Category Archives: Interviews

Life Beyond the Show

When actor and filmmaker Ben Steel came to Adelaide in November 2019 to present his documentary, The Show Must Go On, at the Mercury Cinema, he and I met before the screening to discuss his film. In the brightly lit cinema, we sat across from each other in comfortable red chairs, my voice recorder (and phone as a failsafe) perched on the chair between us as Ben spoke with empathy about what drove his exploration into the mental health and wellbeing challenges faced by those working in the entertainment industry.

It is certainly a topic that demands attention. For example, The Australian Actors’ Wellbeing Study in 2013 found elevated levels of depression, anxiety, and stress in the over 700 surveyed respondents. Amongst the challenges reported by respondents were incredible financial instability and difficulty in getting regular work, travel and the associated time away from home and loved ones, the emotional and physical tolls of a role, problematic uses of alcohol to cope with stress and, indeed, the attitude reflected in the title of Ben’s film that the show must go on, even if one is experiencing physical or psychological difficulties. While many of these issues are not specific to entertainers, both the research and anecdotal evidence certainly points to them being certainly heighted hazards of working in the industry.

As writer-director of the film, Ben had initially set out to understand why so many creatives struggled with their wellbeing and to look at ways to prevent or tackle these issues. With camera in hand, he began by interviewing entertainment professionals from stage, screen, television, and music, both those who work in front of an audience and those behind the scenes. While Ben didn’t envision being in the film beyond some of the interviews, as the project took shape Ben and his team realised that it was his own story that could be a focal point of this exploration and a way to bring together the diverse thoughts of participants, including Sam Neil, Michala Banas, Jocelyn Moorhouse, Dean Ray, and Glenn Scott. And so, in the film, and in subsequent screenings as part of the Wellness Roadshow, where Ben travelled around the country to screen his film and lead discussions about mental health in the industry, Ben honestly shared his story.

Central to Ben’s experiences was how he navigated life post his star-marking turn as Jude Lawson on drama series Home and Away, for which he received a 2001 Logie nomination for Most Popular New Talent on Australian Television. When that role ended, he ventured overseas working as an actor, as well as behind the scenes. Returning to Australia, he found not only the work had dried up, but that he was struggling emotionally. In moments throughout the film, Ben lets us in to the depth of that struggle. At one low point during production, he tells us that he felt his work on the film was “a mission to help other people”, but then asks, “But how can I help other people if I can’t even help myself?”. With therapy and support, Ben worked through it, learning much about himself and what keeps him well. Through his own struggles and understanding of the world he investigated, he provides a space for his interviewees to be honest and forthcoming with their own stories. In the process, he has also given us a beautiful film.

It has taken me significant time to publish this interview. If asked why, perhaps I can use the standard reply of 2020-2021, “Because COVID”. As work responsibilities intensified, our chat on my to-do list and my anxiety would rise as I remembered how much I wanted to get this out there.

If anything, however, the delay may be strangely perfect. As Ben and his team adapted to COVID-19, with webinars and online screenings during 2020 and 2021, the core issues of the film have become focused. Paradoxically we have realised the necessity of the arts in our lives as we bunker down at home in front of our TVs and devices, but the creatives themselves have had limited support from government in Australia and overseas as the industry has shut down or been severely affected. If anything, watching the film made me, and I hope you, want to support the arts more when we reflect on how much joy we get from live music, live comedy, art, theatre, TV, film…and the list goes on. Yet, most creatives are living a very hand-to-mouth existence, with the Wellness Study revealing that around 40% of respondents were earning less than $10,000 a year and around 20% can be considered below the poverty line. What comes across in Ben’s films is not only the love creatives have for their craft, but the necessity for society to have a vibrant arts culture. As actress Wendy Strehlow told me in a previous interview, “I am passionate about the vital role the arts play in society. “Holding the mirror up to nature”, so to speak. Without a healthy and thriving arts culture we are spiritually bereft”.

Why I think Ben’s film is relatable and audiences will find commonality between the film and their own experiences, even for those not in creative industries, is that it shines a light on a lot of the risks for mental unwellness for all of us. Regardless of career, upbringing, and experiences, we are often not taught about psychological care or wellbeing as we navigate our worlds and pursuits. It was Ben’s hope that the film could start a conversation about such matters, and I hope that you enjoy ours.

Adam: Tell me about the Wellness Roadshow. How long has it been going and where have you been so far?
Ben: We launched it on my birthday, on the 9th of October, straight after the ABC premiere. We’ve had screenings in Melbourne and Sydney and Newcastle, and now we are in Adelaide. Next year we’ll be heading to the other states, going to Perth and Hobart and the Gold Coast.
Adam: And you’re doing this over the next 12 months or thereabouts?
Ben: Pretty much. It’s just that rolling thing. We’re doing the capitals first and we’ve just started to get little pockets of funding that can take us to some regional centres as well. We’ll just keep rolling it out as much as we can, spreading the word and getting people talking.

Adam: The film screened on ABC back in October and you’ve been traveling around since then. What’s been the reaction to the film so far?
Ben: It’s been amazing. I always hoped that it would connect with people and that people would respond. I guess it was kind of a no brainer that creative people or people within the entertainment industry would probably connect to it. But I was always hopeful that it would reach outside of that, which it kind of has – which is amazing. Collectively, as a team, we’ve probably received now over 100 emails, texts, or whatever, from people saying it’s actually saved their lives and they’re getting help.
Adam: That’s fantastic. Were you expecting that?
Ben: I was hopeful it was going to make a difference, but to actually hear it and feel it, makes me really happy. It’s quite overwhelming that what we’ve been able to make has had that impact. There’s been hundreds and hundreds “thank you for doing it” kind of emails, but the ones that really bowl me over are the ones where people say “I’m actually going to get help now” or “It’s saved my life”. Literally those words. And you go, “Thank God, that means we’re really helping people”.
Adam: It’s the kind of film that makes sense that people would contact you. But often you put something out there and you wonder, Is anyone listening? Is anyone watching?
Ben: Yeah, definitely. I guess because it’s such a personal film and all the cast that were involved, who beautifully and generously gave their time and they were so candid, they were just so open – that’s what people are really responding to.

Adam: Disclosing depression or anxiety or any mental unwellness is difficult. Was it difficult for you starting the film – although you weren’t initially going to have such a big role compared to what it ended up being – knowing that you would have to disclose something about your own story or ‘come out’, so to speak, about it?
Ben: I guess initially I didn’t think I would be [Laughs].
Adam: [Laughs].
Ben: Probably the first part of that is, at the beginning, I just didn’t have the awareness. I hadn’t started my recovery. I hadn’t received help. My awareness level of how bad I actually was, or how much I was struggling, I just didn’t have the awareness level. So, to have that – I wouldn’t have even thought.
Adam: That far ahead.
Ben: Yeah. It was probably – I mean we had a big team meeting probably about eight months in when it became apparent that my story was central to this film. Up until that point, it was me interviewing people and talking and I was going to construct something together based on all these opinions and solutions. I wasn’t in it. There were shots where I was on camera, but it wasn’t my story. So, we had a team meeting when it became apparent that “You’re the through line here, Ben. That’s what people are going to connect to, your story, and then all these other things feed into it”. Probably at that point, it was a little bit, Am I ok with that? I think since I was asking other people to put themselves out there, I’ve got to be able to do that myself. I guess being an actor and being on screen, I didn’t have that barrier to overcome in the sense that I’m fine to see myself on camera, or hear my voice, which some people behind the scenes.
Adam: Are a bit reluctant to do.
Ben: Yeah. I didn’t have any of those issues. And then it was only probably two weeks after we finished making the film – editing was done, it had been approved by ABC, and the post-production people were doing all their magic deliverables and making DCPs and all that. I was away on holiday and I kind of went, “Oh shit, my story is going to be out there in like two weeks”. And I was like “Ooh, ooh”.
Adam: [Laughs].
Ben: And it just gave me a little bit of a butterfly of nerves. I mean, I was fine. Everything in it is me and it’s what happened. It felt like I need to tell people that story.

Adam: I think you’re right that the focus is really you because you’re holding all those stories together. I could appreciate if you had reluctance because, as we said, it’s hard enough to disclose regardless, but you’ve been in the network machine of publicity and there’s a very structured way of having publicity. I think it’s great you could do it.
Ben: Thank you. I guess that was so far away from my current reality anyway.
Adam: Of course.
Ben: To be honest, I didn’t really think of the career consequences, if any. At a certain point – I mean, in the beginning, I was being driven by there being some people really struggling and I want to know what’s going on. Then it reverted to “I’m actually struggling, I need to find these answers for myself”. And that trumps any kind of I wonder what people are going to think about me [Laughs].

Adam: [Laughs]. That’s great. That leads in quite well to what I wanted to ask. When you started filming, you knew you weren’t good, but you weren’t aware of where you were. Was it in your mind to try to unravel what was going on for you?
Ben: Not in the beginning. It was only after I started becoming aware. In the beginning, so I left Home and Away – got dumped [laughs].
Adam: [Laughs].
Ben: Then went overseas doing the UK thing like so many ex-Home and Away and Neighbours people do. So, I was kind of milking that and working that for all I could, riding that particular wave, and just kind of pushing and pushing and pushing. Then at a certain point – I think it was about nine years I was away – I came back to Australia. I wasn’t expecting there to be a welcome home party or anything, but I did achieve some things overseas. I made some shows and was in some films and all that kind of stuff. And I guess I was expecting the transition back into the industry to be a little bit easier than what it was.
So, I was aware of that struggle that I felt like I was outside the circle. And at the point I put it down to, Well I’ve just been away too long, people have forgotten about me. I hadn’t maintained all those relationships and friendships and networking that you need to do. Maybe part of it was that, but I think more of it was because I just had this huge identity crisis about to blow up and happen and I was so caught up in my identity as an actor and pursuing that, that I wasn’t actually being a real person. So, I think that was probably getting in the way of my career more than anything.

Adam: Sam Neill talks in the film about this idea that it is perhaps healthier to have an approach to acting, or any performing, as, “That’s what I do, that’s not what I am”. He describes it as separating yourself from your profession. So, as opposed to saying, “I’m an actor”, to say instead, “I’m Ben and I act”. Did you find in talking to people that this is often a pitfall for actors? Because there’s such a drive to get there, you really have to work at it consistently and it’s probably impossible for it not to become pretty much your identity
Ben: I think there’s two parts to that. I think, one, is that through the training we get, whether it’s behind the scenes or in front of the camera, you’re made abundantly aware how slim the chances are you’re going to succeed. So, you have to really just put everything, your focus, on it. When you’re doing that and you’re not having a social life, and you’re missing weddings and funerals and real-life things, or you don’t have hobbies because you don’t have time, how could it not become your identity?
I think the other factor to it is because there is so much rejection, and there’s oversupply and under demand as far as work, how do you deal with that rejection? You deal with that rejection by creating this wall, or thick skin around you, and really just saying, “Well, this is who I am”. You’re kind of building these walls that “I’m an actor and this is all I am. I’m just going to keep doing this”, or whatever your job is. I think for those two reasons that’s why it’s a no-brainer that a lot people in entertainment have identity issues. But I think it’s also across the board. I think a lot of people out in the wider community also do. A perfect example is when you’re raising kids and you become a parent and that’s all you are for a substantial chunk of your time.
Adam: It’s not a role, it’s an identity.
Ben: “I’m a parent, I’m a parent, I’m a parent”. And then the kids leave home. And then you suddenly have an identity crisis.
Adam: “What the hell do I do now?”
Ben: Yeah. Or you’re a corporate CEO and you’re working towards this and you’re building a company, you’re building a company, and suddenly it goes bankrupt and nobody returns your calls and nobody cares about you anymore, and you can’t fund anything, so who are you anymore? You’ve lost your identity.

Adam: That’s perhaps why the film is reaching all sorts of people. There are some unique issues with actors and the entertainment industry that you cover, but there’s also a lot not specific to actors – the idea of identity and overinvesting in your job. When I was watching it, what came up for me is this idea of perfectionism.
Ben: Yeah.
Adam: I would imagine actors are often quite perfectionist and whether that’s a personality trait they bring to it or whether it’s something the industry breeds because you have that slim margin, you’ve really got to be on, you’ve got to be ready. But then what some of your interviewees found – and what I find with my perfectionism, which leads to nothing but anxiety most of the time [Laughs] – is I get to wherever I imagine I’m going to go. And, first, it’s “Fuck, I’m exhausted” because I’ve near killed myself doing it. And then after that it’s like, “I’m not going to be able to maintain this”.
Ben: Mmm.
Adam: “How do I keep myself on top here?” I think that came through with some of the people you speak to. Even when they had this success, it’s like, “Is it going to be taking away from me?” Or, “How do I maintain this?”. Or “I’m an imposter, they’re going to find out sooner or later”.
Ben: Definitely. And again, I think that’s quite common across the board. Maybe it’s part of us breaking down mini steps along the way to success, and certainly within the entertainment industry there’s no one clear path to anywhere. But maybe a quite common belief is “I just need to get this one big break. And then once I get there, everything is going to be fine. I’m going to have all the money I need. I’m going to be as happy as Larry. The next opportunity is going to come easier”. And da da dah-dah.  And, as you allude to [Laughs
Adam: [Laughs].
Ben: and what’s in the film, when you get there, there’s a whole other slew of things you’ve got to deal with, or other fears or concerns that, “Now I’ve got it, what happens if it gets taken away from me?” Or there’s just so much pressure at that point.
Adam: Yeah
Ben: But it kind of again makes sense that we probably, as humans, put things into little boxes. We just focus on that first bit and then I get to that bit, and then “What’s next?” And I think it’s also society kind of pushes us and feeds us that way, like “More, more, more, more”.
Adam: Absolutely.
Ben: And you hear it all the time – enjoy the journey. It’s all about the journey, not the destination. But it’s hard to live by that principle.
Adam: It is, isn’t it? You’re not taught to look at what are your values compared to what are your goals. Your goals are something you achieve, like you can get on to Home and Away, great. But what are your values about creativity or contribution or whatever else? I kind of wonder – I’ve spoken to a few actors about this, and I think a lot of jobs are like this, but particularly with creative people – when I write, often it’s an extension of me, it’s very tied into identity. So, when you get rejected, it feels like a very personal rejection. I’ve spoken to actors who tell me that it feels like a rejection of them, rather than “Hey, there were 10 actors, and it just turns out that you’re not the one that’s right in the director’s mind. It doesn’t mean you’re not good”. It feels very personal.
Ben: Yeah, definitely. I think you’ve hit it on the head there, what we do. Unlike other industries, we are bringing so much of us into it, there’s a big amount of emotional vulnerability, like Glenn Scott says in the film, there’s so much emotional vulnerability. So, if you are rejected, it is you they are rejecting, it’s your creative pursuit – like, if you’re a technician, it’s the work you have done, or not done, that they are not happy with. Because you are putting your heart and soul into it, and you so closely link what you’re doing to you, that they’re not just rejecting what you’ve done, they are rejecting you. Most other jobs, most other careers, I think there’s more separation between that. Not all the time, but I think most of the time.
Adam: Yeah.
Ben: And I think performers again take that step just even further, and potentially probably comedians have it the most in the sense because they have created the story as well as performing it. And if you’re not funny, if they are not laughing at it, it’s a real failure.
Adam: Yeah, watching Andy Saunders, who is a comedian, in the documentary. That’s interesting you say that. When you were talking to Sarah Walker, who wrote for Home and Away, it’s your character, but it’s also her character. With comedians, it’s them out front, it’s often their stories.
Ben: Mmm.
Adam: I was speaking to my friend Gavin Harrison, who was in Home and Away probably ten years before you, he played Revhead.
Ben: Yeah, yeah.
Adam: And this picks up from what we were talking about before. Among the reasons he transitioned out of acting was that, he said, “I wasn’t really comfortable not having control of where I was going in my life”. He’d gone to America and ended up in a whole lot of TV shows and films there and he was so busy auditioning – it was actually Gavin who said, “That’s the part of acting where you can have 10 good actors, but only the person who is completely right in the director’s mind is going to get booked”. He told me that Jane Nagel, who did publicity for Home and Away, gave him some useful advice that, “there’s the person, the professional, and the product, and that these three aspects of my life should be viewed as such when I was doing certain things”. That helped him, although I’m sure he would admit how hard it can be. When you spoke with Dean Ray in the documentary, for example, when people say something like, “Hey, you got fat”, it’s pretty hard not to take that personally, no matter how much you realise you’re a public person or personality.
Ben: One bit that didn’t make it in the doco – my dear friend and Home and Away actor, Ada Nicodemou, said, which is similar down that path, “It’s not about me, it’s about the character that I play and the show that I’m in. They’re famous, I’m not famous. That’s what people want, that’s what people need”. The show is so much bigger than us.
Adam: Yeah.
Ben: I think that’s quite a healthy way to look at it. Regardless of whatever art it is, ultimately “the song” is the star [Laughs],
Adam: Yeah [Laughs].
Ben: the album is the star; the front person is not. The end result of many people’s work is the star, it’s where the fame is attached. Having that healthy separation from, you know, doing this interview with you, or doing Sunrise, or whatever, it’s actually not about me at all [Laughs]. It’s really helpful to go in with that mind. And that’s what we want, that’s what we love, that’s what we’re selling, that’s what we’re pushing, that’s what we’re all working towards, that’s what all these thousands of creative people are coming together to work on – the thing that is the star, it’s the product, it’s the show.

Adam: What do you think are some unique challenges for performers’ mental health?
Ben: If we are to compare entertainment to wider society, the biggest thing is – like what we’ve spoken about already – just the emotional vulnerability that we have to go to for our work. The sensitivity that’s actually involved in doing what we’re doing. Even if you are a technical person on the crew and you’re looking at lighting or something like that, it’s such a beautiful, delicate – you’re putting your heart and soul into it. It can be quite a technical thing, but there’s imagination and creativity and you kind of then are invested in the thing that you’re doing or building.
Adam: And you’ve worked in lighting as well.
Ben: Yeah, I did lighting.
Adam: The film was beautifully done.
Ben: Oh, thank you! Or you’re constructing a set, like you’re the chippy, you’re the carpenter on the set, you could make far more money out building houses or buildings, rather than working in our industry. They’re drawn to it because there’s something else, something magical, they’re expressing their creativity in a different way, or they are getting to work on different things
Adam: Yes.
Ben: Everybody in the industry has that – that emotional vulnerability and sensitivity and connection to what we’re doing. I think that’s a big one. The other big one that I found is that a lot of the pressures that we face – there are some little weird, little quirky ones that no other industry has, like talking in public, although some other industries have that – there’s quirky things like auditioning, auditioning, auditioning. Other industries, you could be getting job interview after job interview. A lot of what we go through can apply to other industries, but a big thing is the accumulation of many pressures happening at the one time. I think that is quite unique to our industry. Not only are you putting your heart on the line, you might be working at night, and you’re working interstate,
Adam: Away.
Ben: Away, and you’re not getting paid that well. So, you’ve got multiple pressures that most people, if they had one pressure, they’d freak out. But our industry, we’re facing multiple pressures all at the same time. I think that is unique to our industry and that’s why our stats are larger than the general population.

Adam: An example of what we’re talking about is when Jocelyn Moorhouse discusses in the documentary the pressures of her film not getting made, but then two of her children are diagnosed with autism. It’s on top of, on top of, and on top.
Ben: Yep. Ultimately, at the end of the day, all of this, all of what we’re talking about, mental health and wellbeing, mental ill health, it’s a human issue. We, in the industry, are human [Laughs]. There’s just some stressors or pressures that may be a little bit more weird or different or hard for the rest of society to understand.
Adam: And there does seem to be that gap a little bit
Ben: Yep.
Adam: Some people have this idea that actors are sitting in the mansion. For the vast majority of actors, that’s not the case. For the vast majority, it’s a job, and there is instability and all those sorts of things. I love when some American actors post their residual checks on Facebook and they are getting a cent.
Ben: [Laughs].
Adam: A cent residual for a movie. Perhaps there is a little bit of a gap and maybe the film can help people to understand a little bit better that perspective.
Ben: Yeah, and I think that was part of the reason as well – and that’s why having my parents in there is such a good thing because I think many people outside the industry could maybe think down the lines of my parents. Or they are parents themselves to creative kids. So that’s why having them in there was so important to me, to give a bit of a voice and a personality to those opinions against some of the creative things. But then also some of the things they’re bringing up like, “Get a different job, just leave, do something else”. It’s hard to do. And funny enough so many people who have tried counselling or therapy and hadn’t found the right one – and I’d suggest people keep trying until they find the right one because they will be there –
Adam: For sure.
Ben: I had to go through several to find the right one. The counsellors don’t know how to – they seem the problem being the industry, so just get out the industry [Laughs],
Adam: [Laughs].
Ben: which is kind of short-sighted because if everybody just got out of the industry there would be no entertainment, so you know.
Adam: And that doesn’t take into consideration the things that the person does get from the industry, in terms of their values and what they want to achieve. But also, perhaps, practically – and again speaking to actors and performers I’ve spoken with before – you’re so driven, even though you’re expected to work multiple jobs while you’re acting, you’re so driven or you really have to focus, that it’s not that easy – for many people, they might think, I haven’t necessarily built some other things to be able to do, so even if I wanted to exit, how can I exit? This is all I’ve ever done.
Ben: I interviewed Susan Eldridge who’s an amazing woman at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music. She didn’t make it into the film, but we’ll be releasing some additional content with her, as we will with some other people that aren’t in the film because there were so many amazing people, I just couldn’t fit everything in. She’s devised a couple of – well, she’s devised an amazing program out there – but among some key things that I learnt from her was focus on living a creative life, rather than having a creative career. That doesn’t mean that we can’t make this our profession, or we can’t make money from it. But when we’re valuing it like other industries and other professions, we’re kind of setting ourselves up to fail. Because there’s only a very small amount of people who can sustain a career out of this, so therefore when we aren’t sustaining a career, where does all the negative energy go? It goes to us because we feel that like we’ve failed, or we’re not good enough, or we’ve missed the boat, or we’re getting too old now, we can’t do this anymore, or whatever. But what we can actually do is live a creative life every day. So, focus on living a creative life rather than ‘pursing a creative career’ is one thing that she taught me. The other thing is rather than having a day job or a Plan B or a backup plan, or any of that kind of stuff, she says, “Have two Plan A’s”.
Adam: That’s great.
Ben: Focus on your creative life, and then focus on something that can bring you a certain amount of stability – and it can actually be another creative job, it can actually be creative industries – and that allows you to be able to pay your bills and do everything else or achieve your other goals, whilst you are still pursuing living a creative life.
Adam: Absolutely.
Ben: One thing about performers, I think most of us have multiple jobs. We’re not just pursing one thing. So, I write, I direct, I produce, I shoot, I make stuff across the whole spectrum of entertainment, not just in one little niche. I coach actors, I work with actors, I shoot their self-tapes, I do many different jobs within the industry. And all that cobbled together in the gig economy is enough to support me to keep pursing a creative career, whether I’m auditioning or whether I’m writing something or whether I’m making a documentary. I’m not saying I’m the success story, but I’m using that as an example.
Adam: Yes.
Ben: Because again, at the beginning, I didn’t have that awareness that I actually was going OK. Once I had that awareness and gratitude – Oh fuck, I’m actually going OK. Look at all this awesome stuff around me – I started to feel better.

