Mark Wahlberg in an upcoming film about adventure racers called Arthur the King. “But I haven’t been as physical being back in Australia and everything’s just fallen apart,” he says. Still, he wouldn’t be anywhere else. “Darwin’s home and everything that means,” he says, flashing a smooth, matinee-idol grin. Charisma on tap. “It’s spending as much time as I can in the garden and being domestic. It’s coffee with my wife, it’s walking on the beach with my children.” He likes to walk at sunset, more of a night owl than a lark. Spectacular evenings here: the sun drops into the Timor Sea with a cosmic shout of red as gathering beach crowds fall silent. “Because of the job, I spend a lot of time away and I’ve never got used to being away for long stretches of time,” he says. “I’m drawn back to this place; I think I always will be and, God willing, I’ll be buried in the earth here.”
Dripstone Cliffs is a short commute from the northern suburbs home Collins shares with Laetitia Lemke, his journalist wife of 21 years, and their four children, who range in age from three to 23. The youngest is responsible for the dainty rose-tinted hairclip he discreetly removes ahead of the photo shoot. It’s a quiet and private life off-duty, watering the heliconias, picking palm fronds off the lawn. Despite being the town’s second-most famous resident (“Jessica Mauboy takes top honours”), easygoing Darwin leaves him largely alone. He’s acutely aware, however, that as his star steadily rises, forgoing his anonymity may become the trade-off. Particularly if he steps in as the next James Bond.
“He’s so good-looking, he’s charismatic; he can jump buildings. You know, there’s nothing he can’t do,” actor Sam Neill told the ABC recently, offering Collins as his personal pick to succeed Daniel Craig in the 007 role. Thus, the actor became the first Indigenous name to be tossed into a very large, very crowded hat.
With speculation growing ever more frenzied in the lead-up to the September release of Craig’s swansong, the much-delayed 25th Bond movie No Time to Die, the names keep coming. They include, but are not limited to: Henry Cavill, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Michael Fassbender and Robert Pattinson. Producer Barbara Broccoli recently acknowledged Bond was a more mutable figure than in previous years, opening up the door to a non-white or non-British – but not yet non-male – actor. Idris Elba and Bridgerton’s Regé-Jean Page are in the running, and Esquire magazine last month suggested British-Pakistani actor Riz Ahmed as the first Muslim Bond.
Rob Collins wants to be Bond. A bit of tinkering with that gammy knee and he can see himself behind the wheel of an Aston Martin DB5 in an immaculate bespoke suit. “What male actor in his forties with a reasonable level of fitness doesn’t want to be James Bond?” he says. “It’s hard to ignore with Sam Neill’s vote of confidence as well. It would obviously be an amazing thing to do.” If he could ramp up his fitness again, “then I would think about maybe auditioning”.
He’s warming to his theme now. “Thankfully, they like to cast men into their 40s so I think if it’s going to happen, I’ve got a window there of five or six years.” His eyes have a faraway look. “Any role that has you wearing a nice suit is a good role for me I reckon.” What a coup it would be for Australia, and what a coup for Collins. The first Bond of colour. The first Bond from Darwin. He would also – though this is not definitive – be the first 007 who was formerly a member of a boy band. (More on that later.)
Collins is no stranger to colour-blind casting, a practice that aims to promote diversity by filling a role with no assumptions about race. In the Channel 10 romantic drama The Wrong Girl, he starred alongside Jessica Marais as charming TV chef Jack Winters, a heart-throb role that was written, in Zoe Foster-Blake’s book, as a blond white man. “The source material had him looking more like a Hemsworth than me,” Collins says. “I love that they gave me the opportunity to audition for it, where I think maybe five, 10 years ago that wouldn’t have been the case. That’s a positive move in the right direction, off the back of a lot of hard work from the folks who have come before me.” Likewise, his role as a doctor in the upcoming Seven Network drama RFDS, about the medicos and pilots of the Royal Flying Doctor Service, was not written as Indigenous. Neither was his Arthur the King character, nemesis to Wahlberg’s underdog adventure racer. “It started as a New Zealand character, then morphed into being Australian, so I just played myself,” Collins says.
