Richard Roxburgh plays Cleaver Greene with conspicuous conviction

RICHARD Roxburgh plays the booze-sodden, lovable rogue Cleaver Greene with such conviction ... is he really acting at all?

Roxburgh: "I assumed I'd probably do acting as a hobby."...

IF we could pinpoint the place where the morally malleable world of Cleaver Greene intersects with that of his creator, Richard Roxburgh, it would be here: on the northern edge of Sydney's Hyde Park, at the crossroads of justice, in a bar.

Important men and women sail down nearby Macquarie Street, black barrister gowns flapping like Hollywood Transylvanians, as the elegantly wasted man in a suit launches into his second midday martini. Straight up, two olives. "You've always been a sexual version of Doctors Without Borders," hisses the dark-haired beauty opposite, before raising her voice so nearby drinkers swivel in their seats. "Sex Sans Frontieres!" she shouts wildly.

The man's handsome, keen-edged features crumple sheepishly. He starts in on a bewilderingly erudite discussion of the word "martini" and its plural - second declensions, nominative singular, pointy-headed Latin stuff - before trailing off and draining his drink. He knows he's digging a hole with slippery sides.

For the brilliant-but-busted, perma-liquored criminal defence barrister Cleaver Greene, now a household name after two seasons of ABC1's hit show Rake, this uncomfortably funny scene is the latest in a self-destructive quest to find his limits. For Roxburgh, who has just turned 52, it's itchily familiar. "Cleaver really speaks to an earlier incarnation of myself, I think," he says in his distinctive drawl. "The intersection is probably less explosive than it would have been years ago." It was in his 20s and early 30s maybe, no, his entire 30s, that Roxburgh - Rox to his mates - found himself reeling from drink to drink, bed to bed, "a fool to myself, and an enemy to the public at large". There were fisticuffs and fire alarms. Rivers of booze. Scratchy-headed mornings in random hotels. The doubled-down euphoria and end-times despair of all tomorrow's parties. "I was always looking for a departure in some way, from whatever it was, whatever the demons were, or from consciousness itself," he says, shaking his head over the number of times friends discovered him in a "shocking condition". "It's like you're being chased by something."

All this tortured Wildean hedonism, what his Rake co-creator and long-time friend Peter Duncan euphemistically calls his "large capacity for naughtiness", came to an abrupt halt 10 years ago in Prague when Roxburgh met Italian actress Silvia Colloca. She would take him to a safe place; become his wife and the mother of his two young sons. Move with him to a beautiful home overlooking Sydney's Pittwater and give this acclaimed star of stage and screen the confidence to turn his back on the Hollywood he'd come to despise.

From his perch of utter contentment, Roxburgh can look back on his misspent decades with a clear-eyed perspective. "I took a long time to find some semblance of sanity," he admits, parking himself on a bench in the shade as the sun rides high over Hyde Park. "I think I was probably a fairly troubled person."

The silhouette of farce and clowning often masks a darker truth. Roxburgh knows it. His dog-eared alter-ego remains less self-aware - even with Rake's third season starting this month. "Some of the funniest stuff in this season is, well, given any clear understanding, it's also the saddest and the most deeply tragic," Roxburgh says. "That's Chekhovian territory - the very stuff you're falling about laughing at is what's tragic about it."

TV director Kate Dennis, who's back for her second stint on Rake, has called break on the filming of episode eight, the last episode in what will be the final season of this cherished show. The throng of coffee-breaking city workers, schoolkids and daytrippers crowded behind the bank of lights and cameras disperses. Actress Danielle Cormack, the dark-haired beauty from the bar, reaches for her lip balm. The lights click off.

Rake's impending end has put Roxburgh in a reflective mood, and he's developing this theme of self-destruction, the distinctly human urge to destroy oneself in order to, as Hermann Hesse put it, "find a secret behind the ruins".

"The world of self-destruction is so fascinating, because why do humans have that?" Roxburgh says. "It's weird! Like, you don't see a dog trying to kill themselves, running at a brick wall. You don't see a pigeon trying to lose consciousness. So it's a particularity of humankind and it's a weird one. What I think it's about is the trouble that we have with consciousness: we know too much, we see too much. I guess if you're a kind of sensitive beastie it is too much, so there's something protecting you." A wiry little terrier galumphs past, as if on cue, mindlessly happy amid the birdsong and fresh-mown grass. Roxburgh flashes a smile that doesn't quite reach his winter-blue eyes.