Adam: I was going to ask you about that because you’ve done a whole range of other things when you were overseas and even before that. Even before you started on Home and Away.
Ben: Yeah.
Adam: Was that something that kind of just happened or was that sort of a guided move?
Ben: Funnily enough, I wanted to leave school after year 10 because I was already acting when I was a kid at school. I was already working; I was already in the industry. I already knew more than my media teachers at school because I was doing it – arrogant little fucker [Laughs].
Adam: [Laughs].
Ben: My parents said, “No, stick at it”. They were the kind of ones that planted the seed of having other stuff that I was interested in. They weren’t in the industry, they didn’t know anything about the industry, so it was really a fortunate bit of advice. So, I started getting interested in behind the scenes and shooting stuff, and bought a camera and started making little films, started doing subjects at school that were that way. And then all my work experience and everything like that was about that. So, when I left school, that’s what I did. I just started working in the industry in other areas. That was cool and exciting, and I was learning stuff.
That was my path. There’s no right or one way to do it. But I think – so, with the multiple things I was doing when I was at my darkest, I just didn’t have the appreciation because again my identify was so linked with – my definition of success and identity were linked into I have to be an actor in a studio film or a network show. If I’m not in that, then I’m a failure. The fact that I was working with actors, Nup, well that’s not good enough. Why am I not being able to do that? I was so negative about the amazing thing that I was maintaining and being able to live a creative life. So that’s a big thing, I think, is kind of getting your expectations in check and actually redefining your definition of success. Because if you can support yourself, you can still keep doing the thing you love every day and be plugging away. That’s a success. Winning an Oscar, winning a Tony, winning an Emmy, winning Logie, that’s not success. Being able to still do what you love and find a way to support yourself and have a whole full life, that’s success.

Adam: I write but I’m not in that industry. But what my therapist, for example, said to me was that you can’t expect to get all your creativity or all the want to contribute something out of one thing.
Ben: Mmm.
Adam: And maybe the whole difficulty I was having in a former job was that I expected to get all that from one thing. A: Who does? And B: Is that going to be healthy or sustainable?
Ben: Definitely. The other thing I want to say about the Plan A-Plan A, your other Plan A can actually be out of the industry because some of the skills that we have as creative people, other industries want. So, what is wrong with having a job in another industry using aspects of your creativity? Again, it’s about thee awareness. The fact that we can think outside the box.
Adam: Yeah.
Ben: Many people in brainstorming kind of situations want that skill in their team. Obviously, performers can be very confident, they can work with scrips and do telemarketing and do things like this. Again, if we’re looking at that rather than “Ugh, I’m just a telemarketer; I’m not being an actor today”. Well, you are using some of those skills that you need and you’re honing those skills. We’re so good at focusing at minute little details, but also looking at the big picture as creative people. That’s part of our process. We’re doing that all the time. Again, it’s another skill that other industries would die to have in their workforce. We can actually make good money on the side in other industries. The other great thing is because most of us are freelancers, and what’s happening out there in the big wide world? It’s becoming a gig economy. The world is turning in a gig economy. We’re already 10 steps ahead [Laughs].
Adam: What you might have seen as a deficit, is not a deficit at all.
Ben: Yeah, this constant chasing work and being on the go. As exhausting as that is, we’re – like, that’s part of our DNA now. So, as we’re transitioning into a gig economy as a society, we’re kind of a step ahead as creative people. Looking at the positive and really kind of being grateful for that opportunity, rather than going “Ugh, what am I doing next and dah, dah, dah. Thinking, Actually, I’m ahead of a lot of the population.
Adam: We see that with a whole lot of creative people. I mean, you even seen some creative people become counsellors or therapists.
Ben: I think it’s about that awareness. For me, a lot of I think my struggles were just based on beliefs that weren’t the whole truth or weren’t any truth at all. I just held on to them for whatever reason. It’s quite a hopeful thing now that you can actually – once you kind of have a look at the real issue and what’s going on for you and what’s underneath that and what’s underpinning these beliefs, you kind of unpack that and go, Actually, that’s not true – this is more the truth. So, getting that awareness. And if I can do it, anyone can with help.
 
Adam: I think the film and a lot of what you’re talking about is really speaking to what so many people experience, regardless of whether someone is in the entertainment industry or not. You’ve spoken just now about the idea of really understanding your thinking, and that’s something we don’t teach people. We teach physical health, but we don’t teach people to go, “I’ve got a million thoughts in my head. Perhaps I don’t need to buy into every one of them”.
Ben: Yes.
Adam: “Which one’s are useful? Which ones are not useful?”. All that kind of stuff. From what you’ve learnt for yourself, and from what you’ve learnt with talking with people – bearing in mind everyone’s journey is different, what do you think we’re missing out in terms of what we’re teaching people?
Ben: I think for creatives or just for the wider community at large, it’s kind of putting your personal emotional development at the forefront of your learning and your education from, you know, your parents. So, parents getting better skilled at this kind of language and how to do that because then their children will be a little bit more prepared.
Adam: Yeah, they’re providing that framework.
Ben: Yep. The communities that we’re then involved in and the wider support networks around that child. Then they go into the education system. Again, the teachers and the school and the infrastructure around that child as it grows and develops Then the tertiary institutions or the workplaces. So, the more and more emotion and emotional intelligence and psychology.
Adam: Self-reflection.
Ben: Yeah. When that is more in the forefront and valued as a big part of who we are.
Adam: As important as all sorts of other things.
Ben: Right. Because if you kind of separate – what is it when it’s separate? It’s that your body and your physical health is more important. Ah, no [Laughs]. Or that finances and accumulating more wealth is the most important, which is how capitalist society works, right? But no, you can have all the money in the world but you’re eddying of cancer and you’ve got a psychological problem.
Adam: And nothing’s ever good enough and we keep on the treadmill.
Ben: And I’m not saying the emotional and psychological health should be superior to the physical or to other exterior forces, but at the moment it’s barely a blip on the radar. So, I think more people talking about that and actually going, no, self-development and looking after yourself and checking in with yourself and your psychology and getting to know yourself and getting to know other people and all that – that’s a really big thing.
People on their deathbed aren’t kind of worried about how much money they’ve got in the bank that they can’t spend anymore. They’re worried about the relationships they’ve created and the impact they had in the world, and the friendships and the love and the stories that they’ve shared. And that’s all human emotional and psychological, right?
Adam: Yeah. I think that the absolute core of what you’re saying, you know this whole idea of self-reflection, in the service of knowing you are, not only makes you – a more rounded person, a happier person, whatever you want to call it, better relationships, whatever. I guess it does also feed into those relationships because the more you understand yourself, the more you are going to understand other people.
Ben: To have compassion for other people.
Adam: Yeah, compassion for someone else’s plight. Actors use that every day – they use compassion, they use empathy to get themselves into someone else’s head. Perhaps sometimes what the problem could be is that you’re being asked to tap into a whole range of emotions and life experiences that you may have not processed yourself and then all of a sudden you have to use this and put this out every day. I think unless perhaps there’s been that understanding or development of some sort of insight or where this fits into my bigger story, it may do a little bit of harm.
Ben: Yeah, definitely, I think that’s another big issue for actors and maybe other performers. There’s a lot of training and attention given to getting into character in whichever technique you believe the best for you to get into character, but nobody teaches you how to do get out of character or to de-role or to debrief or kind of leave that behind. If you are dealing with pretty intense, vulnerable, psychologically challenging worlds and material and situations and emotions that you have to put yourself into, it kind of makes sense that you have to be a pretty strong person at the beginning to kind of cope with that. And even still, you still might have challenges.
Adam: Yeah.
Ben: But if you are going through something at that point and you’re thrust into an environment like that where that’s your job, that’s what you have to do, chances are you might not come out the other end so healthy.
Adam: I speak to people outside of this industry, nurses, for example, and they talk about the idea that they’re constantly with other people’s emotions. They talk to me about how when you get yourself into the other person’s head, it’s absolutely fine to feel something for someone – so you feel scared for someone, frustrated for someone, or concerned for someone. But when that kind of self-other separation breaks down and they become personally distressed, they know they’re not going to be able to do their job so well. Also, there is that sort of hangover – they can’t just go home and say, “OK, that’s it now”.
Ben: Mmm.
Adam: And I imagine that might be similar for actors. How do I debrief out of that? Whether it’s talking to other people, or whatever. How do you deal with that real intense emotion and getting into someone else’s head?
Ben: Yeah, definitely. It translates to a real psychological thing, which is called vicarious trauma. So, you’re vicariously being traumatised. It’s not your trauma, but it’s some other trauma. Journalists in war zones go through this, so they’re standing back but they’re watching some horrific shit happen in front of them, and they have to report on that. Or, in my case, it could be argued that in making this documentary, I was getting traumatised vicariously. Because I was hearing people’s stories over and over again and I was watching stuff.
Adam: How did you deal with that?
Ben: Yeah, it was difficult. Um, I think fortunately for me, as I kept  going further and further along through the filmmaking process, I was getting more and more support, and whilst there were times that I was really bad and really dark, I was starting to develop the skills that I needed to kind of help me get through that and knew the support was around me.
Adam: And were you going through counselling or therapy at the time?
Ben: Yeah, Yeah.
Adam: And we see some of that through the film.
Ben: Exactly. I dealt with it the best way that I could. But it can’t be underestimated, vicarious trauma.

Adam: When you speak in the film to Home and Away writer Sarah Walker, you bring up this idea that in a way you hadn’t let go of your character Jude. I’ve asked other actors this – is he an easy character to live with and do you think you have?
Ben: I think with Jude and the thing that – I mean, maybe it was quite close to me. He was really caring and really sensitive. He was looking after his little brother – different to me, but he had family issues, so he really kind of had to grow up pretty quickly and then he took in a foster kid, as well. So, he was really kind of caring and nurturing. And I guess that’s part of me and my personality as well.
Adam: Yeah, I can tell by the way.
Ben: [Laughs]. Thank you. I think it was hard to let go for me because my identity was so closely linked to what I was doing and suddenly I’m not doing that anymore. I think it was hard to let go of Jude because I hadn’t had conversations with other actors about letting go of characters before. I hadn’t thought about the bigger kind of things that you go through when you go through such an amazing experience like Home and Away. When it comes to an end, it’s quite common for whatever role you are in in the industry that when the show comes to an end, there’s a thing called post-show blues. You get a little bit sad and flat.
Adam: Even a grief some actors talk to me about.
Ben: Yeah, a grief, yeah, exactly. And those kind of things people don’t really talk about. We don’t really talk about that stuff. I certainly hadn’t had conversations. I think they were the main reasons why it was hard for me to let go of Jude, until ultimately going on this journey making the film and kind of unpacking the bigger and wider issues of the industry. But then, more intimately, unpacking my own issues and resolving that, so I could finally let go of that now and look back with fond memories of that whole time in my life
Adam: And being proud of it as well.
Ben: Yeah, being proud of it and, yeah – and I think, like I said in the film, if I didn’t have the Home and Away experience, if I didn’t have the getting dropped from the show and the subsequent battles and struggles that came from that, and my identity, and my struggles with all that, I wouldn’t have been at that precipice of struggling so much that drove me to make this film. I wouldn’t be there.
Adam: And not that we wish, you never want to wish these things happening to you.
Ben: [Laughs] No but, it’s, yeah.
Adam: But it’s which way you’ve taken it as well. Do you learn something from it? That’s very flippant to say it that way, but it’s really true. It’s what do you do with this?
Ben: Yeah, definitely, and I think I’m just fortunate through the people I have around me and the situation that I was in, everything kind of lined up and the skills that I guess developed behind the scenes that I could actually  go off and make this film. It was the perfect outlet for me to do that because that’s what I do. I make stuff, you know, I do things. So, I just started doing it. I didn’t think about making a doco, I just started doing it. I thought, Oh yeah, I think I need to speak to people and I’m going to start filming it. And it just started to grow. It’s part of me and part of my process. Other people aren’t that way, and their journey is different.

Adam: That leads into my last couple of questions. Where do you see your identity today?
Ben: Mmm.
Adam: That sounded so Barbara Walters!
Ben: [Laughs]. No! Yeah, I mean – I’m so many more things than just an actor is, I guess, the core revelation.
Adam: Mmm.
Ben: And I’m just more appreciative and grateful for everything that I have and am.
Adam: Yeah.
Ben: So, I’m a pretty shit surfer, but I love it [Laughs].
Adam: [Laughs].
Ben: I’m a brother, I’m an uncle, I’m a son. I’m so many different roles, you know. I’m a friend. So I think it’s because when your identity is so closely linked into the thing that you do, the availability and just the emotional vulnerability that you have for all the other things on the outside, like friends, family, activities, hobbies, experiences, life, joy, parties – like everything is just so limited because you’re focused on that. I’m just experiencing life much more, so much more. I guess my identity is much more whole or much more full now than what it was. It was very shallow and narrow before.
Adam: That’s fantastic. I guess the final thing is what’s next?
Ben: [Laughs]. So, yeah, just continuing on with the beautiful roadshow and getting out and just trying to have as many conversations as we can about this. At the same time, surfing as much as I can because it just brings me so much happiness and joy and I love it! And I’ve started developing the next doco.
Adam: Awesome. That’s fantastic.
Ben: Awesome, brother – thank you.

The Wellness Roadshow continues through 2021. Full details are available at The Show Must Go On website. Please also visit the documentary’s Facebook and Instagram pages, and stop by Ben’s Instagram page for pictures of Ben, his dog, and beaches.

Images used in article courtesy of Ben Steel.

Dancing Through Life – Part 2

In Part 1 of our interview, Galyn Görg and I spoke about her early dance training, starring on the Italian variety show Fantastico, and the films Living the Blues, Dance Academy, RoboCop 2 and Point Break. Here in Part 2, we pick up with Twin Peaks, Galyn’s roles in science fiction and fantasy TV series including Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Stargate SG-1, and Xena: Warrior Princess, and her arts education work with young people.

Adam: Last time we spoke, we ended on Point Break. It is probably timely to talk about Twin Peaks given the recent revival of Twin Peaks. You were on the second season of the original series. It had just blown up during its first season. What was it like to go into that phenomenon?
Galyn: It’s always interesting to watch a show and then have a part on it. Johanna Ray was the casting director. She always was a fan of mine and just so sweet to me. She called me up for so many things. David Lynch, I already knew who he was. As a director, I was somewhat in awe of him. It was great because I love that whole genre. The producer Mark Frost cast me after that in Storyville. I just had a communication with him recently. He was great. David was great. It’s so much fun creating art, and then when you get to work with people who are just kind and everyone’s supportive of each other. And Kyle MacLachlan’s cool, so it was a great experience. It’s like you’re stepping in and helping create this world, so I really enjoyed it. Sherilyn, I had that little bit with her, she was – everybody was really cool. I enjoyed it.

Adam: I love watching Sherilyn Fenn. Victoria Catlin, who played your sister, is someone I haven’t been able to find much about since Twin Peaks.
Galyn: Yeah.
Adam: This is probably a question that actors get asked a lot, but when you’re doing it, do you ever have a sense of what might stay around in the way that Twin Peaks has stayed around all these years?
Galyn: I had no idea. I didn’t know that it was going to be so successful. When the new Twin Peaks was coming out, I posted some shots of me on set of [the original] Twin Peaks. I think they got more ‘likes’ faster than anything I’ve ever posted, and I was shocked. It was shocking the amount of interest in that show all these years later. I had no idea that there was such an interest in it.

Galyn and Victoria Catlin in Twin Peaks.

Adam: It must be a pretty pleasing feeling to have something like that. You do something, and then you keep working and doing other things and you kind of put it to one side, but then it’s still there all these years later.
Galyn: It’s great because you realise, Oh wow, people were watching. Just before I got on this call, I saw somebody was watching an old episode of Twin Peaks and they took a screenshot and tweeted it to me, “Galyn, there you are!” You do these things and then you forget.

Adam: From Twin Peaks you then got Storyville as a savvy, street-smart escort.
Galyn: I enjoyed that. Mark Frost put me through the audition process a little bit. I remember that I had to really work on that. We shot in New Orleans, or as my character would say, “N’Orlns”. I loved it because I had to really work on the accent. When I have a break in shooting, I always like to stand and talk to the grips or, you know, the guys behind the scene, and the local people from wherever I’m shooting. Then I’ll get some real feedback on how my accent is. They said, “Yeah, it’s good. It sounds authentic. You’re doing a good job”, so then I was like, OK, good. I want to get it from the real people.
Adam: You must have a thing for accents. You have the very natural Italian accent, and the very natural New Orleans accent.
Galyn: I love doing accents. I’m actually going to go to an improv workshop tonight, and I’ll try and do a bunch of accents, yeah.

Adam: In Storyville, New Orleans is really kind of a character in its own right, and there’s definitely the Mark Frost ‘stamp’ on that film. At one point, Piper Laurie’s character says, “Down in New Orleans, the past isn’t dead; it isn’t even the past”. So, it kind of has that very rich characterisation to it.
Galyn: It was the first time I had ever been down there. I got to be down there for a while, and on my days off, I’d go walk around. Whenever I’m on location and I have days off, I always go explore. The whole place is so rich. We were in a great place – environment and atmosphere – to shoot the film. And the food – the grits! I went out to this little breakfast place and had these grits, the southern way they do it. Oh, I loved it. And the music. I’d walk down Bourbon Street and then just wander into these little places, and this incredible music was playing. People always told me to be careful because I was always very adventurous, but I always would just keep a low key and just kind of walk into places. It was incredible, the music and the food and the people. I loved it.

Adam: I’d love to go. That’s one of those places I imagine that kind of makes you feel something. The lead was James Spader.
Galyn: James Spader, that’s right, and Joanne Whalley-Kilmer.
Adam: And then Jason Robards was in it as well.
Galyn: That’s right, exactly. The film was so much fun, even though the character was small. When I’ve watched the scene once in a while of me in the courtroom sitting there, the reason I love it is because I know I was having such a good time. It was so much fun. Everybody was just great and giving and supportive. Jason, he – everybody was just great. I had so much enjoyable time on set. It’s one of my most favourite places to be. I’m always trying to get back to being on set because I just have so much fun, always.

Galyn takes the stand in Storyville.

Adam: Is there different preparation for a small role like that, or the role that you had in Judgment Night around that time, or is it a fairly similar process no matter the size of the role?
Galyn: For me, it’s similar because you’re portraying the human being. You get a lot of details from the script and then because of my creativity of being an artist, my imagination will automatically start to fill in ideas and choices about the character. I’ll start filling in, No, no, maybe not that. Maybe she’s that way or maybe she, and then I’ll decide, Yeah, that’s what it was, she was raised by her mother and then the father left, or no, she was raised by two parents, then I’ll start saying, OK, yeah that will be it. Sometimes I’ll get really specific, OK, her favourite colour – it’s fun, that creativity just to create this person, this human being, and then just to play in that field. But it’s pretty much the same process, no matter how big or small. At least it is for me.

Adam: I was talking to an actor about this recently because I do work on empathy and how we take other people’s perspectives. I guess that’s really the height of acting, isn’t it? It’s really getting into someone else’s skin as much as you can.
Galyn: I always feel the compassion that I have for people and world events when I watch the news, I attribute it partially to being an artist and being an actor because you have to have empathy for a character no matter who they are, if you’re going to portray them, so it really teaches you a lot of empathy. I agree.

Adam: I really liked the role you had in Judgment Night with Emilio Estevez where you’re playing this woman that those men who come into her apartment have a very particular perception of who she is based on where she lives and whatever else, but she’s not like that. She might be living in what they would see as I guess a ‘dump’ of a building, for want of a better term, but she’s paying the rent, she’s looking after her daughter, she’s looking after her sister or whoever it was. I thought that was a really interesting role for you.
Galyn: That’s true, the stereotype. I mean when they first come upon me, I’m afraid of them and they’re afraid of me in a way. We’re both kind of like wild animals, kind of trying to sniff the other one out, sense if it’s dangerous. But you’re right, if you go to certain parts of Los Angeles that are, quote-unquote, “urban ghetto areas”, and you drive in those areas – I’ve been in a lot of those areas because I have a grandfather who used to own a tyre shop, he just got rid of a tyre shop in East LA – and it is, there’s a lot of that run-down part of the community, but then you have houses with grandmothers and aunts and people and they’re doing their jobs and you think, Well people don’t see this, that it’s a mixture of all of those things.
Adam: That’s a very good point because they were like the well-to-do, whatever, they kind of thought that they were the ones who should be afraid of other people, but it’s interesting it kind of went the other way with her. She didn’t know who the hell these people were.
Galyn: Right. Living in an area where she was, where there is a lot of violence and there’s a lot of betrayal and there is a lot of violence, you would be, if they came up – even if they didn’t look like they were from her neighbourhood or area – you know you’ve got the guys coming up, she had a bat already there to go take out her trash. She was used to living in, you know having to live in, defending herself and being prepared because of violence in the area.

Adam: In 1994 you got your first regular role in a scripted TV series with M.A.N.T.I.S. What was your experience on that?
Galyn: Well, we shot that up in Vancouver, so I went up to live in Vancouver. I love Vancouver. It’s so beautiful up there, the water and the air. Well, one of my co-stars, Christopher Gartin, the young guy on the show – it’s so cool, he and I just connected on Instagram.
Adam: Oh, fantastic!
Galyn: Yeah. We hadn’t talked in a while, so that’s great. Roger Rees passed away not too long ago, the English actor. He was such a sweetheart, and then Carl Lumbly, gosh, he was great to work with, Adam. I lost contact with him and I’ve tried to reconnect with him, but I just haven’t been able to yet. That was a TV series, so lots of hours, lots of days.

Carl Lumbly and Galyn in M.A.N.T.I.S.