Opening up non-Indigenous roles to Indigenous actors, Collins says, “levels the playing field” for an under-represented cohort. But he is also proud of his involvement in pioneering work such as the 2016 sci-fi drama Cleverman – which featured an 80 per cent Indigenous cast and provided a showcase for Indigenous languages – as well as the upcoming film, The Drover’s Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson. A post-colonial retelling of a Henry Lawson short story from 1892, the film reunites Collins with Cleverman director Leah Purcell, who wrote, directed and stars. A Goa-Gunggari-Wakka Wakka Murri woman from Queensland, Purcell has reinvented Lawson’s story via three different mediums over the past five years: first an acclaimed stage play, then a novel and now the film. In each, she is reclaiming a frontier story in which First Nations people are marginalised and turning it into a feminist revenge tale that interrogates Australia’s history of racial violence. One of the more radical shifts is to reimagine the lying “stray blackfella” of Lawson’s story as the deeply principled Yadaka, a fugitive who shows compassion for the titular heroine’s travails. “I was looking for a place to put that Aboriginal man as a lead, not just a back story,” Purcell says. “I thought, ‘Well I’m going to change that and make the black guy the most honourable, decent bloke in the whole film.” And who better to play Yadaka than Collins?
“Yadaka is based on my great-grandfather so I needed someone who could realise the responsibility that comes with that character and that storyline,” Purcell says. “My great-grandfather was a great family man, he had a gentleness in him, and Rob has all that in spades. Family is at the forefront for him. He’s caring, he’s thoughtful and, you know, he’s a star on the rise.”
In the late 1990s, Collins had hitched his wagon to a different star and its name was Emoshon.“E-m-o-s-h-o-n, yes,” he says. Along with the choreographed dance moves, the over-styled hair and over-emoting, his boy band was all about the zany spelling. “We even had a hand signal that was like the E for Emoshon,” Collins says, warping his hand into a complicated gesture while miraculously keeping a straight face. No amount of Googling will unearth even a mention of Emoshon, but for a time the RnB four-piece held a monopoly on Darwin’s birthday parties. It still ranks solidly in Collins’ affections. “I do joke about it occasionally but it was kind of the beginning in terms of being in front of an audience, putting yourself out there creatively; all those things started with that little boy band,” he says. “We had big aspirations, we wanted to get out of Darwin and perform on the road. Sadly, it didn’t eventuate but it kicked me off into this idea of a creative self which I think morphed into film eventually.”
Collins had slightly more success with a folk-blues band called Black Chapel (which also featured his younger brother Daniel), a creative sidebar to his work as an indigenous education support worker and at the Australasian Performing Right Association. He speaks wistfully of the creative freedom it afforded him. “I wasn’t producing work for any particular reason, I wasn’t writing songs for a label; it was purely for the love of it,” he says. “I love what I do now but there is a certain aspect of it that’s business. I understand the need for that, but I always want to return to the idea of who I was as an artist back then, because it was free and more in line with the creative self I wanted to be.”
He came to acting late, “doing bits and pieces around town,” from Centrelink role plays to community service announcements. He was 31 by the time he enrolled at the National Institute of Dramatic Art, a life-altering move that would not have happened without the urging of his wife. “I wouldn’t even have done the initial audition if Laetitia hadn’t twisted my arm,” he says. “I was in the carpark having second thoughts: ‘I’m too old, this is not for me, what am I doing?’ But she gave me the final shove through the door and I came out with a place at NIDA.” She also supported the family through his three years of study.
It was a huge leap of faith for the couple to relocate the family to Sydney, and Collins is effusively grateful for his wife’s support. He was also helped out by Darwin writer and artist Chips Mackinolty, a family friend, who offered accommodation in his inner-city terrace until Collins landed his first acting role in 2013 as King Mufasa in the Australian stage production of The Lion King.
Mackinolty has known Collins since he was a spindly kid, fishing and playing footy and roaming the blistering black expanses of Casuarina Square shopping centre carpark, scouting for forgotten trolley coins. “He’s always putting his hand up to do stuff,” he says. “He did some great work with the Aboriginal Medical Services Alliance of NT, and for the Northern Land Council he did a lot of valuable work on getting early Covid-19 information out to the public in different languages.”