Richard Roxburgh is a perfectionist. He delivers, almost without pause, flawlessly constructed sentences festooned with shrewd analogies. He's very, very smart, which is a big blessing and a small curse. "It means he labours over choices, whatever they may be," says Peter Duncan from Los Angeles, where he's working on an American version of the series, which just debuted stateside on Fox. He's a hard marker, toughest on himself, Duncan adds. "There were many occasions, basically before he met Silvia, when I observed him punishing himself, trying to find that thing that most people find very elusive, which is happiness."

One place Roxburgh knew would be devoid of joy was the four-walled captivity of an office. He tried to toe the corporate line, even went for a job interview. But a half-hearted stab at studying economics at the Australian National University - "Did you like it?" "No" - taught him that he needed to act. "I think I started to determine by a process of elimination that I was going to have to devote myself to acting because nothing else was going to do it for me," he says. "I assumed I'd probably do acting as a hobby and that I'd get a sensible job like every other normal person on the planet. I would never have been confident that I could have made a life with it until it became clear that I certainly couldn't make a life without it."

Financial imperatives dogged him from an early age. He grew up in a grand old house on a hill in Albury, NSW. But with five older siblings, the dollars were stretched thin. "It wasn't a wealthy circumstance I came from," he says. "It was a big family; my dad worked three jobs to support us all. And so I may have inherited some of that financial anxiety."

As a schoolboy, frustrated and bored, he was a self-confessed "pain in the arse". Until he encountered Willy Loman, that towering little man struggling to survive the ordinariness of middle-class life in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. The 15-year-old read and reread the play over the course of a summer, enchanted by the language. Later, leaving his economics books to gather dust, Roxburgh decided to make purposeful strides towards an artistic future and applied for Sydney's National Institute of Dramatic Art. A life in the theatre spoke to him. Throughout the 1990s he starred in a number of acclaimed stage productions, including a mesmerising turn as Hamlet at the Belvoir St Theatre, the spiritual home he shared with Cate Blanchett and Geoffrey Rush. "You can sort of pay to do theatre," he says now. "If your partner's away and you've got babysitting, yeah, you pay for the privilege of doing theatre. But it's worth it, because it's the creative nutrition that you need.

"And I have found ringingly true this thing that my wonderful agent told me when I first got out of drama school and I was trying to choose between these two jobs. He said, 'Well honestly, darling, it's very straightforward really - which f..king one do you want to do?' One was offering a lot of money and it was rubbish and the other one was good. I said, 'I hate to say it, it's the second one' and he said: 'Great. Then do that.'"

Roxburgh's first major foray into television was a triumph: his role as crooked NSW cop Roger Rogerson in the muscly 1995 drama Blue Murder, a kind of precursor to Underbelly, won him a Silver Logie. Teaming with Peter Duncan, whom he met straight out of film school, he made Children of the Revolution and Passion. He dated Miranda Otto for a while after they co-starred in Doing Time for Patsy Cline in 1997 and, that same year, he played a dashing romantic lead opposite Blanchett in Thank God He Met Lizzie.

In 2000, Roxburgh starred as a villain opposite Tom Cruise in the Hollywood blockbuster Mission: Impossible II, which kickstarted a successful international career or, as Roxburgh prefers to call it, his "derailment". He was a terrifically snide nobleman in Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge! but now he was pigeonholed and, in quick succession, he played Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles, Professor Moriarty in the epically bad The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Count Dracula opposite Hugh Jackman in Van Helsing.

"Look, any Hollywood thing I've done has been shit," Roxburgh says matter-of-factly, stirring a tiny macchiato as he prepares for the next scene. "In the wake of Blue Murder, people thought, 'That's what he is, he does bad guy.' That's where you get, you know, derailed. I found myself doing those bad-guy things and hating it. Hating it!"

Swishing about in a Dracula cape for Van Helsing - dismissed by one American critic as "the dopiest movie of the year" - was the final nail in the coffin of Roxburgh-does-Hollywood. "Once I'd finished Van Helsing" - he mutters the title like it's a curse - "I thought, 'I've done enough of those'." He laughs loudly, flustering a couple of creaky gents studying the park's giant outdoor chess board. "I thought it was a comedy! It read funny to me, I don't know. Of course you get paid a fortune to wear a long black wig and some fangs and prance around in these kind of medieval Transylvanian pants, but I guess I had such an anaphylactic reaction to that - I thought, 'You know what? I actually can't do this anymore. I will no longer allow myself to make these choices no matter how fabulous and stupid the money is.'"