Adam: There was an interview in one of the papers at the time, where you said you liked filming there because of the relaxed people, the clean air, the clean water, and the trees, which is probably your Hawaii upbringing as well coming in there.
Galyn: Yeah that’s true, I always appreciate that. Bryce Zabel, one of the producers, and Sam Raimi, that was their baby at first. I enjoyed it because I love any – it’s like sci-fi, even though my character was a detective, I was still involved in a sci-fi show, so that was great. They don’t re-run that show in the States anywhere, but it does re-run in parts of Europe and different parts of the world. I always like to be connected to sci-fi, and it was wonderful being on a series because all these guest actors got to come in, so you got to work with all these different extraordinary guest actors, which was a blast.

With Roger Rees and Carl Lumbly in M.A.N.T.I.S.

Adam: Was Sam Raimi involved in it when you came on, or he had kind of created it and sort of left?
Galyn: He had kind of created it and left. I don’t really know the backstory. Well, you know they re-cast my character and then that’s when I got the part. But then Sam Raimi, I guess went on to other things. I don’t really know the backstory on what happened. Kim Manners directed quite a few episodes. I found out recently that he passed away. He was involved in The X-Files. When I think of Kim Manners, he was like a mad scientist when he was directing.

Adam: That’s a great visual, I love it. It’s interesting because around the same time [as M.A.N.T.I.S.], there was Scully from The X-Files who, similar to Leora, was this strong scientific woman – maybe not scientific in the case of your character, but sceptical voice of reason.
Galyn: Yes, because my character was a detective. We came on the second year of The X-Files. We aired before them [on Friday nights] during their second season. We thought this show was going to keep going because the ratings were doing well, but there was something with the studio that they decided to cancel it. My character was kind of the Lois Lane to the superhero, kind of sceptical, kind of wanting to really have the facts and details, the scientific proof, and solve the crime.

With Chris Gartin in M.A.N.T.I.S.

Adam: We’re going to talk about a lot of your science fiction work. I think what I really liked about that show is that even though the scripts went for that kind of science fiction, it still dealt with very topical issues like all good science fiction does. For example, there was the pharmaceutical episode where the kids had been given some sort of drug to make them more attentive or smarter, or whatever else, but it was having all these side effects. It was that whole idea of drugging up the population. Then there were stories about biological warfare. I think that was a very appealing part of that program. I don’t know if you remember, but towards the end it started integrating a lot more fantasy into well.
Galyn: You probably remember better than I do. [Laughs]. It probably did. You are probably right. I’m just trying to remember. I may have seen some of the episodes, but I don’t know if I even saw every episode. I think when they aired maybe I saw them. I remember the show from reading the scripts. I saw recently on YouTube a scene and I was like, I don’t even remember doing that scene, when my character goes to a psychologist or a counsellor, so it was interesting watching that. It may have gone into that [fantasy]. I don’t remember, exactly. I bet you talk to a lot of actors like that. [Laughs].

Adam: [Laughs] Yeah, they’ll ask you, “I don’t remember that at all. Was I good in that scene? I hope I was”.
Galyn: [Laughs].

As Korena in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Adam: While we’re talking about science fiction, this probably fits in quite well. You had a very sympathetic role as Tony Todd’s wife in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Once again, the good thing about science fiction is that it can be quite topical, and I like what it said about healing, or in this case not healing, from the grief of him losing his father. It was also a very clever script because it had that touch of the reclusive author, the whole J. D. Salinger-type thing. Do you have any stories from that show?
Galyn: I’m trying to remember. I know one thing, first of all, I was a Star Trek fan, my brother and my sisters and I watching the original with William Shatner. So, when I was cast on Star Trek, I was like, Yay! It was almost kind of surreal, so that was exciting right away. I was at a Star Trek convention in Vegas, it was almost two years ago, and people came up to me because I didn’t know that that episode that I did of that series is like one of the most recognised episodes of the series. I had no idea, and people came up to me who said, what you’re saying, the way the story was told, it really moved people and touched people. The story, it really meant a lot to a lot of people. I knew it was different than, you know, Star Trek is that series, all the series, you know there’s always the sci-fi and then there’s the battles and all that, but then they always touch into different parts of the human emotion and human experience, and so that episode really touched on that. I found out later that it was so moving to so many people because at the convention the Trekkies kept coming up to me and having me sign things and thanking me for coming, and that episode, they would tell me it really touched their hearts. That’s when I really learned about it. When we were shooting it, I knew the scenes were meaningful, but then I learned afterwards how much.

Adam: You had some really beautiful scenes in being able to draw out that character of the wife who’s very, she’s very supportive of her husband and understands in some ways what it must be like for him. When he’s meeting his father again for that first time, you can just see how nervous you are for him because you’re so concerned for him. It was really beautifully done. I’m not surprised to hear that it is one – I’ve read that quite a bit, that it’s one of the top episodes for people who like Deep Space Nine.
Galyn: You know, I was going to say, Tony Todd – whenever I’m in LA, we keep talking about getting together for lunch and it just never happens, so he and I were messaging yesterday, I think. I said, “I’m in LA”, and we keep talking about “OK, let’s get together for lunch”. I’d be curious to ask him, I’m curious as to what his experience was on that shoot, what his impression was of that scene and those scenes in that episode, because I’m sure he has a perspective, and he’s probably asked all the time, too. Yeah, now that you bring that up, when I meet with him, I’m going to ask him about his perception.

With Avery Brooks and Tony Todd in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Adam: You also appeared in Voyager, as well, as Nori.
Galyn: Yes.
Adam: Was that a different sort of experience working on that program? You mostly worked with Jennifer Lien and Anthony Crivello.
Galyn: I remember my outfit because my costume is always very important to me, and my outfit was very kind of confining and very structured. It was a completely different type of character; the story line was completely different. I remember the sets – I’m picturing it. It was such a different character because when I was on Deep Space Nine, she was just so much more nurturing in that mothering kind of person, and this character was so different. She [Nori] was kind of in a powerless position.

Galyn in Star Trek: Voyager.

Adam: When you say that, I’m thinking of when you played Helen of Troy on Xena and your take on that character. To some extent, she was very powerless, until she finally tries to find out who she is towards the end of the episode.
Galyn: Yeah, that’s right. There’s a scene – I actually put it on my reel – where I’m yelling, and the character is saying, “Don’t you realise what you’ve done? You’ve killed your own brother and ruined Troy. And for what?”, and she speaks out and uses her voice, so there is a transformation that happens there. By the way, l loved the costumes. I loved what I got to wear in that one.

Galyn as Helen of Troy, with Lucy Lawless in Xena: Warrior Princess.

Adam: And they were fun programs – Hercules, as well. Were they fun programs to do: Xena and Hercules?
Galyn: Yes, those were fun. First of all, I got to be flown down to New Zealand because we shot in New Zealand, so they flew me down to New Zealand. Those were Rob Tapert and Sam Raimi. Lucy [Lawless] was great, and Kevin Sorbo’s a jokester, he likes to play jokes. Those were fun because the costumes – it’s so over the top, it’s such make believe, but when you’re in a scene, you’re really taking it seriously as an actor. But yes – it was almost like you were dressing up for Halloween, it’s like a make believe, like children, you’re really playing.

When I shot Hercules, Anson Williams from Happy Days was the director. I saw him at the Star Trek convention when I was there, and we were talking about that episode. And I remember Kevin Sorbo we were on set and I played, On Hercules, I played an Egyptian princess and I had to hold a cat. I’m allergic to cats, but I was able to do the scene quick enough, so it didn’t bother me that badly. I remember Kevin saying some joke and we were joking. I barely knew him, and he started chasing me – we were chasing each other around the set laughing and stuff, and then we started shooting again. He was sweet. And Lucy, somehow, I needed a ride somewhere. I don’t know why I needed transportation and she was like, “I’ll give you a ride”, and so she and her daughter, who’s probably an adult by now, gave me a ride, and she was just a sweetheart and gave me a ride, and we barely knew each other.  It was just fun. I had a great time down in New Zealand. I took my grandmother with me, so we went exploring. We were down in Auckland. Yeah, it was great.

Galyn in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys.
With Kevin Sorbo in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys.

Adam: You’ve done better than I have. Obviously, Australia is very close to New Zealand and I’ve never been, so that’s another place that needs to be added to the list.
Galyn: That’s right! You’ve got to go.
Adam: And those shows were very big down here when they were on – they were kind of staples of the Saturday night schedule. That’s great to hear that they were fun to do. They’ve got quite a cult following. Star Trek has obviously got a massive following. Like we were talking about with Deep Space Nine and fans thinking that your episode is one of the best, one of the favourite episodes of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air fans is the episode you did: “Boxing Helena”. Were you a fan of that show when you got that role? Had you watched it?
Galyn: Yeah, I had watched that show. Of course, Will Smith, he had been doing music before, and I liked him. Everybody loved him. I went to NBC Studios out in Burbank to audition for that. I’m trying to remember – what happened in the room? There was a producer and a director, and the reading went really well, and then I got it.

It’s television and you have studio audience, so we rehearse all week, you know Monday through Thursday, and then rehearsal Friday, and then tape Friday afternoon, early evening. The thing that was great about working with Will is that he liked improv, so he goes off the script. You know, we have the script, but then we’ll be in the middle of a scene, and if a creative idea – as an artist, if you have the opportunity – he would go off the script and play with ideas or change something during the scene. So that’s what was great about shooting that.

We had a scene in the boxing ring. He and I have a scene, and so he started improvising and so I started improvising, and I made up some part of that scene. I think the “bwak bwak bwak” – the chicken thing – I made up that. I made up some part of the scene, and they kept it. It was fun working with him. And I knew it was a good episode. You know when you asked if you know – and I don’t always know, but I remember before we taped, he called everybody, the whole cast had to come into his dressing room and we all got in a circle and we did like a focus, energy positive. I don’t know if you want to call it a prayer or whatever, kind of “Everyone focus”, and he said, and whichever other regular on the cast – I don’t remember – said, “Oh, we’ve got a good episode. This is a good one”. Because they do so many, but they knew it was a good one. It was a funny episode.

Will Smith and Galyn in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (Photo: IMDb).

Adam: Do you like the chance to do that improv within a scripted program, TV show?
Galyn: I liked it. If the writers are open and are confident enough to let you kind of play around with it because it enhances the story and the jokes, it makes it so much fun.

Adam: I imagine that a lot of being able to improv also comes from having the preparation, knowing what your script is, knowing who the character is, so that you can kind of go in a direction that might be unexpected but makes sense from the point of view of the story and the characters.
Galyn: Yes, exactly. You don’t want to veer off the storyline or veer off the character, you want to stay within those parameters. It’s like I’m a dancer, I have ballet and I have modern, I have jazz, I have all these techniques, but when you perform you kind of throw in your own flair and your creative artistry comes through, so it’s the same. You have the structure of the script and you have the idea of the character. You play within that.

Adam: I love the way you’ve described it, that use of self, even within a technique you’re still using yourself and what you know and what you bring to it. Let’s talk a little more about science fiction and fantasy because you’ve appeared in quite a lot of science fiction, and I know you said you quite like it. Is that a case of you being asked to play those roles, or they appeal to you, so you audition for them, or something else?
Galyn: It just seemed to kind of happen. I think one of the reasons is because of the way I look. If you audition, they call it “ethnically ambiguous” some of the time, and so it seemed like in the sci-fi fantasy genre – I seemed to fit in there and it was acceptable, kind of this ethnically ambiguous. That’s what I’m thinking, Adam, is what happened, but I like it, I like the sci-fi fantasy stuff.

Adam: One of the shows you did that we should talk about is Stargate SG-1. Like any good science fiction, your episode dealt with very human themes. You had the lead role in that. You played Kendra, who’s a healer, but she’s been ostracised because she was taken over by one of the Goa’uld. I felt it was really interesting that Kendra speaks of being restored to her true self and what she used to be, her voice within and facing fears, and there’s a whole lot of that sort of metaphor and allegory. There was an allegory with race a little bit, in that she sought to separate herself from those who had done wrong. I thought that was a great role for you. Did you enjoy doing that one?
Galyn: I did, and I think that’s one of the things that’s so great about sci-fi, fantasy, that kind of thing, because on so many projects that I’ve done there’s always this, there’s either commentary, or it seems – yeah, there’s a lot of delving into deep human conditions. I just love it.

I had a great time [on Stargate SG-1]. We shot that in Vancouver. It just felt like it was like a dream come true in a way, just being able to have the character and tell that story and have that kind of character with that background and that dialogue. The director, Brad Turner, he was great. And the actors – everybody was nice and kind. As I talk to you about all of these, I realise, Wow, how grateful I am that I’ve worked with – I’ve always had such good experiences. Everybody was so welcoming.

I loved my costume, by the way.
Adam: [Laughs].
Galyn: I loved the dress. I’ve got a Polaroid of me standing outside the costume wardrobe trailer in my dress, holding up my arms. I got to have the cape – OK, so I loved my outfit [laughs].
Adam: [Laughs].
Galyn: It’s always important. My sisters, some of the first things they’ll say, “So how’s your costume?” [Laughs].
Adam: [Laughs] I love that.
Galyn: That was an incredible costume.

Galyn in Stargate SG-1.

Adam: When you come onto an existing program, do you generally find that the actors tend to be quite welcoming to their well-oiled machine?
Galyn: They usually are. I can think in my mind of one – there’s probably been more – I can remember an episode of a show that I worked on and they weren’t, but I won’t mention – I’ll always say the positives because I won’t mention the ones where it wasn’t. I don’t know, it wasn’t super welcoming, but usually it is. Usually, I find that it is. I’m real open and not standoffish, and I’m like, “OK, I’m a professional artist, we’re all professional artists”. Like when I worked on Colony recently, Josh Holloway and Sarah Wayne Callies, right away, because I met them at lunch, they were like, “Hi, welcome, sit with us”.

Adam: That’s really great. I like that focus on those experiences, and let’s forget the other ones that weren’t so fantastic.
Galyn: Yeah, yeah.
Adam: It’s funny you talk about the costumes, as well, because a friend of mine, Donna [Loren] who worked a lot in the ‘60s, when she was quite young – I ask her sometimes, “Do you remember doing this show, or this song, or whatever, and she’s like, “I don’t, but what was I wearing? That might help me remember”.
Galyn: Right! [Laughs].

Adam: You took a bit of a break, or you scaled down from work, around the early-mid 2000s. Was there something that led up to doing that?
Galyn: Well, Adam, you call that a marriage and a divorce.
Adam: Ah, that’ll do it every time.
Galyn: That’ll do it, Adam! [Laughs]. Yeah, I got sort of sidetracked. I got into a little bit of some challenge, challenges. I mean, I never stopped. I continued to take classes to a point, and I continued to dance, but everything kind of got really challenging at times, so that’s when I kind of had that break. I didn’t mean to, it just kind of happened.

Adam: I speak to a lot of actors who often take a break, for lots of reasons. I guess in your case it was just that kind of other things were going on and it’s not necessarily that you mean to take a break, but you just move into another part and things happen; and sometimes if things are a bit chaotic, or whatever else, your attention is sort of elsewhere.
Galyn: That’s pretty much what happened.

Adam: As you said, during that time you were still going to class and so on. Were you in Hawaii around this time?
Galyn: I was in Los Angeles a part of the time and then I was in Hawaii part of the time. I was in Los Angeles and just got sort of sidetracked into a whole different kind of journey for a while, and then I was in Hawaii for a little while. I’ve been slowly kind of getting back into the industry, and I’ve started to get some traction again, which is good.

Adam: Fantastic. From a practical point of view, is it difficult once you’ve been out of it for a few years to get back into it?
Galyn: Well, it can be because you have to have some current credits to really kind of get in there. My resume is extensive, so getting representation is not usually difficult. I actually just signed with a new team, Media Artists Group, which is great. It’s funny that I’ve started my social media pages, Instagram and Twitter, and I’m on Facebook, too, and that’s where I’ve been contacted by different people in the entertainment industry.

Adam: You were on the last episode of Parks and Recreation. What was that like?
Galyn: It’s so funny how sometimes things just kind of happen. I just got a call, “Galyn, you want to do this?”, and I said, “Yes”. I had a small scene – I hadn’t done anything in a while. Being an improv – I’m part of the main company of a group called IFTP, Improv for the People, in Los Angeles – so if they say Amy Poehler, I’m going to say, “Of course”. You can YouTube and watch her do improv, and she’s just phenomenal, so I was like, “Yes!”.

I had a little speech on there, but my interaction was with Amy, and she was great. I remember the scene we had, we didn’t talk about it, but there was a cue that I had to give her in there, and it was so cool because I know what she was expecting as an improv artist. She’s a genius comedian, a genius improv artist. When I told the other people at IFTP [about the role with] Amy Poehler, everyone was just like, “Wow”. She’s held in high esteem as an improv artist.

Galyn with Ray Katz and Brian Nelson, Improv for the People (Photo: Facebook).

Adam: It’s interesting what you say about people tracking you down on social media. I think even David Lynch put it out to social media to try to find Everett McGill when he was doing [the new] Twin Peaks and couldn’t find him anywhere. What I particularly like about what you post is, like you said, there’s the film stuff, there’s the TV stuff, but then there’s a whole lot of other things. You strike me as someone who’s very committed to self-reflection and development. Is that something that you’ve actively pursued or is that something that came over time investigating different, I guess, modalities, for want of a better term.
Galyn: I think it’s probably because of my parents and their background. I mean, of course I love having success and being prosperous and being well, but at the same time I also want my piece of mind, and I want to be able in this wild, wild world, to find, you know, so I am a voice, what I put out there, what I share is something that maybe helps someone else also be happy or create some peace or some beauty. I consider myself a performance artist, a dancer, so I like to do different poetry, images, and I post them on those platforms.

Part of the missing years around not acting, I spent much time with the Lakota and the Diné and the Hopi, different Native American tribes, and so in that time when I wasn’t acting, I was spending a lot of time doing different ceremonies and different practices and different teachings. That’s one of the things I was doing. Images of beauty in the Native American – there’s a saying, the “beauty way”, it’s the beauty way, so anything that I can do to bring beauty into the world into the world, and compassion, I think it’s a practice.

Adam: And you also teach and work with children. How has that been?
Galyn: Yes, I’ve done a nice amount of that. In those years when I wasn’t acting, I taught quite a few workshops all over the Los Angeles area. I’ve done dance, I’ve done theatre. It’s all arts education. I’m starting to put together all the footage – I have so much footage of working with youth. And that’s part of my heart. I have another project I’m developing. It’s kind of a book, it’s based on the – I don’t know if you know from the ‘70s, it was called Free to be You and Me.
Adam: Of course.
Galyn: Marlo Thomas did it, it’s based on that format and it’s really good. I’ve got so much material already compiled. But working with young people from, you know, I’ve worked with gang members, probation kids. I’ve worked at Hollygrove where Marilyn Monroe was when she was young. I’ve worked with wealthy kids and poor kids, all over the LA area, and I love it. I’m good in the room with them, and I think, from what I’ve learned, I’ve helped a lot of young people and they’ve helped me, too. I enjoy it.

Adam: That’s fantastic and I love that idea that you get as much from them as they get from you. And you do see that, the kind of effect that you can have on people. Sometimes with what I do, I write, it goes somewhere, and it disappears for how ever many months and by the time it comes back it’s almost that delayed gratification. But when you’re in the moment in a classroom or somewhere else with people, you kind of see people “getting it”, and they get it in that moment and you get that feedback, sometimes quite immediately.
Galyn: It’s so true because I’m in there for arts education, but what I was taught from a lot of the arts organisations is that what I’m bringing in there is important, but in the present moment whatever is happening with the young person in there, whatever issue or whatever’s going on with them, that is more important than anything.

I’ve taught little ones all the way up to high school. The population that I didn’t know would be receptive to me is these high school boys. I thought, Oh gosh, I could never teach high school boys, but I taught in the last two years and, Adam, they were some of my favourites. I taught at an education centre and these young men, African American, Latino mostly, they just were so receptive. I had such a great rapport with them. Man, we had a lot of fun. If you have something interesting, they’re just sponges to learn and want to improve. They have so many dreams, and you’re just helping them believe and bringing out their potential that has to be cultivated, it has to be guided in the right direction I just really loved working with them. I didn’t know that I had the ability and it was just great to do that.

Adam: That’s so interesting what you say about getting them to believe because I think sometimes when you come from parents or families who have given you that, when as you’ve grown up they believe in you, they make you believe in yourself, you kind of think that must be the way that everyone has it. But there’s so many people who never had that foundation to begin with, and so it really has to be nurtured in them and treated as something important and special.
Galyn: It’s true because if I stand in a workshop and I ask, “Everyone raise your hand if you have someone in your life that’s telling you you’re stupid or making sly comments, or [telling you] that you are not smart, you’re stupid. Raise your hand if you have someone in your life like that”. Usually everyone raises their hands. So, to be that voice; it was wonderful.

Adam: Dance is still a very important part of your life. How has your identity as a dancer evolved over time, has it evolved, has it changed?
Galyn: I took two classes yesterday, that was three hours involved. I did a lot of Brazilian samba and then dancing the different Brazilian styles. Dance, oh my gosh, Adam, the thing that is so great because I’ve danced for so long, going to the different cultures and different styles of dance from the ballet to the modern, I did some tap, into jazz, I took a little hula, but I’m not considered a hula dancer. You know, when I was in Israel, I went into dance class; when I’m in Vancouver, I go into dance class, wherever I go – when I was in New Zealand, I jumped into a dance class. Wednesday night, I’ll probably go take a West African dance class, Thursday night, I might take a contemporary. Just to be able to express, it’s just – I’m trying to think of the question. I mean, it’s always been good, and it always gets better and better. It’s so fulfilling, and if I’m down or not feeling good, if I walk into a good dance class I will walk out, and I will be transformed.
Adam: It’s almost like, “Build her a dance studio and she will come”
Galyn: Yes! [Laughs].

On set filming The Wrong Crush (Photo: Facebook).

Adam: Acting wise, is there anything you can talk about that’s upcoming or in development at the moment?
Galyn: Yeah, I shot another TV movie. I play a psychologist. It’s called The Wrong Crush. I’m talking to my agents because I’m meeting with directors right now.  I’m meeting with a director and then a producer next week. Because of improv, I really want to do some character work, so that’s what I’m putting out there. I’ve quite a few characters developed. My management asked me to put the characters on tape because I’ve got quite a few. So, I’m meeting with some directors and producers, and we’ll see what happens.