It troubles Collins greatly that many of the traditional languages are in danger of dying with their last speaker. Save a language, preserve a culture. “I think as an adult it’s become more apparent how crucial it is, not just to communicate but as an integral part of your identity and who you are as a people,” he says. “That’s what we’re losing; it’s not just language, it’s your sense of who you are. That’s what’s literally at stake.”
When Collins won the 2017 Logie for Best New Talent, he looked beyond the chandeliered vastness of Melbourne’s Crown Palladium, past the seated glitterati to a palm-studded archipelago up north, where his extended family was gathered round the TV. “I’m Territory proud,” he said, and went on to address the Tiwi Islanders in the language of his ancestors. “It brought tears to my eyes watching it,” says Purcell. “It’s always beautiful when you hear language and it’s important that us contemporary mob find our way back to that. What’s even more awesome is it gave his mob the power. He’s speaking to them direct and that makes them feel good about themselves, about our culture, our language.”
Collins’ mother, Rosemary, is a Tiwi woman from Wurrumiyanga on Bathurst Island, one of two inhabited islands in the Tiwi group, along with Melville. He spent school holidays on the islands and many uncles, aunts and cousins still live there. He tries to visit when he can. “It only takes a couple of weeks being on the island to be fluent again,” he says. “My sense of being a Tiwi man gives me a great grounding in life and it’s something I want for my kids as well.”
Collins talks freely of his mum, a fan of Diana Ross, Boney M and Australian Crawl who once bought up the entire 150-CD pressing of her son’s Black Chapel album. Mention of his dad, however, is rare, although he recently told a radio journalist that he had “loved classical music”. A Darwin friend, when asked about him, simply said: “His dad died a long time ago.”
Collins’ father is the late Northern Territory senator and federal Labor minister Bob Collins, who took his own life in 2007 at the age of 61, three days before he was due to face court on child sex abuse charges involving a number of complainants. In his eulogy at Darwin’s St Mary’s Cathedral, Father Frank Brennan noted Collins’ career-long advocacy for the interests of the Territory’s Indigenous community. He also praised his wife Rosemary and three children, Rob, Libby and Daniel, for standing by him “with such love and commitment”. It’s awkward, but a comprehensive profile must at least visit the subject. So I make my apologies to the gods of polite interaction and plough in: “Let’s talk about your dad.”
“Aah … I’d prefer not to, if that’s all right.”
Collins looks uncomfortable but remains courteous. “It must be hard not to feel able to talk about him?”
“Look, it is. [Pause] What I’ll say is… [long pause]. There are just things there that I’m… If I open that portal, um. [Pause]. That I’m just not prepared to… go there. Respectfully. It’s just something I’d rather not do.”
“Is that because the answer will be in the public arena or because you personally don’t want to talk about him?”
“Both.”
“OK, I respect that. I had to ask.”
“I completely understand.”
The same agility and grace Collins displayed while navigating the rocky terrain atop Dripstone Cliffs steers us through this part of the interview, and he quickly resumes a smooth professionalism. We talk about his role hosting The First Inventors, an upcoming Channel 10 documentary series about ancient Indigenous innovations and discoveries. We talk about crocodiles. The bonus of being able to do self-tape Hollywood auditions from Darwin during the pandemic. And we talk about the joy of taking a break in his beloved home town after five months on the road.
“I really value my privacy and my anonymity, which kind of runs at odds with a successful acting career,” he says. “But for the time being at least, I’m able to have my cake and eat it too.” The James Bond role would no doubt put paid to all that.
“Well, that’s the great compromise with those kinds of roles,” he says. “You have to forfeit any idea of people not being interested in your life outside of acting. As you can probably gather, I’m a hugely private person and I really value that part of my life. As much as I can maintain that, not only for my own sanity but for my children’s wellbeing as well, then that’s what I’ll do.”
The Drover’s Wife will be included in the Sydney Film Festival program, to be announced soon. It opens the Melbourne International Film Festival on August 5 and will open in cinemas nationally on October 14.