It's rare and somehow exhilarating to hear an actor, on the loose, outside the publicity machine, speak so candidly and brutally about a film he's been in. One can't imagine Jackman doing it. But Roxburgh is free now, master of his own professional destiny. He shapes his own roles where he can. He works with mates: Hugo Weaving, recently, in Sydney Theatre Company's Waiting for Godot; Cate Blanchett in the compendium Australian film The Turning; pretty much every guest star on Rake. (Blanchett has a "somewhat shocking" cameo as a barrister in the upcoming season.)

Of course, the dreaded Van Helsing did introduce him to the love of his life. One of Count Dracula's three brides was played by the multi-talented Colloca, who trained as a mezzo-soprano in Milan and has just published a cookbook. In 2004, in Tuscany, she became Roxburgh's real-life wife.

The couple share their northern beaches idyll with Raphael, six, and Miro, three ("bookends to each other's energy"). "There's this kind of fantastic connective tissue between Pittwater and the ocean and there's so much play to be had just in that world," Roxburgh says. Clowning on the beach. Walks to the Barrenjoey lighthouse. "I mean, that's just gold."

Dust from his past, Roxburgh admits, settled over the early years of his marriage. "For sure. I still drank quite a lot," he says. "My wife knows my history; she knows my story. She watches the show and recognises that part of me." Riding that fine line between lovable rogue and vice-ridden lout is part of Cleaver Greene's appeal: audiences cringe while they laugh as the train wreck plays out.

Credit Peter Duncan with having the savvy to tap his old mate's inner clown and help spin it into TV gold, with scripts that negotiate a tone that's both learned and absurd, referencing Nietzsche and Rimbaud, cannibals and bigamists. "Pete was someone who understood me and understood that clown, so this gave us an opportunity to trot it out and see where we could take it," Roxburgh says. "I think people are a little surprised at that side of me, but in a way that's what I enjoy doing the most - stuff that has great lightness to it; comedy with secret corners." So taken with the genre is he that a stint behind the camera on a comedy might be next. He is, after all, a different man from the one who made his directing debut with the solemn 2007 drama Romulus, My Father. "I like the mechanics of working with funny stuff," he says. "I think it might play to my strong suit."

Happily, Roxburgh seems to have found Hesse's "secret" before he was ruined. "The self-destructive elements of my nature, which were intense and powerful, they just dissipated as a matter of course," he says. "It's not like I sat down and gave myself a good talking to or anything; it's more that fatherhood brings with it a kind of great tsunami of love that carries so many things away with it. So my life dealt with it for me in a way."

Greg Kinnear has stolen something from Roxburgh. It's a small thing, a trifle. But it rankles. Just a bit. The Hollywood star of Little Miss Sunshine and The Kennedys has stepped into Roxburgh's shoes for the American version of Rake, which is fine by him - he didn't want to do it. It's just that Roxburgh watched the trailer recently and he saw a dishevelled Kinnear - playing a character named Keegan Deane - walk into a Los Angeles coffee shop wearing a dressing-gown and brogues. And he felt a twinge of possessiveness about the costume. "There was a bit of ... hey, that's mine! I thought of that!" Roxburgh admits. "I'd be fibbing if I said there wasn't. But, look, he's such a good actor, he makes the character his own. I look forward to seeing what they do with it."

There were discussions about Roxburgh accompanying Duncan when he took Rake stateside, but the actor "couldn't stomach" the idea of playing the character within different parameters, with an American accent, on a commercial network. "I would have felt that in so doing I would have dismantled the work I'd done here on some strange level and I couldn't bear that because I love it so much," he says. "This is my Cleaver; this is the Cleaver I have given my all to."

The actor gazes around him. Convoys of buses thunder down Elizabeth Street as barristers bustle along with their pink-ribboned bundles of briefs. That one's having a bad horsehair day, the thickly serried curls of his white Mozart wig perilously askew. This is legal-eagle central. It's where Roxburgh and the team have filmed Rake for three seasons. This is where Cleaver Greene lives.

"It's hard to let go," Roxburgh says. "But it's also important to let go of it, to leave a good-looking corpse. I've been quietly grieving my Cleaver time as I've gone along. I've known that the day was coming so it's like being given an opportunity to say goodbye."

Goodbye to 24 cumulative hours of cracking good Australian television: a day in the life. One last thing: those martinis - real or fake? "It's always just water in the martini glasses," he smiles. "Because you can guarantee after I've finished that martini, I'll have to do four hours of sprinting through Martin Place. Oh no, that's water. Definitely water." There are so many things to enjoy about being 52. The diminishing appeal of self-destruction is one of them.

Season three of Rake starts on ABC1 on February 9.