Adam: I look forward to seeing some of it.
Galyn: Yes, and in terms of some of the projects I’m working on, my youth project, I want to complete that. I think young people around the world will really appreciate it. I think it will speak to them.
Adam: Thank you so much. I’ve had such a good time talking to you.

Galyn in Maui (Photo: Facebook).

Galyn can be found on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and at her website.

Dancing Through Life – Part 1

When Galyn Görg answers the phone, she is in Maui. Owing to the time difference between South Australia and Hawaii, while I’m having my morning coffee, Galyn is tucking into a late lunch in between appointments. As we begin to talk about her younger years on the Big Island and then Oahu, more than once I am reminded of where she is. I can hear birds chirping in the background and it seems like it’s a splendid weather. You know how you can sometimes just tell it’s a sunny day, even over the phone?

More than the location, however, Galyn seems to embody a lot of the spirit of Hawaii, as described to me by friends who lived there for many years. It is fitting that at the end of our first conversation, when we’ve just discussed her role in Point Break, which is only about a decade into her more than 30-year acting and dance career, that she bids me goodbye with the Hawaiian, “Aloha”. Like the many meanings of that word, she is open, welcoming, generous of spirit, creative, compassionate and, indeed, it is a joy to spend time in conversation with her. When we pick up for out next conversation, she is now in Los Angeles, her other base, meeting with producers and directors. Wherever Galyn is in the world as she takes on roles in film and TV, she’ll likely be seeking out a dance class or somewhere to improv, and she tells me that she actually plans to do both in the coming days. It’s no surprise why. There’s a clip on YouTube of Galyn after one of her early performances on the Italian megahit variety TV series, Fantastico. The host, Pippo Baudo, asks the breathless Galyn, who had just finished a dance number, “Senti, Galyn, tu quando canti e quando balli, che cosa sente?” In English, he is asking, “Listen, Galyn, when you sing and when you dance, what do you feel?” Galyn replies, “Mi sento felice, una grande gioia, voglia di vivere”. The translation says it all: “I feel happy, a great joy, a desire to live”.

It was with dance that Galyn first began her foray into performance. Her mother, Gwyn, a dancer and model, introduced her to dance classes when the family was living in Hawaii. She was exposed to a range of styles, which has held her in good stead on TV and in her films. When her mother and father, filmmaker Alan Görg, moved the family – her brother Carter, and sisters Gentry, Sunny, and Tagi – to Los Angles, Galyn won competitive dance scholarships, including to the legendary Dupree Dance Academy. Along with sister, Gentry, Galyn was among 51 students to receive scholarships sponsored by the Professional Dancers Society. According to a Variety article (6 March 1981) detailing the presentation of the scholarships, these dancers “were selected from a field of 700 auditioning and competing”.

Galyn in Italy (Adam Gerace collection).

From there, Galyn began appearing in acting roles in TV and film, often playing a dancer, as well as music videos and commercials, including ZZ Top’s video for “Sharp Dressed Man”. One of her first big roles in film, as Lynka in Cannon Film’s post-apocalyptic tale, America 3000, saw the barely 20-year-old Galyn travel to work in Israel, an experience that she loved. Further travel was on the cards for Galyn when in 1985 she won a regular spot as a dancer on an Italian TV series, RAI’s (the national broadcaster) ratings juggernaut, Fantastico. Paired with American dancer Steve LaChance, the chemistry on (and offscreen) was apparent quickly, and a star dancing team were born. After the success of Fantastico, which topped the season’s ratings and regularly took around 45-50% of the viewing audience each week (the finale, alone, drew an over 60% share of the audience, with almost 23,000,000 viewers), Galyn and Steve went on to another Italian variety series, SandraRaimondo Show, hosted by the legendary television husband and wife act of Sandra Mondaini and Raimondo Vianello. Capitalising further on their popularity, Galyn and Steve starred in the scripted Dance Academy (aka Body Beat), an Italian-American co-production set at a classical ballet academy with – thanks to a new teacher played by Tony Fields – a modern jazz flair.

Galyn and Steve LaChance (Photo: Galyn Görg Official Website).

Stateside, Galyn was busy on TV and still more film. One of those roles was starring in Living the Blues, written and produced by her parents, directed by her father, and with her siblings also working on various aspects of the film. In Living the Blues, Galyn is Mana Brown, who is running figuratively (and, in dance sequences, sometimes literally) from her life on the wrong side of the tracks and a grim future she envisions for herself. She meets the upper-crust Abel Wilson (Michael Kerr), and the star-crossed lovers navigate the disapproval of his parents and Mana’s mother, played by Gwyn Görg, while being counselled by Uncle Sam Brown, played by legendary Blues musician Sam Taylor. In dance, music, and poetry, their story unfolds. In a review of the film in Variety (30 August, 1989) Galyn was described as “an appealing screen presence”, with her work in Dance Academy also praised.

Galyn as Mana in Living the Blues.

Galyn moved easily between leading and supporting roles, and the new decade of the ‘90s brought parts in the hits Point Break as Patrick Swayze’s girlfriend in beautifully-realised scenes on the beach at night, and RoboCop 2, as Cain’s (Tom Noonan) increasingly horrified accomplice, Angie. There was also Judgment Night starring Emilio Estevez, Cuba Gooding Jr., Stephen Dorff, and Jeremy Piven, Storyville starring James Spader, and a role on Twin Peaks as Nancy O’Reilly, Blackie’s (Victoria Catlin) nefarious sister and Jean Renault’s (Michael Parks) lover.

Galyn with Michael Parks in Twin Peaks.

Science fiction has formed a fair chunk of Galyn’s career. She starred as detective Lt. Leora Maxwell on Fox Television’s underrated – and like RoboCop 2, I would argue, still topical – science fiction-crime drama M.A.N.T.I.S., alongside Carl Lumbly, Roger Rees, and Christopher Gartin. Filmed in Vancouver, Galyn relished the natural environment there, which is not surprising given her Hawaiian upbringing.

Galyn as Lt. Leora Maxwell in M.A.N.T.I.S.

In quick succession, she also had plum guest roles on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, and Stargate SG-1. When I say plum, her episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is regularly ranked among the best of the series by fans and critics, alike. In that episode, “The Visitor” she plays Korena, the wife of a now adult Jake (played by Tony Todd). In one particularly poignant scene, Korena is all hope and nerves for her husband as his long-lost father Sisko (Avery Brooks) appears briefly at the couple’s house. Stargate SG-1 gave Galyn the chance to play the lead guest role as Kendra, an ostracised healer who must confront her past and face her fears in the episode “Thor’s Hammer”. Galyn delved into the lighter side of Greek mythology when she took on roles in fantasy shows Xena: Warrior Princess as the oppressed, but ultimately resilient Helen of Troy, and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys as Egyptian Princess Anuket. Often while watching her appearances in preparation of speaking with her, I would write in my notes, “Great outfit”. Wardrobe wasn’t lost on Galyn, either, and while discussing her roles, we also talk about some of those wonderful costumes.

With Jennifer Lien in Star Trek: Voyager.

Many of Galyn’s movies and TV shows are in regular rotation, and with an extensive body of work (we cover so much of her career, and still can’t fit everything in), many may have not realised that she took time away from the screen in the 2000s. During that time, Galyn engaged with Native American teachings (her mother has Native American ancestry) and immersed herself in arts programs for young people. Her role as teacher and mentor is one that she relishes, along with dancing and improv. And … Galyn is again appearing in a string of films and TV series, which is a very good thing for us.

As Kendra in Stargate SG-1.

When talking with Galyn, it comes across that she loves what she does, is at home on a set, and she is able to form good relationships with her co-workers. I don’t think this comes down to Galyn focusing her recollections only on positive on-set experiences, but instead from that openness and compassion she displays when talking with me during our extensive and enjoyable chat.

In Part 1 of our interview, Galyn and I speak about her early life in Hawaii and LA, being a dancer at the height of the Fame and Flashdance dance craze, starring on Fantastico, her roles in TV and film during this time, and starting out the ‘90s with RoboCop 2 and Point Break.

Adam: It’s been a long time coming.
Galyn: Yes, it has. We’ve been trying to do this for quite a while.

Adam: I’m so pleased to speak to you. How are you today?
Galyn: I am very well. I am very well, just busy, but doing pretty well.

Adam: Thank you for taking the time to speak to me. I guess we can pretty much get started. Well, I guess to begin with, when did you start learning to dance?
Galyn: My first dance class was on the Big Island, they call it here the Big Island of Hawaii. In the town of Hilo, my mother went to take in a West African dance class, and that was my first dance class and I went in and oh, I was in love – that was it.

Adam: How old were you then?
Galyn: I must’ve been about ten, eleven, ten.

Adam: So you started with that dance class and then from there you went on to learn other styles?
Galyn: Yes, then we moved to Oahu and then I began taking ballet with my first ballet teacher. Her name was Helen, Miss Chun I think her name was. I loved ballet, I loved West African. So, I was doing that for a little while, and then as I got older, I tried many other styles of dance.

Adam: Maybe you were too young at the time to think about this, but do you think there were clear divides between those students who learned ballet or learned jazz or learned other styles, or could there be that mixture?
Galyn: For me there was the mixture because after we left Oahu we moved back to Los Angeles, my parents moved us back to Los Angeles, and I was awarded a scholarship. I auditioned and got a scholarship at a studio in Hollywood. It was called Dupree Dance Academy. It was the top studio and we had to take different, we took different styles. We had to take jazz and ballet and I guess you’d call it kind of a funk hip hop was just coming around.  Then I eventually went into a lot Brazilian, I did samba, then I did a lot of West African.  I love them all for different reasons and they’re all challenging for different reasons, but I have loved every one of them dearly.

Adam: When you did move back with your family to LA was that because of your father’s work as a documentary filmmaker?
Galyn: Yeah, that was partially, because my parents, you know, my mother is Black, and my father is White, and they had met in the Civil Rights Movement in Los Angeles, they had met in an organisation called CORE, it was Congress of Racial Equality. My parents had met in that group, and so they were very active in the Civil Rights Movement, with Martin Luther King and everything that was happening, and they wanted to go back to Los Angeles because they wanted to make sure that we were exposed to the arts more and they were exposed to, just more exposed.  And then my father wanted to do more films.
Adam: Last night I was watching one of his documentaries that’s made its way onto YouTube, Felicia.
Galyn: Yes.
Adam: Fantastic, and of course that’s been put into the National Film Registry, so amazing work. Where did you go to school in LA?
Galyn: The first place I went to was called SMASH, and that was Santa Monica Alternative School House. It was an alternative school meaning that the classes were very small, arts were very emphasised, it was like, you know, you have a classroom and there’s couches you can sit in, you can get personalised attention, and your creativity is encouraged. And that’s why I actually excelled in math, which is the only place I ever excelled in math. It’s so funny – because I got so much attention, otherwise I had a really hard time with math, but it was the only place that I did well in math. And then I also went to Santa Monica High School.

Galyn (Photo: Galyn Görg Official Website).

Adam: That’s kind of funny being in such a performance-based school, alternative school, and doing so well in math. Is that where you took more interest in dance and performance?
Galyn: Yes, I think it was there and also because my mother had been dancing and modelling and very creative, and so she just kept encouraging me. I just loved it myself and I have three sisters – I have a brother also, but he wasn’t really interested in that – but my sisters were, and she just kept encouraging us. We would go see Alvin Ailey, we would go see productions and theatre, and we watched musicals all the time, of course Singing in the Rain and West Side Story.

We would see those and then they played, my mother and father, liked Blues and my dad loves Blues. That’s why he made the film Living the Blues, and my parents encouraged us in the arts, we were just always encouraged, and I wanted to be in television and film. When we lived on the Big Island of Hawaii in Hilo, my parents had a theatre group for youth, for young people, so I did quite a few plays when we were on the Big Island with the theatre group. Then on Oahu, that’s right – I’m just remembering this [laughs] – I did plays with youth theatre programs, and I loved it. I did a lot of plays on Oahu and on the Big Island. So then from the theatre there then going to Los Angeles and being involved, I started really getting involved in dance when I won my scholarship to Dupree Dance Academy.

Adam: So, you got a scholarship from Dupree, as well as other scholarships. I think I found your first mention in Variety, where they were talking about the ceremony for the Professional Dancers Society scholarships. There were some big names mentioned: Roland Dupree Juliet Prowse were judges; Debbie Reynolds, Eleanor Powell, and June Haver were at the ceremony. Do you remember going to that?
Galyn: I remember that. I remember there being celebrities and different people like that, but my focus was so on being a dancer, and so wanting to perfect the technique. I was so serious about it and the thing that I knew is because of that level of artistry and those artists involved, it was going to be a high-level experience. That’s what my mom wanted to make sure that if I was going to train, I had the best quality. I do remember that – that I knew I was in good company.

Adam: That’s interesting, that sort of mentality, that performance mentality. From early on, where even though you are surrounded by all that, it’s really on that focus of, “This is what I need to do, and this is what I’m focusing on”.
Galyn: That’s right. There’s a man, Bill Prudich, he was on scholarship at Dupree Dance Academy. He now is the Executive Director of EDGE in Hollywood. EDGE is the top dance studio. He and I were interacting on social media the other day, and I told him that the only celebrity that ever made me nervous was when I met Cyd Charisse. When I was there [at Dupree], she was the one that I was like, Oh my God [laughs].
Adam: [Laughs].
Galyn: But otherwise my parents always said, “Well, you’re an artist and anybody else, famous or not, is an artist, and when you’re creating art together then you’re all artists. You’re on the same playing field, the same level, it’s just art, you know”.
Adam: That’s a great attitude, I love that.
Galyn: Yeah.

Galyn in Italy (Photo: Galyn Görg Offical Website).

Adam: You started to appear early on in your career on TV and films that were set in dance schools or dance academies. You did Fame; I know you did at least one episode, I don’t know if you did other ones. You did Mirrors, the TV movie, and then later, Dance Academy.  In your experience of dance school or dance training, were those sorts of programs accurate reflections of your own experience?
Galyn: Um, not exactly because the intensity of where you are. When I was on scholarship at Dupree, we had to take three classes a day, so we had to take about 15 classes a week. You pretty much are eating, sleeping, drinking dance. It’s just your entire – I remember my sister and I, when we would go to sleep at night, we would try and sleep with our legs, our feet in a position to help our technique in the day time. We’d want to sleep through the night to try to have our bodies adjust to a certain technique. Film somewhat captures it. The intensity is sometimes in films or the level of rehearsal and the competition; and some instructors are not nice, and some instructors are nice, and not being able to make the move you want to make and then making the move and having a great show. Aspects are definitely accurate.

Adam: In Mirrors, one of the characters says, “After a week or so, the rest of the world disappears. Nothing’s real, but the show and the people you’re working with”.
Galyn: Mmm, yeah.
Adam: Which is interesting. How did you get Fame?
Galyn: I’m trying to remember. I must’ve auditioned, yeah, I auditioned for that.

Adam: With Fame, did you only do the one episode, or do you think you might’ve done other ones as well?
Galyn: Good question [laughs]. I think I just did, I’m trying to remember. The thing is so funny, Adam, I can picture the set right now, I can picture the hallway, like the classroom hallways. I can picture the set and I was dancing and doing something, and I remember there were other dancers on it. When I was dancing like that, I knew most of the other dancers because they came out of Dupree or Joe Tremaine. I think I did one episode, maybe I did two. I can’t even remember.
Adam: [Laughs] When I do these sorts of interviews, I’m always asking people, “Remember when you did that”, and it’s like “Wait a second, that was 20, 25 years ago”.
Galyn: [Laughs] I know!

Adam: Dancing and acting, of course, are not exclusive, but how did you go from having more of a predominant focus on dance to moving into acting?
Galyn: That’s funny because I was in theatre when I was really young and then I got into dance. I think being on scholarship and the dancers that came out of Dupree, the “Thriller” video, Michael Jackson, all of that stuff was dancers out of Dupree and out of Joe Tremaine; and you know Flashdance and Marine Jahan, she was out of Dupree. I mean I can go on and on and name the dancers. It just happened to be a hot moment, a really hot time for dancers in videos and MTV coming alive, and so I think that’s why I [got into dance]. Music videos, people don’t know I did quite a few music videos, and I did tons of television commercials, and it was mostly dance orientated. Then after I went to Italy and came back, I slowly transitioned into acting more.
Adam: That’s interesting because you did a couple of things before you went over, but predominantly you moved into that phase once you came back from Italy.
Galyn: Yes.

Galyn in Al Jarreau’s “After All” music video.

Adam: What music videos that you did stand out in your mind?
Galyn: Somebody recently messaged me on Facebook a clip of ZZ Top’s “Sharp Dressed Man”. I think that was one of my first videos, with Peter Tramm, the dancer, who’s passed away. I remember that was like my first video, and then “All Night Long” with Lionel Richie. I had a small part on that. You don’t see me that well. That was my first one or ZZ Top. I can’t remember – maybe “All Night Long”. And I knew the song [“All Night Long] was this great song, but I didn’t know the song was going to be that! I had no idea. I come down dancing on the side of Lionel, Mr Richie, with Lela Rochon. Lela Rochon is on one side and I’m on the other side. When Al Jarreau passed away, I posted [on social media] because I danced in the “After All” video. I danced in a Ray Parker Jr. video right after [he did] Ghostbusters. I did a bunch of music videos. I’ve tried to remember them and post them because people ask me. That was being a dancer and being able to come out and do those, especially with Flashdance happening and all of that. Flashdance was great because of her [Jennifer Beals] kind of ambiguous look; I think that helped me.

I did commercials at the time, too, in between all the other stuff, so I was doing lots. I did McDonalds and Pepsi and Coca-Cola, and all those. Hertz rent a car. I have to look, they’re written down somewhere, but, yeah, a lot of television commercials, too.

Adam: One of your first films was America 3000. There’s a lot of interest in those films again from Cannon, and all of that coming around again. What was your experience on that? What was it like to film in Israel?
Galyn: I loved it! Oh my God, that was in Tel Aviv, the Sheraton in Tel Aviv, and the thing is they booked me for three months, so I was out in Israel for three months, but I only worked probably about a month, so I had a lot of time off. Oh my gosh, I travelled around a lot by myself, and people were [saying], “You better be careful”, [but] I had a great time. I would go to what they call the Arab markets, and then I went with people to the Dead Sea. I had so much fun, the food was delicious, and everybody was so nice. You know there was conflict because there were machine guns and soldiers walking around with machine guns; and there was conflict in South Africa with the Apartheid. I could hear booms sometimes, but at the same time when you meet human beings on an eye-to-eye to level, and you just do that, and you don’t talk about crazy world stuff. I just had a great time with people and the food, and on set. I really enjoyed Israel.
Adam: That’s a great lesson, isn’t it? That whole idea that when you’re meeting someone person to person. And of course, at that age as well – you would’ve been in your early twenties – and sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know. I remember when I first travelled, I went to Greece and so on, and, you know, I’d leave my wallet and everything else on the counter, and it didn’t matter.
Galyn: Right.
Adam: Whereas I probably wouldn’t do that now if I went back. But sometimes, it’s fine at that time.
Adam: It’s so true Adam, it’s so true. You’re wide-eyed and just open, and I was protected and blessed and had a wonderful time. I went to parties on roof tops, ate tons of food, and worked on the film, I mean I’m still friends with Sue Giosa who played in that film; and Laurene Landon, I just reconnected with her.
Adam: I saw you just did something with her, A Husband for Christmas.
Galyn: Yes, yes.

Adam: That’s really good to hear that you’re still in contact. And do you remember the producers, Golan and Globus?
Galyn: I remember them, yes. I remember them walking around, stressing out.
Adam: [Laughs].
Galyn: [Laughs] It always seems that the producers are stressing out during the film. There was drama, different dramas. I think one of them was dating one of the actresses, you know these behind the scenes dramas. But I just was into my craft and then my days off.
Adam: I think that’s a good way to be.
Galyn: [Laughs].
Adam: It’s interesting with America 3000 because the dialogue was trying to be very clever, I guess,
Galyn: Yeah.
Adam: with stuff like “hot plastic”. And you had a bit of an intense scene. I know predominantly it wasn’t a serious film, but you had an intense scene where your character is preparing to be what I think they called “seeded”.
Galyn: Yes.
Adam: I think it’s going to come back, this film, I would not be surprised.
Galyn: That’s so – usually I don’t tell people about it [laughs].
Adam: [Laughs].

Adam: From that film then – I think I’ve got my timeline right – soon after you got Fantastico and ended up in Italy. How did you get that show?
Galyn: I was in LA auditioning and there was a notice in the Variety paper. I saw that, and I went to this audition. There was a long line of girls, and I stood in line. I was not in a good mood, I remember that day, and I was going to leave, and I remember being really, Oh gosh, and I walked in. I just remember going in to audition, they interviewed me, and I remember being in a really sort of sour mood, and then I left. Then about a couple of months later I got a call from the two men, Guido De Angelis, who is actually now a very big producer, he just produced the [Maria] Callas movie, and Giuseppe Giacchi. They called me in and asked me if I’d like to come to Italy to do a variety show, and they were going to manage me. So, I flew out with my mother. I went to Italy, came back, then I went to Israel to shoot the film, and then I went back to Italy. The man that had to make the final decision in Italy was Pippo Baudo. He’s like the David Letterman, the Johnny Carson, the big time. He had to approve of me, so I met Pippo Baudo and the choreographer Franco Miseria. They liked me, and I liked them, and it was the biggest variety show in Italy.

Adam: Did you have any concept of how big it was?
Galyn: No, I didn’t know. Even when I was doing it, I didn’t know, really. I had no idea that it was this huge, huge show. I learned as we went because we did a couple of episodes and I couldn’t walk the streets after it. After we left the theatre, we had to try and drive and escape from people. We had to hide, and then that’s when we started to realise, Oh my gosh, this show is huge.

Galyn on the cover of Tele Sette magazine.
Galyn on the cover of Intimità della famiglia magazine.

Adam: You were always on the magazine covers. It’s kind of funny, I was moving house a few weeks ago, and for research, I had all these magazines with you on the covers. And my partner’s like, “How are you going to pack these, you can’t just throw them into a box”.
Galyn: [Laughs]. Yeah, a whole lot of magazine covers. I had a great time. I’ve re-connected with many of those people again. I was supposed to go there in December [2016]. I was supposed to go do a show with Lorella Cuccarini and Heather Parisi, who are very well-known dancers now, but there was a contractual disagreement, and that’s why it didn’t happen.
Adam: Hopefully down the track, perhaps.
Galyn: I have Italian fans always messaging me, contacting me, “Darling, darling, when do you return to Italy, Galyn, Galyn?”

Galyn with Pippo Baudo and Lorella Cuccarini on the cover of Guida TV magazine.

Adam: That’s fantastic. And it was a high intensity show, I mean it was a two-hour show. What was your schedule in any given week?
Galyn: It was intense. We rehearsed all day, must’ve been six to eight hours, and then I had to go into the studio that night and record because we were singing so many songs. It was packed. It was a packed non-stop rehearsal all day, go record in the studio, maybe go and do an interview, shoot a photo session.  It was an intense schedule and the show was live, millions of viewers. It wasn’t like delayed, there wasn’t a three second delay. It was live! And we were doing lifts and all of these – I hadn’t done anything to that level. My partner that I danced with was Steve LaChance, who is actually still in Italy. He had been an incredible dancer. He’d worked with Bob Fosse, and Debbie Allen used to call him regularly to dance on the Academy Awards. Phenomenal partner. I was very lucky. That happened because my mum suggested him to the Italian producers.
Adam: Right, I was going to ask how that came about.
Galyn: Yeah, they needed a partner for me and my mom suggested, “What about Steve LaChance?”

Adam: Did you and he click pretty quickly in terms of dance?
Galyn: Oh, yeah, we kind of clicked, you could say. Yeah, we started dating for probably about four and a half years.

Adam: Was that getting a lot of attention in Italy?
Galyn: Yeah, at a certain point. We tried to deny it for a while, but then people could kind of tell, and then they kind of marketed us as a couple.
Adam: Have you seen him recently or are you in touch with him?
Galyn: He and I contacted each other about a year ago. I’m in contact with his sister and she’s a sweetheart. About a year and a half ago I was in direct contact with him, we messaged, but if I get to Italy – it may happen because of some things that are occurring – I definitely will say hi. I was so lucky to have him as my partner. He’s a phenomenal dancer. He just made me look great, he looked great, and it just worked. It was great.

Galyn with Steve LaChance in Italy (Adam Gerace collection).

Adam: Do you have any favourite performances that stand out to you from the show?
Galyn: There’s a couple of pieces that are my favourites that stood out. Franco Miseria was a very well-known choreographer in Italy. He was choreographing pieces for us and then about the third or fourth episode in he choreographed a lyrical piece for us where I’m wearing red and black. It’s a lyrical piece and that’s the night we started to hit. From then on, we just hit and went to super stardom because our forte was lyrical. He [Steve] and I doing lyrical was just magic, it was just magic. [Adam’s note: You can watch many of Galyn’s Fantastico performances on her YouTube Channel].

Adam: What was life like living in Rome? You were living with your mother and sister?
Galyn: I was actually just living with my sister because my sister was one of the dancers in the show; she was in the chorus dancing. My grandmother came and stayed with us for a while, and then my mum visited for a while. But life was, it was pretty much just rehearsal. The thing, Adam, about the Italian culture that’s so incredibly wonderful is that we would rehearse and then it would be lunch time and it wasn’t so much like in the United States; it was more like, “We stay together, we drink a little wine, relax, we stay together, mangia, mangia, let’s enjoy the life, enjoy the life”. We worked, but then the rest of the time we enjoyed life as we were doing it.

Galyn with her sister, Gentry (Photo: TV Sorrisi e Canzoni).

Adam: My background is Italian, so I understand where you’re coming from with that. How well did you learn Italian?
Galyn: I was getting pretty good when I was there because I had a private tutor. I had a knack for the language they told me, the Italians, that my accent seemed really natural to them. My accent was pretty good, and I had a private tutor, so I was getting it well. Now I don’t have it so much because I don’t practice, but I enjoyed that language and having a tutor really just helped.
Adam: My parents are Italian, but we didn’t speak it at home and they’ve been in Australia for a long time. But when I was studying it in school, I was great at it. I would ring family in Italy, and talk to them fluently, but now it’s kind of a bit hit and miss because you don’t use it that often, you’re not practising it.
Galyn: That’s the thing because if you don’t practice it, then it just doesn’t stay with you.

Adam: When you look at Fantastico, and even other earlier performances – I don’t know if you do that often because I know a lot of performers don’t – but when you have seen those clips, what do you think and what do you feel looking back now?
Galyn: When I look back and see the clips from Italy of the dancing, I was better than I thought I was at the time. At the time, I was a perfectionist, but now when I look at them, I go, Oh, you were better than you actually thought you were.
Adam: It’s interesting to have that point of view separated from it. When you watch clips, do you have a bit of a disconnect where you sort of – like when you’re looking at yourself, is that you, or is that someone that’s not quite you. or does it feel one and the same?
Galyn: Yeah, I think it is kind of like that where it seems like a different self, in a way. It’s like a different self. I’ll even, if I talk about it, sometimes I can refer to it in the third person, “Oh look at her and how she is”. It can be like that sometimes.
Adam: Absolutely, because I was speaking to an actor [Gavin Harrison] whom I’d sent a video to so that he could see when he was on Mission: Impossible when he was a teenager. He hadn’t seen it in all those years, and when he looked at it, it seemed to him like it wasn’t necessarily him, but he was very proud looking at this young kid, thinking, look at how he was just going for it.
Galyn: Mmm.
Adam: He doesn’t have a lot of experience or whatever else, but he’s just really throwing himself into it.
Galyn: Exactly. Same kind of thing where you’re looking at this – it’s this other person in a way. another aspect, another aspect of yourself, another person in a way. Definitely, I’ll refer to myself in the third person.

Adam: Yeah, that makes sense. Then straight from Fantastico, I think you did the film Dance Academy. Was it because of your popularity in Italy with Steve that they came up with that movie?
Galyn: Yeah that came out of that; the same people were involved. That was part of that production, with an American director, Ted Mather, and then Italian produced. It was a co-production.

Galyn and Steve LaChance in Dance Academy.

Adam: Do you have good memories of that one?
Galyn: I just saw some scenes recently because they’re being added to my website. We had a good time on that. We had finished Fantastico and then we went into that. Steve and I had danced as partners for quite a while, so we had really learned how to work together. Then I had scenes and I got to do some acting, so that was great.
Adam: And it was you and Tony…
Galyn: Tony Fields.
Adam: Amazing Tony Fields.
Galyn: Tony Fields. Yeah, I was watching Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” video the other day and I saw him, and it was like, “Oh, there’s Tony”.
Adam: Isn’t that fantastic?
Galyn: Yeah, with Michael DeLorenzo in that video and – gosh, so many people in that video.

With Tony Fields in Dance Academy.

Adam: You went back to Italy and you did SandraRaimondo Show. What was it like working with new hosts, at a different network, and in a different place as well?
Galyn: Yes, because that was in Milano so that was different, and they had us living in this place called Milano Due, which was more isolated. That show wasn’t live, and those shows were taped, so it was a different experience. But it was nice because we could be in the editing room. I remember we were in the editing room and we could say, “OK, take that, cut this, put that”, so being in the editing room is sometimes nice because then you can perfect a piece in the editing.

Galyn and Steve LaChance at the 1988 Sanremo Music Festival (Adam Gerace collection).

Adam: That must have been quite a different approach, and especially to be able to shape a performance in the editing room as well.
Galyn: Yes. Both experiences are great. Live is one thing, that’s incredible, but then being able to cut and edit; they’re both, I enjoy both processes.

Adam: And just as the host of Fantastico was very big in Italy so were Sandra Mondaini and Raimondo Vianello. Big stars.
Galyn: I had no idea how big until people were telling me, and then I realised they’re legends.
Adam: I’ve had the same with people I’ve met in my work, and you don’t always realise at the time how big they are until afterwards you look back, and it’s kind of a bit staggering for you to go, “Wow”.
Galyn: Yes, isn’t’ that true? That’s so true.

Galyn and Steve LaChance return to a variety show with SandraRaimondo Show with Tracy Spencer and Bonnie Bianco (middle), and Sandra Mondaini and Raimondo Vianello (Photo: Wikipedia).

Adam: This probably leads us in quite well to Living the Blues with Sam Taylor.
Galyn: Sam Taylor. Yeah, he’s like a legend. I had no idea. I mean, I know he was an incredibly talented musician because of the music he was making, and he was a lot of fun on set. He was a real character. I’m pretty good friends with his grandson, Lawrence Worrell, who’s a great musician. He calls himself L*A*W Planet 12. He’s all over social media. But yeah, Sam Taylor, I see a lot of stuff through his grandson; all these photos of him with all these legends. He was a legend in his own right.

Adam: Did Living the Blues come about through your father and mother?
Galyn: Yes, my dad and my mother wrote and produced it, and they shot it around the streets of Los Angeles.

Galyn in Living the Blues.

Adam: Your character was really someone who wants to get somewhere else. She really has this intensity of getting out of the situation that she’s in, but at the same time – and same with her mother, as well – it’s very focused on money and, “If I could just get that money”. Was she an interesting character to play?
Galyn: I think it was the struggle that so many people go through, especially in the African-American community, people who are in states of poverty – just that struggle and trying to keep the dream alive that something can happen. Then there was the mother being really tough on the daughter and wanting her to not make the wrong decisions, but then my character, the daughter, feeling that she’s being controlled too much and wants to make her own choices. It’s that coming of age story of wanting to have respect for her mother and family and everything, but wanting to do her own thing, go out in the world. It’s a real human story.

Adam: And it probably also came from your father’s experiences with his documentary films. The film I watched last night, Felicia, where she’s talking about how she was in the neighbourhood seeing these men who had just given up; they tried and just hadn’t been able to get anywhere, and so they’d kind of given it up. I think your character or the mother in Living the Blues says something about not wanting to be loaded up with babies and always poor.
Galyn: Yes, and then the young man being Caucasian, having his passion for the blues and the music and the culture, and then having to struggle with what he wants and then care for his parents who disagree; and trying to find some balance in following his dreams and what he wants to do, but then having to struggle with his family and identity. I think it’s a universal story.

Galyn and her mother Gwyn Görg in Living the Blues.

Adam: What was it like to work with your family, to work with your dad and your mom?
Galyn: It was great. The only thing that’s different for something like that is if you’re doing your acting, but then you might carry a bag of props to the car, or you might help set up craft service a little bit, you might help with that sometimes. You’re going take on a few more roles.
Adam: Yes, you look at the credits, and you see your father did this, this, and this; your mother did this, this, and this; your sisters and brother did some work on it as well.
Galyn: Yes [laughs].

Adam: I enjoyed the interaction between you and the guy that played your boyfriend, Michael Kerr. Has he ever done anything since? I couldn’t really find much about him.
Galyn: I couldn’t either and I actually tried to find him on social media recently. I thought, Oh, let me reach out, but I haven’t seen or heard from him. I don’t know if he did anything else, but he was easy to work with. He was a really easy person to work with, but I haven’t had any contact with him since then.

Galyn and Michael Kerr in Living the Blues.

Adam: When the film was released on video, you got a good review in Variety. They called you an appealing screen presence and they really enjoyed your performance. I don’t know if you ever saw that?
Galyn: No, I didn’t, I never saw it, never heard about that.
Adam: I’ll have to send it to you.

Adam: One of your movies that has stuck around is The Malibu Bikini Shop. I don’t know how much you come across people talking about that, but particularly over here [Australia] that was one of those ones that was always in the video store, it was always on TV. What are your memories of that film?
Galyn: That’s so funny – I forget about that until somebody brings it up. I remember that we shot on the Venice Boardwalk. I remember being glad that I was going to have – because I don’t think the dancing was in there at the beginning, and I think they added it. Bruce Greenwood was in there and he’s gone on to really big things. I remember the cast – everybody was really cool. I remember it was an enjoyable time, and it was great because it was so local.

Michael David Wright, Bruce Greenwood, Barbra Horan, Galyn, and Ami Julius in The Malibu Bikini Shop.

Adam: And Barbra Horan, who goes by the name Amanda now, runs her own bra and shapewear company, Sassybax.
Galyn: Oh, I didn’t even know that!

With Barbra Horan and Ami Julius in The Malibu Bikini Shop.

Adam: You did a whole lot of other work throughout the ‘80s and you ended up on an Aaron Spelling pilot, Nightingales.
Galyn: Yes.
Adam: What was your impression meeting him?
Galyn: I remember having a little interaction with him. I didn’t have much interaction – he was kind of this, it was like the Wizard of Oz. I was nervous because he had had so much success. I remember Tori and his son. We had a cast party or something, and this was before Tori was on the show [Beverly Hills 90210,] and I remember Aaron was there and he was really supportive and nice because he gave compliments and encouragement and said positive words to everybody. He was huge, but he was very personable now that I remember it and gave words of encouragement. I had a great time with the other actresses. Susan Walters was in it; she’s doing really well right now. I was actually looking for Britta Phillips recently. I remember she was a sweetheart and I thought, I should try to connect with her, but I didn’t find her.
Adam: Other people in there were Kristy Swanson and Chelsea Field, and the director was Mimi Leder.
Galyn: That’s right, Mimi Leder is great; and that’s right, Chelsea Field, I bumped into her not that long ago.

Adam: You didn’t end up in the TV series. Was that because you had other work at the time, or did the character didn’t continue? Do you remember why that would’ve been?
Galyn: I’m trying to remember what happened. We shot it and then everything changed, and I remember there being a big drama about it and I don’t know why they re-cast. I forgot what the reason was, but of course I didn’t like the reason at the time.
Adam: [Laughs] Of course.
Galyn: For some reason everything changed. It was probably the network wanted to see a different look or a different something. But I remember, “OK, that’s done, I should move on”.

Adam: I know that the show didn’t last long, and it had a lot of criticism from the American Nurses Association because it was seen to depict nurses in a non-serious way in this soap opera.
Galyn: That’s right.
Adam: Suzanne Pleshette went to meet with nurses and try to figure that out. I think there was a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes. Do you remember working with Suzanne Pleshette? Did you have much to do with her?
Galyn: Yes, I do, I remember her, and I remember – you’re right, there was a thing with the Nurses Association. I remember Suzanne – she was really sweet. We had a good time on that.

Adam: That’s good to hear because sometimes these things don’t always work out, but it’s a nice process to be in them and to do them.
Galyn: Most of the times that I have been on set working with people, I have had a good time because I think actors are glad to be working. I was working recently on A Husband for Christmas – I had just a small part – and Eric Roberts came on set and he was in such a good mood. I had never met him before and he was just joking with me and everybody.

Galyn in RoboCop 2 with Tom Noonan, George Cheung, Michael Medeiros, Gabriel Damon, and Frank Miller, who also wrote the film.

Adam: In the early ‘90s, you had a couple of big pictures. The first was RoboCop 2. How did it feel to get that plumb role in that film?
Galyn: It’s so funny, I didn’t even realise who Irvin Kershner really was at the time. I had no idea until afterwards. He was just really sweet. We shot down in Huston, Texas. I’m still friends with Tom Noonan; and Frank Miller, he was great, I had a really good time with Frank Miller, he signed my The Dark Knight Returns book. I’ve said this in a couple of interviews lately because I keep thinking it’s going to get back to him, but he and I used to meet for dinner and he told me about this part, he said, “You know there’s this part, this script I want you to play. I think you should play Elektra; you’d be really good as Elektra.  At the time I thought, OK, that’s great, but, you know, they went on and Jennifer Garner did that.
Adam: What a shame.
Galyn: Yeah. I enjoyed it [RoboCop 2]. It was long hours and then they were having conflicts with the script. I mean, I wasn’t really a part of it, but I just could see it in the distance. I wasn’t really included in any of those discussions, but otherwise, personally, I had a great time.

Adam: It’s interesting because RoboCop 2 is one of those films that at the time when it came out, it was part of the discussion in the media about film and TV violence. It was seen as somewhat emblematic of that sort of screen violence. Did you come across any of that at the time?
Galyn: I vaguely remember a little bit of that. I did an interview recently for RoboDoc, the documentary coming out, and I was asked a lot of questions about that. I agreed, because that’s what I’ve heard about in terms of the violence within it and that it was too much sometimes and, you know, who it was being marketed to, young people. To me, it’s just not necessary.

Adam: I know that there was criticism that the young adolescent in it, [played by] Gabriel Damon, was swearing his head off and everything else, and people took issue with that as well. But it’s interesting watching RoboCop 2 now because some of the themes in it are actually pretty timely now. Private enterprise is running a city. At one point, your character picks up one of the vials of the drugs and looks at it and it says, “Made in America”.
Galyn: Right.
Adam: And then Tom Noonan’s character says, “Yeah, we’re gonna make that mean something again”. That happens again where the head of the company says that they are going to make RoboCop 2 in Detroit, and that’s going to create jobs “and make ‘Made in America’ mean something again”. So, interestingly, 25 years later that’s sort of come back a bit.
Galyn: Yeah, it’s so true because there definitely was a social commentary being made in terms of the police, the corporations and money, and the drugs on the street. That was a component of that story. I definitely agree with what you’re saying; there were definitely parallels.

Galyn with Gabriel Damon.

Adam: I think it might’ve been very soon after RoboCop that then you got Point Break.
Galyn: Yes, that’s right.

Adam: As well as Los Angeles, was it filmed in Hawaii as well?
Galyn: No, we filmed it in Los Angeles. The beach scenes, we probably did – where did we do those? Malibu? Somewhere around the coast of LA right by Los Angeles; one of the beaches, as far as I remember.

Adam: What’s your memory of working with Kathryn Bigelow?
Galyn: I was only on the set maybe two or three days. She was very welcoming, and that’s always nice. Very focused on what she wanted to happen in each scene. I remember her being very patient in the scene around the fire with Patrick Swayze. He had dialogue and that day he was – you know sometimes, it happens to everybody, sometimes you just snap and you’re getting a little tongue twisted, and you have to do quite a few takes to get it out. They did quite a few takes of that scene trying to get it the way so the director and the actor, so Patrick and Kathryn, were both happy with it. That happens sometimes. I remember her being patient and I remember him being patient with himself and being patient with the process. And he had enough clout at that time; when you have clout like that and you have to take some time to, it helps. But then they got it and it worked great, and she edited it, so it really worked well. I was very curious when we were shooting that to see how she was going to cut the scene. I liked when she did it. She did a good job.

With Patrick Swayze in Point Break.

Adam: It’s a really good scene. How do you remember Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves?
Galyn: I remember them being really sweet, and one of my dear friends, JP, John Preiskel, was working behind the scenes. He and I are still friends. With Keanu, we used to go out to clubs in Hollywood. Keanu, he was so great and cool, and you know, he’s a musician, he has his band, he’s really into his music. I’m trying to remember the places we went, but we had some fun.

In Part 2 of our interview, Galyn and I will discuss her work on Twin Peaks, two Star Trek series, Stargate SG1, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, and more. We also speak about her recent acting work and her work with arts education programs.

Galyn can be found on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and at her website.

The Start of Something Big

Jonathan Daly

If you ask Jonathan Daly to describe himself, he has a few choices. He is an actor, most often in comedy; a writer, of nightclub acts, television series, plays, and more recently, screenplays for films; a director; and a producer. He has often combined these roles at the same time and, at one time or another, done all of them in spades. Jonathan’s initial prominence and popularity was in front of an audience. On U.S. television, Jonathan is well-known for co-starring roles in the final season of Petticoat Junction (1969-70) as Orrin Pike, Bobbie Jo’s (Lori Saunders) suitor, and in 1970s series The Jimmy Stewart Show as Peter Howard (Jimmy’s character’s son), and then C.P.O. Sharkey, playing Lt. Whipple, the superior of none other than Don Rickles. He was a familiar face in guest parts on The Flying Nun, Bewitched, The Ghost & Mrs. Muir, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, and The Partridge Family. There were also films: among them, The Young Warriors with James Drury; Out of Sight which included a who’s who of rock and pop musicians; and Disney’s Rascal and Amy, which were Jonathan’s favourite films, and two of seven pictures he made at that “wonderful studio”.

There was a time before these series and films when Jonathan was known somewhere else, and by a whole nation no less who had only recently come to television. With a partner named Ken Delo, and an act that initially started as a “Martin and Lewis thing”, but became much more, Jonathan set out for Australia. It was early 1960 when producer Norman Spencer brought Delo and Daly to Melbourne. They had been working together for only a couple of years. In that time, as Jonathan explains, the focus was on building a relationship rather than the act. Viewers, and the press, likely did not know what to expect from the comedy team when they made their Australian television debut Saturday April 2 at 8pm on Melbourne’s GTV-9 on the nationally-aired The BP Super Show. Very quickly Australia took the duo into their hearts and homes. GTV-9 would be their home for several months, as an initial four-week stay (some papers said six) turned into six months. At GTV-9 Jonathan and Ken found supportive colleagues and good friends. It was there they appeared regularly on In Melbourne Tonight and The Graham Kennedy Show, the version of IMT for national consumption that also meant the duo became well-known interstate. The legend of the show’s host, Graham Kennedy, has grown over the ensuing decades, but Jonathan found in him a collegial colleague with whom he shared the stage many times. IMT’s roster included Bert Newton, Panda, Joff Ellen, and appearances by the very special Elaine McKenna, with whom Jonathan worked often, and shared considerable chemistry.

Ken and Jonathan (Photo: Australian TV: The First 25 Years).
Ken and Jonathan (Photo: Australian TV: The First 25 Years).

It was the time of the nightclub in Melbourne – and, indeed, much of the country – with Delo and Daly becoming a sensation wherever they went: the Savoy Plaza in Melbourne, Chequers in Sydney, and Lennons Broadbeach Hotel in the Gold Coast, amongst them. They did not, however, appear at the very famous nightclub The Embers, with Jonathan tasked with telling formidable club owner, Jimmy Noall, why his establishment was not suitable for comedy.

By the time the team left Australia, after filming two specials, their “acceptance by Australian TV audiences … set them apart as being by far the most successful of the U.S. TV comedy ‘imports’” (The Age, Radio and Television Supplement, October 6, 1960), with the pair later described as having “had the biggest success of any overseas act on Australian TV, and what was planned as a limited stay in 1960 turned into the longest for any imported variety act” (The Age, TV and Radio Guide, May 31, 1962). Colin Bednall, head of GTV-9, knew a good thing when he saw it, and he offered Jonathan the chance to write and produce. An appealing prospect, Jonathan and Australian wife Marlene Duff returned from the U.S. for Jonathan to work at GTV-9 for a year. In a nice tie-in to his very first appearance in Australia, he was assigned The BP Super Show. The BP Super Show was the network’s prestige program, “the channel’s show window” (The Age, Radio and Television Supplement, April 7, 1960). Indeed, in the month before Jonathan took over the reins, the star of the February episode was Ella Fitzgerald in a special filmed performance – at The Embers of all places!

Jonathan’s stint with The BP Super Show began with an episode starring Lorrae Desmond, Jerry Vale, French acrobats The Dandinis, Kamahl, and Tommy Hanlon Jr. Horrie Dargie compered and his quintet were featured on this show, which went to air February 11, 1961. On March 25, The VW Show began. This show, sponsored by Volkswagen, alternated with The BP Super Show, so that every two weeks viewers received either a BP or VW instalment. For this first production, Horrie Dargie compered a show featuring Alan Dean, Ray Hastings, Kathleen Gorham and Robert Pomie, Dorothy Baker, the Coral Deague Dancers, and the GTV-9 Orchestra conducted by the maestro, Arthur Young. The shows showcased new talent, overseas talent, Australian stars, vocalists, comedians, dancers and acrobats. Take a BP show from April 8, 1960 that featured The Allen Brothers act: Chris and that Boy from Oz, Peter. In many ways it was also a showcase for Jonathan’s many talents, as he would increasingly move across performing, writing, and producing.

Lorrae Desmond, Jonathan Daly, and Rod Kinnear inspect the new GTV-9 pool (Photo: The Age, Television and Radio Supplement, February 2, 1961).
Lorrae Desmond, Jonathan Daly, and Rod Kinnear inspect the new GTV-9 pool (Photo: The Age, Television and Radio Supplement, February 2, 1961).

It became a bit of a habit for Jonathan to be about to board a plane (once literally), or to actually board a plane back to the U.S., before being asked to do something else in Australia. After his time with the BP and VW shows was over, he moved on to HSV-7. It was there that he compered Daly at Night, a forerunner to night time talk shows on Australian TV and an introduction to “the authentic Tonight format” (Australian TV: The First 25 Years, ed. Peter Beilby, 1981). The show was a D.Y.T. production, with Horrie Dargie, Arthur Young, and John Tilbrook having set up their own production unit. Described as a “controversial discussion show” (The Australian Women’s Weekly, 13 November 1963), critics didn’t completely take to Jonathan behind the desk and his panel and team that included Vikki Hammond, Horrie Dargie, Arthur Young, Frank Thring, Kitty Bluett, and Lou Richards. The Wednesday-Friday series did, however, produce plenty of memorable moments and ran for a year; starting March 7, 1962 and ending on March 29, 1963.

In many ways, the team of Delo and Daly had cast a long shadow on Australian television. In the time that the team had largely been off of TV, which was some two or so years with the exception of a special at GTV-9 called In the Soup in 1961, momentum was building for a return. After the stage lights of Daly at Night dimmed, Jonathan returned to the U.S. When his plane back to Australia landed on May 5, 1963, Ken was with him. At the time of their arrival to a “welcoming committee” at the airport including Norm Spencer, now at HSV-7 as assistant manager production, Horrie Dargie, John Tilbrook, Kitty Bluett, Julian Jover, and Joe Latona, Jonathan declared, “It’s wonderful to be back!” (TV Times, Victoria edition, May 15, 1963). That’s high energy after a rather lengthy flight between continents!

Jonathan goes south of the border in In the Soup (Photo: TV Week, Adelaide edition, May 17-23, 1961).
Jonathan goes south of the border in In the Soup (Photo: TV Week, Adelaide edition, May 17-23, 1961).

The negotiations between D.Y.T. and HSV-7, the search for sponsors, and other details of the show “created more press speculation since it was mooted than any other” (The Age, TV and Radio Guide, June 6, 1963). TV Week reported that “Delo and Daly have planned their show with Cape Canaveral-type security” (South Australia edition, June 29, 1963).

The Delo & Daly Show launched on HSV-7 in Melbourne on September 3, 1963. It eventually had “a six State ‘web’” with New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, and Western Australia carrying the program (The Age, TV and Radio Guide, January 23, 1964). I imagine for viewers tuning in to the first episode that it was a thrill to again watch Ken and Jonathan, as they walked together on their set’s distinctive checkered floor toward the camera. It was a thrill for me when I watched a tape of the first program earlier this year.

The Delo & Delo show was variety in every sense of the word. Ken and Jonathan sang medleys, sometimes with their guest stars, and Ken also typically sang solo. The two engaged in fast-paced skits, involving take-offs of commercials and other popular forms. In between skits, The Delo & Daly Girls would try to keep straight faces as they set the scenes. In one skit in the first episode, an excited Jonathan is Ralph, a hiker about to start a monumental trek from the corner of Bourke and Exhibition streets in Melbourne across the entire continent. It’s just too bad that he’s not good at crossing a road, and it’s over before it begins. In another as part of the regular “Let’s Talk” segments, Superman (Jonathan) asks his interviewer (Ken) to call him “Soup”, and he talks of how at 21 when most of his peers got cars or boats, he got a cape; as well the problems of leaving his suits unattended in phone boxes.

In a skit from the second episode, Jonathan is an optimistic prison warden who doesn’t “like to use the word ‘escape’”; instead preferring to “just say they’re away” when his inmate count reveals some deficits.

Jonathan put a premium on quality. During a visit to Adelaide early in the show’s run, he was quoted in TV Week (South Australia edition, October 5, 1963) as stating, “To make a really good show you need writers and time … time to rehearse and money to pay the artists, technicians and musicians during rehearsal. Writers need time to prepare well ahead of each show, and while they are preparing they must be paid”. As Jonathan rightly points out all these years later, The Delo & Daly Show – and, in fact, all of the shows he was associated with – included wonderful performers, such as Kitty Bluett, Bill Bain, Joe Hudson (also a producer on Delo & Daly), Lewis Tegart, Addie Black, and Vikki Hammond, as well as The Joe Latona Dancers (Julie Dawtry, Chris George, Steve Buge), the song-and-dance quintet The Take Five (Annette Fisher, Pauline Whalley, David Ellis, Barrie Stewart, and Wally Ruffe), Jimmy Allan and the HSV-7 Orchestra, and many others. Behind the scenes were director Norm Spencer, writers Jonathan, Ken, and Hugh Stuckey, producer-choreographer Joe Latona, and art director George Havrillay – all masters committed to their craft. The Delo & Daly Show won the Logie Award for Best National Variety Show in 1964. When I mentioned to Jonathan that I had watched the 2015 Logie Awards on Channel 9 a couple of weeks before our chat, he told me that he thinks he still has the statue, and that “We were very honoured” to have received it.

Writing and fronting The Delo & Daly Show was a demanding task, and one which Jonathan devoted himself to fully. Eventually, Ken and Jonathan started a weekday afternoon show, called simply enough, Ken and Jonathan, which ran April 27 to July 24, 1964. Julie McKenna was their hostess.

All good things must come to an end, and on August 26, 1964 the final The Delo & Daly Show aired. Ken and Jonathan returned to the U.S. soon after. Of course, that was not the end of the story. Ken would go on to a long stint in the U.S. The Lawrence Welk Show. Jonathan would return to Australia many times, including in No Sex Please, We’re British. He then began other iterations of his career: his U.S. television and movie career, and playwriting. Jonathan has been married to Kacey for over 30 years, and he has three children: producer Jules Daly, actor Rad Daly, and Kathryn.

I spoke to Jonathan about his time in Australia. His time here was a highlight in many people’s professional lives. When Norm Spencer left HSV-7 in 1968, “he said the happiest and most satisfying period spent at HSV-7” was producing Daly at Night and The Delo and Daly Show (The Age, TV and Radio Guide, January 2, 1969). For Jonathan, it was a time that he remembers fondly, and it was a joy to listen to him light up when speaking of old friends and a country still close to his heart. I have a feeling that if he were to come back, this time we wouldn’t let him go.

Adam: What led to your coming to Australia in March, 1960?
Jonathan: Our agent booked us there for four weeks for In Melbourne Tonight. It was funny because we didn’t really have enough material for that four weeks so we were kind of faking it. And then they held us over and they kept holding us over. I don’t know if you remember the act, but it was a lot of adlibbing anyway. That served us well because if we had had to have formal material we wouldn’t have been able to keep going on.

Adam: I found a TV Week article (Adelaide edition, December 14-20, 1960) where you described the schedule during your first six months in Australia. You said, “With an average of 16 performances a week, 10 in night clubs and six on television, we were always working … We arrived in Melbourne with enough good material for eight performances a week and ended up doing twice that number”.
Jonathan: [Laughs] That’s right.

Adam: If I may backtrack a little bit, how did you meet Ken Delo?
Jonathan: That’s a simple story. I was in charge of the Fifth Army Entertainment Division and it went from Chicago to Denver, Colorado. The idea was I had to produce shows because they were recruiting shows and we would travel, but I had to do a show at my home base every Saturday night if I wasn’t on the road. The problem was it was an Officers’ Club and it was the same audience every night, and so I didn’t have any material. I found a singer, Ken Delo, and I said, “Listen, you’re going to have to not only sing, but you’re going to have to do kind of a Martin and Lewis thing because you’re going to see the same audience every night”, and so our adlibbing started out of necessity there.
Adam: That would’ve been in the late ‘50s?
Jonathan: Yeah, probably 1958, yeah.
Adam: Was that around the time when you also went on a USO tour to Alaska?
Jonathan: You’ve done your work. We did a Bob Hope tour up there and froze.  Everything we were doing was forming more of a relationship than an act and that’s what I think was actually the secret of our success – that the audience accepted the relationship.

Adam: In my research I came across pieces and listings in The Age newspaper announcing that Ken and your first television appearance in Australia would be on April 2, 1960 on The BP Super Show hosted by Horrie Dargie. The star attraction was Carolyn Maye of The Music Man, and also appearing with you were Fred Barber, a mimic and comedian; Jimmy Wheeler, a comedian; vocalists Baby Jane and Dorothy Baker; a French acrobatic dance team, Les Vincent-Cardinal; The Dargie Quintet; and, of course, the Channel 9 Orchestra and Ballet.
Jonathan: You mean it was before In Melbourne Tonight?
Adam: Yeah, supposedly that was the first one and then soon after you did IMT for the first time.
Jonathan: Isn’t that funny, I don’t remember that at all.

Adam: In one short piece announcing The BP Super Show and IMT appearances, the two of you were described this way: “They are said to specialise in a brand of comedy which has won them a certain amount of popularity among teenage audiences in U.S.A.” (The Age, March 24, 1960). Was that the case? Had you performed for teenage audiences?
Jonathan: No, they’re not even close. You know something, honestly we had not performed that much before we had come to Australia. The whole idea of Australia was simply to get us some more experience. We did that Alaskan USO tour but we hadn’t played that many places – it was very fresh.
Adam: And the TV landscape here at the time would’ve allowed you to try out some of that, almost test the material?
Jonathan: Yes.

Adam: As you said earlier when describing IMT, were those shows predominantly adlibbed?
Jonathan: Yeah, we would come up with a premise and Ken was wonderful at going wherever I went; he was a masterful straight man.

Adam: Watching you and Ken, it really is the relationship that comes through. I don’t think you can fake that sort of thing.
Jonathan: No, and it even worked in, there’s an interesting titbit. We were supposed to play Jimmy Noall’s nightclub in Toorak, which was called The Embers. That was part of the deal that we would do IMT and the nightclub. But when we went to see the club I said to the owner, who I didn’t know was a gangster, “I’m sorry but this place doesn’t work the way it’s set up for comedy; it’s not a good place for comedy, it’s a jazz place”. The Oscar Peterson Trio was playing there at that time, and the shape was perfect for jazz. The owner told me, “Oh no, we’ve had comedians play here”, and I said, “Well they must’ve died”. He agreed that they didn’t go very well, and I told him, “Well that’s because it’s not built for that”.

When I spoke to Norm Spencer at GTV-9, he told me, “Well there’s a club I can show you at the Savoy Plaza, but they don’t have a floor show”. I said “Well, let me look at it”. We went there and I thought that it was a perfect nightclub for a comedy team because of the way it was constructed. So we opened there. They’d never had anybody entertain on the floor and we became very successful very quickly and you couldn’t get a table. It just worked out absolutely beautifully.

Advance notice card for Ken and Jonathan at the Rainbow Room in the Savoy Plaza. Guests are advised to "Book early with your host Albert Argenti" (Adam Gerace private collection).
Advance notice card for Ken and Jonathan at the Rainbow Room in the Savoy Plaza. Guests are advised to “Book early with your host Albert Argenti” (Adam Gerace private collection).

Adam: How big was the nightclub scene in Melbourne at the time?
Jonathan: I guess it was big although from what I heard then, it was never as big as what happened with us – we kind of exploded. It was that wonderful mixture of they would see us on television and then able to come and see us live. I think we were as big as you could get then but I can’t remember the others. There was a place called Mario’s and there were some Italian singers from America who would go in there, and I think they did very well.

Adam: Did you ever perform at Chequers in Sydney?
Jonathan: Oh my God, yes. We were the talk of the town in Sydney. They had a very funny owner named Denis Wong. How old are you?
Adam: Thirty-three.
Jonathan: How come you know all this stuff?
Adam: I just love the time and so I enjoy doing the research into these places that I never experienced.
Jonathan: Well, you would’ve loved Chequers because Chequers was a real nightclub and it had some huge names, big names.

Adam: I think you also went up to the Gold Coast in Queensland and did Lennons Broadbeach Hotel.
Jonathan: We opened that, literally opened it. A man named Oliver Shaul who was the head of the hotel chain that also included the Savoy Plaza came to us and said, “We’re opening a hotel. We don’t know if there’ll be an audience because it’s brand new. I’ll give you anything you want so would you come up and open for us?”

Adam: Returning to talking about IMT, Hugh Stuckey described working with Graham Kennedy in this way: “Graham doesn’t need a writer in the same sense as others. He doesn’t need completed script, only ideas fed to him … His big problem is that he won’t let you mentally near him” (The Age, October 11, 1962). In your experience, was that an accurate assessment of Graham?
Jonathan: Actually, I had a very strange, wonderful experience with him. I understood – and Huey and I have talked about this – Graham was distant, but one day we were in the hall and he asked, “How’s it going and have you found a flat?” We were talking and I said, “Listen, you should come over for dinner some night”. Everybody said, “He won’t be coming to your house, forget that, that isn’t going to happen”. Well he did; he came and it was a very unusual experience – I guess because people told me he never did that. Graham and I got along very well, and I think we had a personal mutual respect for how hard it is to do comedy.
Adam: The other thing was he had a lot of pressure on his shoulders, television was relatively new over here and just exploding – I guess in the same way that you and Ken did as well.
Jonathan: Yes, and instead of him being jealous of our success on his show he was enormously supportive.

Ken and Jonathan with Graham Kenndy in Brisbane (Photo: TV Week, Adelaide edition, September 7-13, 1960).
Ken and Jonathan with Graham Kenndy in Brisbane (Photo: TV Week, Adelaide edition, September 7-13, 1960).

Adam: When you first came over to Australia were you living with Ken?
Jonathan: Ken and I had a flat. It was near Jimmy Noall’s nightclub so I guess that would’ve been in Toorak.

Adam: It seems that the audience took you both in fairly quickly. Did it feel like that, like everything was kind of, you came over here and it was like bang, bang, bang we’re on our way?
Jonathan: Yeah, and you know something, for years, in fact to this day, I am stopped on the street. I live in Waikiki and Australians – the tourists are over here a lot – will stop me and say, “How are you?” To this day I discuss with them how amazing it was and I still don’t know why they took us into their homes and hearts so quickly. It was so fast, it was within two or three appearances, so there was something in us that they accepted quickly.

Adam: Was there any sort of animosity or jealousy from Australian performers when you guys came over to work here or was that not an issue?
Jonathan: One of the nicest things that ever happened to me was on the very first night we were in GTV-9. Joff Ellen came up to me and he said, “If you ever need anything, from one comedian to another, I will be there for you, you come and bother me, ask me anything, I will be as helpful as I can be”. Joff Ellen was one of the nicest people I ever met. I thought they would resent us but it turned out to be, you know something, there must’ve been some quality in Ken and me that put the Aussies at ease, they didn’t feel threatened or they didn’t feel we were imposing or trying to be a big shot, never had anything but love.

Adam: That’s wonderful. Towards the end of your first stay in Australia, two specials were filmed. The first screened was produced by Rod Kinnear, and was said to have captured “two-thirds of the available audience in Melbourne” (The Age, October 6, 1960), so that one did incredibly well.
Jonathan: Yes, that was a big hit. I remember that I was in a last-minute rehearsal for one of our specials when I was summoned to the office of the boss to meet someone. I was unhappy at being interrupted but thrilled when I found out who had come to GTV-9 specifically to meet me. It seems Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies was a huge President Kennedy fan. He thought I looked like Kennedy so he came to meet me as a fan. It knocked my socks off!

Delo and Daly on the cover of TV Week (September 7-13, 1960) near the end of their 1960 stay in Australia.
Delo and Daly on the cover of TV Week (September 7-13, 1960) near the end of their 1960 stay in Australia.

Adam: That’s a great story! Then there was A Party with Delo and Daly, with Norm Spencer producing. The plot of that one was Ken having a party and Elaine McKenna suggests that he hire you as the butler and drink-waiter.
Jonathan: That’s it.

Ken and Jonathan with Elaine McKenna (Photo: TV Week, South Australia edition, December 21, 1963).
Ken and Jonathan with Elaine McKenna (Photo: TV Week, South Australia edition, December 21, 1963).

Adam: I read that in the special was your flea act, where you had a flea called Leroy. I don’t know if you remember that?
Jonathan: [Laughs] Yes, I do. That was the dumbest single act in the history of nightclubs. It was just so stupid that the audience went along with it.
Adam: That was from your nightclub act and you brought it on to the TV show?
Jonathan: I started that at the Officers’ Club in the Army. In the act, I had a flea who did acrobatics. Of course, nobody could see anything, and eventually the flea in doing the triple disappeared and we lost my precious flea. The whole idea of it was that later in the act as we were walking around entertaining the people who were sitting by the floor I would go, “Hold it”, and I would go over to somebody as though I had just found my flea. But the punchline was that after putting my fingers in this poor man’s hair I would say, “Oh sorry, that’s the wrong flea – that’s not Leroy”, and so we would insult whoever the celebrity was who was ringside. We’d use that in our nightclub act and then I think we used it on A Party with Delo and Daly.
Adam: I think it sounds quite funny.
Jonathan: Well it was funny because the audience was in on it. I mean they knew we were being total twits so they loved the fact that we were being so stupid.

Adam: You worked with Elaine McKenna many times. What do you remember of Elaine?
Jonathan: Elaine and I were very close. We connected well for the audience. They kind of felt we were dating. It was a working relationship, but we loved each other. I went back several times, as you probably know, to Australia over later years and was very saddened to hear that she had passed away. I am still in touch with her sister, Julie McKenna.
Adam: Who you also worked with a few times as well.
Jonathan: Yeah.

Elaine and Jonathan (Photo: TV Week, Adelaide edition, October 5-11, 1960).
Elaine and Jonathan (Photo: TV Week, Adelaide edition, October 5-11, 1960).

Adam: When you and Ken left GTV-9 in 1960, Rod Kinnear wrote in the notes for The Best of Delo and Daly record, “I have tremendous respect and admiration not only for their extraordinary talents, but also for their personality and character as people. They have become very great friends of everyone at GTV-9”. You came back solo soon after to Australia and GTV-9. What led to that?
Jonathan: We were leaving after having been there for quite a while and Colin Bednall, the head of the network, came up to me and said, “Would you consider producing and writing shows?” I said, “Sure, absolutely,” and so we created another show called The Volkswagen Show which alternated with The BP Super Show.

Adam: That makes sense because I couldn’t find as much on The Volkswagen Show. I could find information on The BP Super Show, but not so much on that one.
Jonathan: I think we did them every two weeks.
Adam: Was that similar to The BP Super Show?
Jonathan: It was the same show, but sponsored by Volkswagen.
Adam: So it was essentially the same format just a different name?
Jonathan: Oh yeah, I did exactly the same show.

While in Australia, Art Linkletter compered the 18-hour National Heart Foundation telethon on GTV-9 on May 28, 1961. Jonathan and Art worked together on the telethon. He subsequently appeared on The BP Super Show on June 3, and The VW Show on June 17 (Photo: The Age, TV and Radio Guide supplement, June 15, 1961).
While in Australia, Art Linkletter compered the 18-hour National Heart Foundation telethon on GTV-9 on May 28, 1961. Jonathan and Art worked together on the telethon. He subsequently appeared on The BP Super Show on June 3, and The VW Show on June 17 (Photo: The Age, TV and Radio Guide supplement, June 15, 1961).

Adam: Do you have any memories of favourite guests or episodes of The BP Super Show or The Volkswagen Show?
Jonathan: Well, I can tell you a story. I used to use a lot of opera singers and ballet dancers – it was very classical. I had a booker who was from Europe and I would use his talent. At the end of my contract I came in to the head of the network and I said, “I need a little extra money”. I was walking down Collins Street and this little European booker came running up to me and he said, “Jonathan, Jonathan, I’ve got for you Andrés Segovia”. Well Andrés Segovia was the greatest guitar player in the history of humankind, he was brilliant. I said, “Are you kidding me?”, and he said, “No, because you’ve been so nice to me you can have him on your show”. So I needed a little extra money and I went to the network. They said to me, “No more Spanish dancers”. And guess what, I quit. That was the end of The BP Super Show and The Volkswagen Show. It’s also one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard. I didn’t even bother to tell them that Andrés Segovia was not a Spanish dancer. I mean, it’s not their fault; Segovia was not popular in Australia so it was understandable that they hadn’t heard him.

Adam: Is this when you directed and starred in Come Blow Your Horn?
Jonathan: Yes, again I was leaving and Garnett Carroll, the owner of the Princess Theatre, sent his son, John, to the airport. He told me, “There’s a play on Broadway by a new writer named Neil Simon and we have permission to do it. Would you direct it?” I couldn’t find anybody to be in the lead, so I did it.
Adam: That’s impressive to hear, the up-and-coming writer Neil Simon.

Adam: After 12 months producing for GTV-9, as well as the play, you left, but then you came back for Daly at Night on HSV-7. You hosted, and had a panel with Vikki Hammond, Arthur Young, and Horrie Dargie.
Jonathan: Horrie was my right-hand man, he sat next to me.

Adam: I’ve never seen Daly at Night, but I read it described as a “controversial discussion show” (The Australian Women’s Weekly, 13 November, 1963). Why do you think that was?
Jonathan: [Laughs] Well, it was very simple; it was controversial because the audience was used to seeing me making faces and getting a pie in the face, and being a clown. In Melbourne Tonight was a variety show, it wasn’t a talk show. Daly at Night was the first talk show, and so the audience wasn’t sure what the heck was going on because there was a comedian sitting behind the desk, as Graham did; but it was some serious, some funny, and there weren’t any acts, it was just talking. At first they didn’t get it, but by the end of the year – and I could only stay for a year – they were loving it.

Adam: I guess that would’ve been even before The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson or anything like that, so that sort of thing wasn’t really being done anywhere.
Jonathan: No, Carson was already playing. Steven Allen started The Tonight Show, and then Jack Parr, and then it went on.
Adam: Oh, of course.
Jonathan: That’s what I was doing, I was doing The Tonight Show. No-one had ever done that in Australia.

Adam: I researched some of the guests. Did you have Henry Fonda on Daly and Night?
Jonathan: Yeah, I sure did. It was funny because I had done a show in America called The George Gobel Show, and he and I did The George Gobel Show together. That was in 1954 or 1955, something like that. And then he came over and did Daly at Night with me. Years later I played Jimmy Stewart’s son on The Jimmy Stewart Show, and Hank Fonda was Jimmy Stewart’s best friend. So Hank came in on the set one day and he said, “You and I have to stop meeting like this”. When he was on Daly at Night he was absolutely fantastic and we spent the next few days together. He was a wonderful man. So eventually to work with his best friend, it all tied in very nicely.

Adam: I’d love to find that Daly at Night episode. I don’t know if they’re around but that would be something to see.
Jonathan: Do you remember a man named Frank Thring?
Adam: Absolutely, yes.
Jonathan: Well, Frank was as openly gay as you could be in those days, and he would come on the show and he was hysterical. All of our humour – see that’s what the audience, they were a little thrown by it because we didn’t have acts, but we had funny conversations. If you could find Daly at Night, oh my gosh that would be great. I’m sure they burned it because they didn’t know what the heck we were doing.
Adam: Frank seemed to be definitely one of a kind.
Jonathan: He was fantastic, great guy.

Adam: When you were producing and then when you were on Daly at Night was there pressure or people wanting Delo and Daly to reunite? You did do a one-off special screened in May, 1961, In the Soup, and I know Ken came back to Australia for a solo stint on IMT in 1962.
Jonathan: Well, we stayed in touch and we kept talking about doing it, and then when Daly at Night finished, then there was pressure, “Can you get a hold of Ken? We don’t want to lose you”. I was very lucky because every time I’d start to leave they’d say “What else do you want to do?”, so that was pressure to get Ken to do The Delo & Daly Show.

Adam: It seemed every time you were about to get on an Ansett plane they kept sending you back.
Jonathan: That’s right! In fact Reg Ansett called me and he said, “Where are you going?” I told him, “I’m leaving” and he said, “No, no, no, no”. As you know I came back later and did No Sex Please, We’re British, and Ken and I also did Bert Newton’s show together, and so any excuse to come back. I love Australia.

Adam: Did you work with Bert Newton on IMT or was it later that you worked with him?
Jonathan: We only worked with Bert in his role that he had with Graham, but then when he had his show they brought us back to do that.
Adam: I did find a picture from 1984 of Bert with you and Ken for Tonight with Bert Newton.
Jonathan: Oh yeah, that would be it. It was that wonderful director Peter Faiman; he directed Bert’s show and he contacted us.
Adam: I saw Bert Newton last year on stage in Grease, and before that he was in Wicked playing the Wizard of Oz.
Jonathan: He has had quite a theatrical career, hasn’t he?
Adam: Yes. He had a morning show here in the ‘90s and 2000s
Jonathan: Right.
Adam: And then once that wrapped he’s been doing a lot of theatre.
Jonathan: I’m glad to hear he’s still working.

Adam: Did Daly at Night finish because you needed to go back to the U.S.?
Adam: Yes, and again the same thing happened. I think they started to figure out that it was a money ploy because I’d say, “No, I’ve got to go home” and that’s when they suggested, “How about if you get Ken and we team up the old team again?” I said, “I don’t know. If you want to do this it’s going to cost you a lot of money. We’ve got to hire a writer, we’ve got to get a bigger orchestra, we’ve got to have sets, and we’ve got to have guest stars”. Norm Spencer, he muscled the big shots at Channel 7 and they pulled it off.

With Norm Spencer (Photo: TV Week, Victoria edition, May 15, 1963).
With Norm Spencer (Photo: TV Week, Victoria edition, May 15, 1963).

Adam: The Delo & Daly Show took a while to get moving. From reading some of the articles of the time, it seems that there was a lot of negotiation going on before you actually shot the first couple of shows.
Jonathan: Sure, absolutely, they were terrified. Have you seen the show?
Adam: Yes I have.
Jonathan: OK, I’ll give you an example of that. I wanted a big black and white checkered floor and no permanent sets. I wanted to do it in a very sparse way, but then once in a while use realistic sets. One of the negotiations was about the floor. You won’t believe this, but that black and white floor cost a fortune. We would constantly negotiate.

Adam: It was a fantastic floor. Is it true that up the front of the floor were really big pieces but as you went further and further back they were little ones, and it was to give the perspective of depth?
Jonathan: Yes, it was a perspective.

Adam: It was a very modern set for the time. It was fantastic.
Jonathan: People raved about the look of it. I knew what I wanted, but I knew it was going to cost them a fortune. I remember spending hours with Keith Cairns, who was the head of the network, saying, “Come on, come on, give me a little more money”.
Adam: [Laughs].
Jonathan: [Laughs] But then it was a hit.

Adam: Did you ultimately feel that you got the time and money needed to make the show you wanted to make?
Jonathan: Oh absolutely, absolutely. They were just amazing to us and that’s how I got Hugh Stuckey to come aboard, and Hugh is as good as you get.

Adam: Did you already know Hugh at that point?
Jonathan: Yes, Hughie was writing for Graham when we were on IMT and so I knew him. I called him in to our offices at D.Y.T. and said, “Listen Hugh, we’re going to do this big variety show and I’m going to need all the help I can get”. Hughie and I just had a fantastic relationship. I could say something and he would go from there. He was a wonderful, wonderful writer. We’ve stayed very close, incidentally.
Adam: That’s wonderful to hear that you still speak to him. He wrote for A Country Practice, which is one of my favourite programs.
Jonathan: Have you ever interviewed Hugh Stuckey?
Adam: No I haven’t, he would be a fascinating person to interview.
Jonathan: Oh my God, he covers the whole gamut of Australian television between IMT and Neighbours, A Country Practice. You should talk to him; he’s a gem. Hugh’s a good friend, he even came to Hawaii once and we had a wonderful time together.

Adam: The show was filmed in Fitzroy at the old Regent Theatre, which became the HSV-7 studio.
Jonathan: The Teletheatre, yeah.
Adam: Was that a good place to film?
Jonathan: Oh yes. When I first saw it they told me, “This is where we’d like to shoot it”. I thought, Oh my God, this is a dump. But they assured me, “No, no, we’re going to come in here and redo the whole thing”. They really did a great job.

Ken and Jonathan on the cover of TV Times (February 19, 1964).
Ken and Jonathan on the cover of TV Times (February 19, 1964).

Adam: I watched a few episodes at the State Library of South Australia. The guest star on the first program was Maggie Fitzgibbon, who was appearing in the musical Sail Away. Ken tells you to stop clowning around and introduce her, and so you start your introduction with “Maggie Fitzgibbon first joined the Communist Party back in 1946”. You then get cut off by Ken who says that she has nothing to do with the Communist Party.
Jonathan: [Laughs]
Adam: The comedy holds up just incredibly well; it’s a ball to watch those shows. There’s a skit in that show where Ken is interviewing Superman, who is played by you. I don’t know if you remember that one?
Jonathan: No, no.
Adam: You’re telling Ken that you have to claim your suits on income tax because every time there’s an emergency you’ve got to leave the suit in the phone booth, and so you’re losing all these suits.
Jonathan: [Laughs]
Adam: There was a skit in another episode where you were a prison warden and Ken’s interviewing you. During the conversation the lights kind of dim and you say, “Oh my gosh, Ralph,” and you realise that you forgot to stop the execution.
Jonathan: [Laughs] I don’t remember these things but you have to understand that we did a lot of those shows and we would adlib a lot in the sketches, and then once we would finish that show we didn’t remember anything.

Adam: What was the weekly routine that you had while you were doing The Delo & Daly Show?
Jonathan: I don’t remember the night we taped, but let’s say we taped on a Friday night.
Adam: I think it might have been.
Jonathan: We would have the weekend off and then we would meet at my flat with Joe Latona, who was the choreographer and producer, and Hugh, and we would come up with what we were going to do and then we’d give that to whoever the music people were. If we taped on Friday night we probably rehearsed on Thursday and then did the show on Friday.

Adam: Was the show essentially what you did most of your time, or were you involved with other things?
Jonathan: I was writing 24/7. I remember going to mass, and on the way up to Communion I thought of something. I turned around and left the church! So it was a constant; a lot of work. It was a huge show to do every week.

Adam: Did you write with Ken? In a TV Week (Adelaide edition, September 7-13, 1960) you described a scene of one of you at the typewriter and the other pacing up and down. Was that the case for The Delo & Daly Show, or did you write more by yourself?
Jonathan: I did most of the writing and Ken did all the music. I had a tin ear, I didn’t know what I was doing musically but he made me sing and he protected me because he knew my limitations. So he did all the music and I did most of the writing; what writing there was, it was more structured stuff that I’d come up with and then we’d go from there. Hugh wrote a lot of the stuff we did.

Adam: Can we talk a little bit about people you worked with on The Delo and Daly Show? You worked with Vikki Hammond on Daly at Night and then she came over to The Delo and Daly Show as well.
Jonathan: She was wonderful.
Adam: I know she went into acting but I haven’t seen anything of her in a while.
Jonathan: Somebody told me that she kind of pulled out of the business, I don’t know. I’ll tell you when I did see her. When we went back in 1984 to do Bert Newton, Van Johnson was there and I knew him and we had lunch with Vikki, so that was in 1984 and I got the feeling then that she was not in the business any more but she came to lunch.

Three's a crowd? Ken, Vikki Hammond, and Jonathan on The Delo & Daly Show (Photo: Australian TV: The First 25 Years).
Three’s a crowd? Ken, Vikki Hammond, and Jonathan on The Delo & Daly Show (Photo: Australian TV: The First 25 Years).

Adam: Another person who you worked with quite a bit, and who was on Delo & Daly was Kitty Bluett.
Jonathan: Yes, Kitty was on The Delo & Daly Show.
Adam: Did you enjoy working with her?
Jonathan: Gosh yes, she was one of the funniest people and she had a wonderful husband. Kitty was just funny. You know there’s some people who are comedians but they’re not necessarily funny, she was just naturally funny.

Adam: You worked with her husband, Julian Jover, as well.
Jonathan: Yes.

Bill Bain, Kitty Bluett, and Joe Hudson (Photo: The Australian Women's Weekly, November 13, 1963).
Bill Bain, Kitty Bluett, and Joe Hudson (Photo: The Australian Women’s Weekly, November 13, 1963).

Adam: Then there was Bill Bain.
Jonathan: Oh God, yes. [Laughs] See we had really funny people.
Adam: He was quite a character as well, wasn’t he?
Jonathan: Yeah, I’ve always felt that you’re only as funny as the people around you and it’s better to have them get laughs because it helps you, so we found Kitty Bluett, Bill Bain, there was a little old lady, I cannot remember her name and we would put her every once in a while, she was hysterical. We liked character actors.

Adam: There was Joe Hudson, who was in The Horrie Dargie Quintet.
Jonathan: Oh gosh yes, we used him a lot.
Adam: And Addie Black.
Jonathan: [Laughs] Yeah, yeah. This is fun to hear.

Addie Black (with Jackie Brown in the special In the Soup) was a regular on The Delo & Daly Show (Photo: TV Week, Adelaide edition, May 17-23, 1961).
Addie Black (with Jackie Brown in the special In the Soup) was a regular on The Delo & Daly Show (Photo: TV Week, Adelaide edition, May 17-23, 1961).

Adam: Sounds like it’s good memories.
Jonathan: Wonderful memories because they were wonderful people.

Adam: And I think there was Lewis Tegart as well?
Adam: Oh my God, you are amazing! Yeah, absolutely.

Adam: Like you said before, there was Norm Spencer who was the director, and then The Joe Latona Dancers.
Jonathan: And The Take Five.

Adam: When you were on Australian TV, you worked with a lot of the same people over multiple programmes. Was that deliberate or was it just a random thing where everyone was working?
Jonathan: This is a very strange thing to say but there weren’t that many jobs for that many good actors, so if you got on a roll, which I was lucky enough to do, then you kept running into the same good actors. All the directors knew each other, all the casting directors knew each other and I was very pleased to keep running into good friends. It’s actually a pretty small community because there really aren’t that many shows you know.

Adam: The person I forgot to mention was Jimmy Allan who was the conductor of the HSV-7 Orchestra, which was on Delo & Daly.
Jonathan: Yes. You probably don’t know this but Jimmy Allan was a very funny person, he was a comedian.
Adam: No I didn’t know that.
Jonathan: Oh God, he was so funny.

Adam: Jimmy was married to Panda, wasn’t he?
Jonathan: Yes and she was a delight.
Adam: Did you work with Panda on IMT?
Jonathan: Yes.
Adam: I think she’s come back to live here. Jimmy and Panda lived in the U.S. for many years.
Jonathan: They lived in Vegas.
Adam: Did you see them over in Vegas?
Jonathan: No I didn’t, but are you in Melbourne?
Adam: I’m in Adelaide.
Jonathan: If you ever can find Panda please pass on my love to her.

Adam: Did you have any favourite guests on The Delo & Daly Show?
Jonathan: Yes. Dickie Valentine, he and I did a sketch, if you can find it it’s very funny. Dickie was a big star in England and I asked him, “Are you willing to do an almost totally adlibbed sketch? I know you’re a star, you’re a big shot – are you willing to risk it?” He said, “Let’s do it” and it turned out to be very funny. He was a wonderful guy. You know we had so many – Oscar Peterson was fantastic. Oh I’ll tell you who one of my favourites was, Jack Benny.

Adam: Was Jack Benny on the show or was he on something else that you did?
Jonathan: He wasn’t on Delo & Daly?
Adam: I’m not sure. I didn’t see his name in episode listings at the National Film and Sound Archive, but I did see his name on something else you and Ken did. You did the Royal Children’s Hospital Good Friday Appeal so I don’t know if that was a telethon with Jack Benny?
Jonathan: Maybe that was it.
Adam: He could’ve been Delo & Daly, but I didn’t see any reference to it.
Jonathan: I bet we did the telethon with him and stole five minutes with him to put it on The Delo & Daly Show. I bet that’s what it was.

Adam: That might be it. What was he like to work with?
Jonathan: It was funny because I knew this before I met him; he was the most famous comedian in show business in America for being the best audience, he laughs at everything a comedian does, he’s very supportive, wonderful, wonderful man.
Adam: That sounds like a tremendous experience.
Jonathan: Oh yeah, loved him.

Adam: Was there anyone that you were really sort of star-struck by, or was it just business as usual because you did this every week and didn’t have time to be star-struck?
Jonathan: I’ll tell you, when I left Australia I moved into movies and television, so I’ve worked with almost every big name. I worked for two years with Don Rickles on C.P.O. Sharkey, and that’s when you have to stay sharp every minute of every day. I would’ve thought he was going to be intimidating but he was not. So of all the stars I’ve ever worked with, I’ve never had a bad experience.
Adam: He wasn’t intimidating?
Jonathan: Oh no, he was a pussycat. He was a very gentle, loving, almost timid soul; you’d never believe it’s the same person. I thought I was going to be intimidated by Jimmy Stewart but it turned out that he became like a father to me. I’ve never had anybody that spooked me.

Adam: When you were on Delo & Daly were there any mishaps?
Jonathan: Yes every night, every night.
Adam: [Laughs]
Jonathan: We were so lucky that we were capable of adlibbing because we had a lot of things go wrong: doors that wouldn’t open, props that didn’t work. We taped the show but in essence it was live because we didn’t stop. The audience was there so we just ploughed ahead.

Adam: While you were doing The Delo & Daly Show, you and Ken did an afternoon show for a little while. Was that a split show, where you did half of it and Ken did the other half of it?
Jonathan: That’s so funny because Julie McKenna asked me that and she said, “You know, I was on that show with you”, and I said “You were?” It’s so embarrassing but I can’t, I bet you’re right, I bet Ken did “Name That Tune” and I did “Who Do You Trust?”
Adam: I think that’s exactly what it was. Definitely don’t feel bad about memories, I’m asking you to recall things that, I mean, you did a lot back then.
Jonathan: Well, I’m amazed at how much I have remembered so far, yeah.
Adam: I think that I have a clipping with a picture from The Delo & Daly Show, and underneath it mentions that you both announced Julie as a co-host or the hostess of the afternoon show. I will send that to you.
Jonathan: Oh wonderful, send that to me please.

With Julie McKenna (Photo: The Age, TV and Radio Guide Supplement, April 23, 1964).
With Julie McKenna (Photo: The Age, TV and Radio Guide Supplement, April 23, 1964).

Adam: When did the playwriting come in?
Jonathan: Well, the reason I stopped Delo & Daly was because I didn’t want to perform. I wanted to be behind the camera but the problem was when I got back to L.A., I became successful in television and movies. I didn’t like acting, and so what happened was as I was doing and becoming known in television and movies, I started to tinker with writing plays. Eventually I had my own theatre in Hollywood, and I would write plays and direct them. I made a lot of money because the plays started to go out on tour and I would put stars in them. That became my livelihood and, now, because my daughter is a producer of movies, I’m writing movies.

Adam: Wow that’s fantastic. When it came time to leave Australia was it a mutual decision? Did Ken want to go as well?
Jonathan: He wanted to go, but he wanted to keep the act going and I did not.
Adam: Was that a hard thing to tell him?
Jonathan: Yes. I didn’t realise how hard it was. I thought he was okay with it but I don’t think he was too happy with me. I just didn’t want to perform anymore and then I ended up doing all of that. We were very lucky as a comedy team.

Adam: And you’re still in contact with him now?
Jonathan: Oh yes, absolutely.
Adam: I guess after experiencing something like that with someone, the two of you experiencing what occurred during that time.
Jonathan: Yes, because it’s a gift and we were appreciative of it, and we’ve stayed in touch over the years. He was my best man.
Adam: That’s great. He was on The Lawrence Welk Show afterward.
Jonathan: Right.

Program cover for No Sex Please, We're British (Adam Gerace private collection).
Program cover for No Sex Please, We’re British (Adam Gerace private collection).

Adam: You came back to Australia a few years later for the play No Sex Please, We’re British.
Jonathan: When you asked about mishaps on Delo & Daly, I can’t think of a specific thing, but I can tell you when I did No Sex Please I broke my arm.
Adam: Was that a work-related injury?
Jonathan: Oh yeah, yeah, I broke it several times. It was a very physical show. They flew me to London to meet Michael Crawford who was in No Sex Please in London, and he said to me, “You’d better be in good shape, you’re going to get killed in this”. And I did, I got my arm broken twice. When my arm was broken the first time, the St Kilda football team was in the audience. After the show they wanted to meet me so they came back with the coach to the dressing room and asked, “What happened?” I told them, “When that door came down, I broke my elbow.” I was told to come the next morning to the Football Club and the trainers would be put at my disposal, and they’d have me back on the stage that night. So every single morning I would go to the St Kilda Football Club and the trainers would work on my arm and they got me through the play.

This can't end well. Jonathan in a scene with Allan Kingsford Smith (Photo: No Sex Please, We're British program).
This can’t end well. Jonathan in a scene with Allan Kingsford Smith (Photo: No Sex Please, We’re British program).

Adam: Was it Harry M. Miller that brought you back for No Sex Please?
Jonathan: It was Harry Miller. When I broke my arm the second time it was because the stage hands were on strike and they had substitute stage hands. They were supposed to put a mattress in place when I went diving through a window and the mattress wasn’t there. I broke my arm and I left the next day. I left Australia and Harry Miller was livid; he said he was going to kill me! But I didn’t have any more limbs I could break so I left. The author of No Sex Please, a man named Anthony Marriott who also directed the play, found out that I walked out on his play and cost him a lot of money. The funny part is a year later I was living in London and I ran into Anthony on Piccadilly. I thought he was going to hit me! Well, we became best friends and he and I wrote plays together.

Adam: I came across an article written when you were on C.P.O. Sharkey with Don Rickles. Your schedule for that show was from 10 in the morning to six at night, and then you would go to your theatre on Hollywood Boulevard and stay there until 11. You’d then get home after midnight and do some writing. The theatre group rehearsed plays for weeks and then performed them. Weekends were sort of family time and leisure, but you were still writing during that time. It seems like you’re someone who always had a very heavy load when it came to work.
Jonathan: I’ll tell you a funny story, my daughter has produced some really big movies, and she’s very successful and she works 24/7. About a year ago, I said “I’m worried about you, you are back and forth, you’re always on an aeroplane, you’re working 24/7; I’m very concerned about your work schedule”. She looked at me and she said, “Daddy, shut up”, and I shut up, and she said, “You must never say one word to me about a schedule because when you were raising me you were working. You had to be in makeup at 6.30 in the morning, and you didn’t leave the theatre until 11.30 at night. Don’t you ever say a word to me about working too hard”. I said, “Okay, that’s it, never another word”.

Adam: I guess looking back at that, is that a regret?
Jonathan: Well, it’s a regret in that it cost a marriage and it cost time with my kids, but to be honest with you I’ve come to terms with the fact that creative people are in fact slaves to their talent. It’s what you do, you know, it’s a way to make a living.

Adam: I think sometimes people have this idea about creative people that you just wait for the inspiration to happen, and that’s when you’ll write or that’s when you’ll act or sing.
Jonathan: [Laughs] There’s no waiting for it to happen, it just happens. The most frightening thing in the world, and I’m sure you know this, is an empty page. There’s nothing more terrifying than a blank piece of paper.
Adam: Absolutely, I understand that one. The thing is if the inspiration’s not coming you need to get working anyway until it comes; and maybe it will and maybe it won’t.
Jonathan: Yes.

Adam: Do you still write on yellow legal pads, or is it computer now?
Jonathan: No, I still do it and then my wife puts it on Final Draft, a computer program.

Adam: Was one of your biggest plays A Good Look at Boney Kern?
Jonathan: That probably lasted the longest. I think we got 15 years out of it. I’ve had other plays that came closer to Broadway, but they didn’t last as long.

Adam: Do you have a favourite?
Jonathan: Yes I do, my favourite is called Mind If I Join You. It starred Dan O’Herlihy, who was an Oscar-nominated actor, an Irish actor. Greer Garson produced, and she almost got it to Broadway. I think that’s my favourite. Although I got very close to Don Knotts when I was doing Boney Kern, and then Gary Burghoff did it after. When you say your favourite, the experience with Don Knotts was we became very, very close friends and so that all becomes part of it.
Adam: It’s not just the play itself, it’s what goes along with it.
Jonathan: Not just the play itself, exactly.

Adam: I was going to focus mostly on the Australian work and the plays, but Bewitched fans are probably going to kill me if I don’t at least mention it. Do you remember working on Bewitched?
Jonathan: Yes of course, I did several of them.

Adam: Was that a good one to be on?
Jonathan: Oh yeah, because we became good friends, Aggie Moorhead and I, do you know the show?
Adam: Yeah very well, very well.
Jonathan: Okay, well Elizabeth would sit between Aggie Moorhead and me and try to keep peace because Aggie and I would argue about religion. Finally Elizabeth said, “I give up, I can’t follow either of you”, but we had a wonderful time on that show. I spent a lot of time there. I did two or three of them but I also was shooting other things near their soundstage so I stayed in touch.

Adam: Was Elizabeth Montgomery a good person to work with?
Jonathan: Oh yeah, her father was a pro’s pro and so she was naturally very professional and very warm and had a great sense of humour.

Adam: I know people who like that show, and there’s a lot of them out there, will enjoy hearing that. And Agnes Moorhead, was she a fundamentalist, I can’t remember what denomination she was.
Jonathan: Oh no, she just – her whole thing was if you don’t believe in God but then you find out that he existed you’re in trouble, so she said “I’m just going to go with the fact that he exists”.

Jonathan and Elizabeth Montgomery in the Bewitched episode "Samantha's Shopping Spree".
Jonathan and Elizabeth Montgomery in the Bewitched episode “Samantha’s Shopping Spree”.
Jonathan, Agnes Moorehead, and Steve Franken in the Bewitched episode "Samantha's Shopping Spree".
Jonathan, Agnes Moorehead, and Steve Franken in the Bewitched episode “Samantha’s Shopping Spree”.

Adam: What about The Ghost & Mrs. Muir where you played a newlywed with Yvonne Craig and go to the haunted house? I think I saw that on TV again so they keep on.
Jonathan: Oh that was great, that was family.
Adam: With Hope Lange.
Jonathan: Yeah, she was a great girl. I had a lot of fun on that show because Charles Nelson Reilly was on and he was really funny. I got to know Eddie Mulhare who turned out be Dan O’Herlihy’s good friend, and Dan O’Herlihy ended up doing my play. I ended up going on Petticoat Junction as well. It’s wonderful the fact that they’re still going.

Adam: Returning back to Australian television. I guess for someone like me who wasn’t there, what was the TV climate in Australia like at the time? Looking at what was available, there was the international content and also a lot of the old movies, but it seemed to very much be a time of the variety show.
Jonathan: Somebody told me that the last big variety show was our variety show, is that possible?
Adam: After you guys left, IMT continued for a few years after that, but with the exception of probably Don Lane’s show, I can’t think of too many more.
Jonathan: I think Hughie, Hugh Stuckey, said to me fairly recently that the variety show as we did it was kind of the last one. It was a budget thing, a show costs a lot of money. You know who I’ve been in touch with is Olivia Newton-John. I’ll tell you a story, a friend of mine said, “I want you to come over to my house. I want you to hear a little girl sing in my living room,” and I said, “Oh dear God, no, don’t do that to me”. He said “No, no, I just want you to give her a little encouragement”. So I went over and she sat on a stool and she sang for me. I said, “You’re very good, you know what you should do? There are things called coffee houses here in Melbourne and you should go to these coffee houses and you should sing. You will get some experience so you’ll get some confidence singing in front of people; and if you do that, I’ll come to the coffee house”. “Oh, would you do that, would you do that?” “Absolutely”. She became one of the biggest stars in the history of Australia.
Adam: That’s fantastic, what a story.
Jonathan: I just had an email from her about six months ago. In fact she thanked me on some television show years ago and she said, “There was an American comedian over here and he told me that I should…” I knew her sister, Rona, very well.

Adam: Another person from your time here, who still performs every now and then, is Toni Lamond.
Jonathan: She came over to America and did pretty well.
Adam: I don’t know if Denise Drysdale had started when you were here, that might’ve been a bit later on?
Jonathan: No, I didn’t know her but I’ll tell you who I just talked to, Helen Reddy. She was at a hotel here in Hawaii and we had a little chat. I really miss and try to stay in touch. Obviously Helen is still around and Olivia is still around. Is Toni Lamond working again in Australia?
Adam: From what I know, she does the occasional cabaret show.
Jonathan: There’s nothing for them; there really isn’t a variety show now is there?
Adam: No, there isn’t and that’s the problem because I think a lot of them still would like to work.
Jonathan: Why is there no variety on television now?
Adam: It just seemed to change, and I think after probably the ‘80s where you had Don and Bert. The landscape changed, and even now the biggest thing is not even drama series anymore, it’s really reality TV.
Jonathan: Oh yes, isn’t that a crime? What do the young talented singers and comedians do, where do they go?
Adam: There’s not really a lot for them to do, I mean live music is still fairly good and I guess that’s the closest that you’d have to the old sort of nightclub acts, but in terms of TV there’s not a lot.
Jonathan: That’s so sad, wow.
Adam: It’s a shame that it hasn’t kept up. It is a shame because so many would probably want to keep doing it and I think we’re poorer for having this kind of experience.

Adam: What are you working on at the moment?
Jonathan: I’m currently writing screenplays for my daughter. So far only options, but we press on.

Adam: And finally, how do you look back on your time in Australia?
Jonathan: I look back on Oz as some of the happiest days of my life. I made lifelong friendships and loved going to work every day.

Jon today (Photo: Jonathan Daly private collection).
Jon today (Photo: Jonathan Daly private collection).

Jonathan’s IMDb page is here. With thanks to Rad Daly, Jonathan’s son, for putting Jonathan and me in touch; and the staff of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, State Library of South Australia, and State Library Victoria. Top photo from No Sex Please, We’re British program.

Time and Tide

My Two Mothers by Patricia FlorioOne of my favourite opening lines in a novel is from The Go-Between (1953) by L. P. Hartley: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”. In a later introduction to the book from August 1962, Hartley wrote about what shaped his story of an older man reflecting on his past. It was largely one summer in 1900 that left such “a mark on my memory” at only four-and-a-half years of age: “From then on, for many years, I always hoped that the long succession of hot days would be repeated, but unless my memory betrays me it never was, in England at any rate, until 1959”. He concluded that, “I didn’t want to go back to it but I wanted it to come back to me, and I still do”.

Patricia Florio would likely understand that sentiment. She has written a memoir, My Two Mothers: A Memoir with Recipes. My Two Mothers tells the story of a girl raised by two women in Brooklyn in the 1940s and ‘50s: Patricia’s mother, Millie (actually Amelia), and Millie’s sister, Jennie. Patricia writes that “Mama got her ideal situation – and so did Aunt Jennie – a daughter for her childless sister, a daughter to dote on so Mama could fulfill her need to work “outside the house” content that her youngest daughter was safe and well attended to”.

The book originally came from Patricia’s MA thesis at Wilkes University. Theses and dissertations are often destined to languish in library basements. In this case, publisher Gina Meyers of Serendipity Media Group thought that Patricia’s work could make a book. In line with Gina’s interests in cooking, she felt that the book should also contain some of the recipes from Patricia’s growing up in an Italian-American house in Brooklyn.

The result is the addition of actual recipes to a memoir already filled with food: the J&M Grocery store that Jennie and Millie opened, with the tomato cans stacked in a pyramid; the “smell of fried meatballs [that] wafted out of the windows on Sunday mornings” in the largely Italian and Irish neighbourhood on and around Union Street; and family gatherings – be they for holidays, birthdays, or a death – that “began and ended around a kitchen table”. It is a wise move, for food holds such memories for people, particularly (in my experience) children of Italian immigrants.

In addition to the rich characterizations of the Prano sisters, other family members, and neighbours like singer/songwriter Teddy Randazzo and his group The Three Chuckles, Patricia says that there really is one other character in the book. That is Brooklyn, New York. Brooklyn seems to be one of those places very much representative of a collective past, even for those who have never lived there. Perhaps it is the nature of a place that was inhabited so largely by people who all left different pasts and foreign lands to start a common future (in my brother’s genealogy research, even some of my own family). Children of these people, and their children’s children, may have left long ago but many seem to still carry Brooklyn with them. In Walt Whitman’s poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” Whitman speaks to imagined future commuters (fifty, a hundred or many hundred years from him) on the ferry between Manhattan and Brooklyn:

It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not,
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the
bright flow, I was refresh’d,
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift
current, I stood yet was hurried,
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the
thick-stemm’d pipes of steamboats, I look’d.

When I visited Brooklyn a few years ago, I looked across that water and, in particular, up at the very tall apartment buildings. My mind wandered not to the future, but to the past, and all those who had lived, loved, fought, and broken bread there. Those who had felt as Whitman had.

In this interview with Patricia, I asked her to reflect on researching, writing about, and grappling with family history; nostalgia; the changing face of Brooklyn; where her writing has taken her; and, of course, good old Italian cooking.

 

Adam: My Two Mothers was your Master’s thesis. What led you to choose your topic of growing up in Brooklyn within a large extended family?
Patricia: “Write about what you know”. This is a simple suggestion, one that most writing professors encourage their students to take seriously. So I did. Sometimes I thought of my family as Damon Runyon characters, like from Guys and Dolls, each one a distinct character from the other. Thinking that way put me in touch with my feelings, sights, smells, sounds and tastes for the old neighbourhood in Brooklyn and my family members. I sincerely thought Brooklyn could be a character in and of itself. It has so many definitions: home of the Brooklyn Dodgers; Nathan’s Famous in Coney Island; Coney Island beaches; the Cyclone, Thunderbolt, and the Parachute Jump; and the aromas of all of the above. How could I not write about such an eclectic past? Some of the best writers come from Brooklyn, and I certainly wanted to be remembered as one of the good ones.

Adam: Tell me a little about the house on Union Street. How long was the house in the family?
Patricia: The house on Union Street was a gathering place for “la famiglia”; a fun place, not only where I lived with my parents on the third floor, but where everyone came to see grandma, the holidays were spent, tomatoes were grown in the backyard for the Sunday sauce, and where grandma had her basil bushes and fig trees. It was also where we connected to our neighbours: Philip, my best friend, and his family; and the Sconzos on the other side of us who had a contingency of family and friends bigger than ours. The house always evoked festivities. And to tell the truth, it still does.

The actual construction of the house was red brick facade, grey concrete steps, and beige/pink stone balusters. It looked like a mini fortress. There were windows in the front and back of the house. The front windows overlooked Union Street, a busy traffic street, and the windows at the back of the house overlooked backyards of neighbours and the steeple of St. Agnes Catholic Church on Sackett Street.

There were only two apartments in the early 1900s, where the entire Prano family lived in and slept. When I was born, there were three apartments: Grandma living in the basement apartment, Aunt Jennie and Uncle Frank on the second floor, and then up a steep staircase was our apartment. At one time, the apartment my Aunt Jennie and Uncle Frank lived in before I was born were the bedrooms for Grandma Petrina and Grandpa Giovanni’s children (my aunts and uncles, of which there were nine altogether that lived. Grandma miscarried a set of twins later in life). I lived with my sister and brother, who were older than me, and my father and mother, of course. Some of the hallway decor I still possess today: beautiful frames and pictures of early Americana, and one of the Rialto Bridge in Venice.

Adam: Your book wasn’t originally a food memoir. How did it become one?
Patricia: Gina Meyers had the idea to insert recipes into My Two Mothers, creating the new edition that you’ve read. I first sent her a version of what I called Cucina Amelia, a celebration of food and family. It was a hardcover cookbook that I made for family and friends with a local printer, using standard 8 by 11 typing paper and old pictures of family members from my parents’ photo album. Gina loved it and utilized some of my grandmothers’ and mother’s recipes. She selected the recipes that are in the new edition of My Two Mothers: A Memoir with Recipes. Eventually, Cucina Amelia became my next project for publication.

Adam: How were the family recipes passed down to you? How did you choose which recipes to include in the book?
Patricia: Since the only time I spent with my part-time working mother was as she prepared our meals around four o’clock in the afternoons, I learned my cooking skills from watching her. The house on Union Street and all the family members celebrated the holidays as one entity every year for as long as I can remember. My mother and her sisters prepared all of those meals, and some of the stories of those holiday events are the head stories in Cucina Amelia. Again, watching and assisting in preparing the dishes, I picked up tips, influences, and the art of cooking for my own family after I was married.

Amelia Prato, Patricia's mother, in 1925 (Patricia Florio private collection).
Amelia Prato, Patricia’s mother, in 1925 (Patricia Florio private collection).

Adam: What was good about choosing to write a family history? What was not so good?
Patricia: When a person chooses to write about family history, it’s kind of scary. I remember that I pitched My Two Mothers as my thesis in this way: what if a woman who has a sister who cannot have children decided to give her unborn daughter to her baron sister, on loan that is, would you read that story? My classmates and professor wanted more. And I embellished, or got creative, about how to tell the story. The original thesis has more pages in it than the memoir that was published. There were some things that I didn’t feel I had the right to tell, even though most of the people had since passed. It’s the Italian guilt left attached to the psyche that did me in!

Choosing to tell this family story, even abbreviated, as it was, for me kept my mother and Aunt Jennie alive a bit longer. It’s a bittersweet story, one I enjoyed telling especially during the time the women went into the grocery business together, and when I had them to take care of in their old age. I feel as if I had such a rich childhood, even with its depressive days, that I wanted to share these two women, Millie and Jennie, with the world.

Adam: Italians (I know) are notoriously guarded with the family secrets. There’s the whole “don’t let the neighbours see” attitude. Was this an issue or barrier when you were writing the memoir; both in terms of other family members finding out and for your own creative process?
Patricia: Yes, I’d have to say I was guarded, especially about their younger brother, whom I called Uncle Sly Fox in the book. His daughter, one of my favourite cousins, and I had always been friends up until the time she aided her father in taking Aunt Jennie away from my home and never bringing her back. I haven’t been too forgiving about that. My mother yearned for her sister; they should never have been separated. It’s still painful, even as I write these words. I allowed my creative process to go so far. I believe I didn’t cross the line. Yet, when I look at my bound thesis, there is a painful aspect of my mother dying that I didn’t put into in the book you read. She (Millie) died in 2004 at 95 years old. Jennie died in 2006 at 99 years old. I agonized over how painful it was for me to write. I just made a decision at the last minute that the book was going to the original publisher to leave that out and summarize the ending. But I can’t say it stunted my creative process. I’m sure it didn’t.

Adam: I’m interested in the allure of nostalgia, and how we may remember a time through rose-coloured glasses. How did you manage this natural human tendency while writing?
Patricia: I am a nostalgic person, but I don’t live in the past. I just embrace it. I have a wonderful present life with my husband, children and grandchildren, and several good friends. I live in a beautiful section of the Jersey Shore with the Atlantic Ocean 50 steps from my front door. It has given me poetic license to dream and think and focus on my writing. But I loved Brooklyn and my family growing up there, both sides of my family, even though I’m more aligned to the Sicilian roots inside me. I love to listen to the aria “Nessun dorma”. Different arias give me the vision of what used to be, how Italians celebrated life. The culture born inside me I allow to flourish whenever I come in contact with people. I love people. I love company. And I have plenty of it during the summers living in a beach community. I embrace the old ways, yet I’m as modern a woman as my mother and Aunt Jennie were. Nostalgia fills me on certain days and I allow it to enter into me. I don’t chase its warmth away.

Patricia with daugher Kristin and granddaughter Amelia (Patricia Florio private collection).
Patricia with daugher Kristin and granddaughter Amelia (Patricia Florio private collection).

Adam: What was your family’s reaction to the memoir? What did your two mothers, Millie and Aunt Jennie think of it?
Patricia: There are several reviews on Amazon, a few from my family members. My brother said, “You killed me”, when we first spoke after he had read my story. My writing caused his emotions to flow. Others thanked me for the memories. My brother’s daughter Christine said, “My father won’t tell you this, but he felt like he abandoned when you needed him most as a child”. Those years that separated me from my sister and brother were like a whole other generation; they are 14 years and 10 years older. My sister married when I was six years old. My brother went into the Air Force when I was eight. In essence, I was an only child.

My mother and Aunt Jennie had both passed when I wrote My Two Mothers. I think my mother would have been extremely happy knowing how much her life impacted mine. We weren’t really friends until my mother was about 80 years old. I have to admit I was closer to Aunt Jennie. I had taken Aunt Jennie’s infirmities and loss of two husbands, Frank Richmond and Nick Coniglio, as my job to handle. That’s why it was so hard for me when she went with her younger brother: the fact that she allowed them to lure her, to go and live with them and abandoned my mother. It took a lot of praying on my part and years for me to get over it.             

Adam: Tell me about your participation in the Fellowship program at the Norman Mailer Center. How did this come about?
Patricia: Norman Mailer was on the board of trustees of Wilkes University’s Creative Writing programs. He helped get the courses accredited with its founders Dr. Bonnie Culver and Dr. J. Michael Lennon. Dr. Lennon is Norman Mailer’s official biographer. Mr. Mailer had a stake in all of its students/writers. And we in turn had a stake and an opportunity to be mentored after graduating with our degrees by other faculty and professors from across the country. These scholarships and fellowships were set up by the Norman Mailer Society or the Norman Mailer Center, I forget which one, and anyone around the world could apply by sending 30 or 40 pages of a project that they are working on. I did this on two occasions. In 2012, I was a fellowship finalist and went to Provincetown to Mr. Mailer’s home for my memoir workshop. In 2014, I was granted a scholarship and went out west to Utah for my week’s workshop.

Adam: What are some of your other works?
Patricia: On my website, patriciaflorio.com, I have some of my other works that I’m proud of. One called Theresa is about my sister-in-law Terry. Phyllis Scott published a lot of my short stories. I’m especially proud of how I entered into the writing world via newspaper travel pieces and commentaries being published by local and major newspapers. I covered the Scene Page for the Two River Times, a Red Bank weekly newspaper, for a couple of years. I’ve written for stripedpot.com, a travel e-zine and my work can be found in numerous anthologies and literary journals.

Adam: Brooklyn has undergone tremendous change since your grew up there. To you, what is the most noticeable change?
Patricia: Ah, Brooklyn, to me it has never changed, although I know it has. The face of my grandmother’s house has been modernized. Obviously, that’s especially noticeable. But nowadays, the people in the neighbourhood where I grew up, now called Carroll Gardens, are rich or at least well-to-do! We were poor white Italian-Americans and Irish-Americans, struggling to better our lives. Now, I guess the neighbourhood is considered gentrified; people are tagged as nouveau riche.

Ebbets Field is no longer there, where the Brooklyn Dodgers were nicknamed the Brooklyn Bums. Brooklyn people loved the Dodgers when I was growing up. The “Boys of Summer” from 1955 when they beat the New York Yankees, will never be again. Brooklyn Heights is still upper class. I go there often to look out across the river and marvel at the skyline. My mother-in-law still lives in Brooklyn, downtown, as it was referred to in the good old days, so I still have plenty of opportunities to eat in restaurants that I had eaten in as a kid.

Adam: As you’ve gotten older, have your memories become less dependent on the physical house on Union Street, or do you still long to be in that place?
Patricia: My memories are not dependant on the physical house on Union Street. That’s why we have memories. I can conjure them up anytime I want. I don’t long to be in that place anymore. I can be anywhere where my husband is. We were just married 43 wonderful years. My life and his are joined at the hip. Well, that’s what a lot of people say about us. We were in the same career for almost 30 years as court reporters. I still have occasion to transcribe his notes from the District Court at Newark, NJ, when things get hairy and he’s on a long trial.

Adam: Do you have any recommendations for people wanting to document family history?
Patricia: I think documenting family history is a fun thing to do if you’re up for the job. I spent several months researching my family’s history from Palermo, Sicily to the United States, the ship they came on, etc. I even went on a trip to my father’s parents’ village in Avellino, Naples. I think I found the right spot where my Prato grandparents came from. I’ve learned a lot of interesting things going to Italy and reading other authors’ books about Italy: recipes, culture, their holiday traditions, and so forth. I’m none the worse for all the reading.

A few interesting facts: my parents Amelia Prano and Rocco Prato, almost the same last name, were both born on August 16, five years apart. My mother’s name Amelia is similar to my father’s mother’s name Amalia, whom my sister Molly is named for. Both of my parents had nine brothers and sisters.

Adam: What are you working on at the moment?
Patricia: At the present time, I’m working on what I’ve entitled Confessions of a Court Reporter. It’s a book that starts out about a young girl who tells a very potent lie to her father when she is 10 years old. It also weaves in some of the cases I’ve worked on as a court reporter and/or transcriptionist. I’m not giving away any more of the story. The first half of the book is now revised and is being edited, while I continue to work on the second half. This is definitely a labour of love that I’ve been toiling over for the past two years and have workshopped at the Mailer Colonies. It even contains some poetry.

 

My Two Mothers: A Memoir with Recipes can be purchased at the publisher’s website or at Amazon.com. Patricia’s other book, Cucina Amelia, is also available on Amazon (link to her author’s page). Patricia’s website is here.

Excerpts from The Go-Between are from the 2002 edition published by The New York Review of Books (New York, NY). Excerpt from “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” is from Leaves of Grass, available through Project Gutenberg.

Calm Life Mind

Gavin HarrisonGavin Harrison has always worn many hats. Of course, one of them was acting. On Australian television he played cyclist Hugo Strzelecki on the Seven Network’s revered drama series A Country Practice. Before that, he had several stints on Home and Away as Morris “Revhead” Gibson, one of the soap’s first bad boys. At the moment, Gavin’s main role is as a producer with his own advertising production company, Section9 Productions. The Los Angeles-based company engages in global print campaigns for everything from Kia to BMW to Tesla in the automotive industry, to Absolut Vodka, American Airlines, and Philips. It’s no surprise to find that it is a “full-service” company, meaning Gavin and his crew are involved right from pre-production, to shooting, and then to post-production. That includes scouting locations, casting, co-ordinating production, lighting, and working alongside photographers. After all, Gavin has worked in all these areas at one time or another, and has done so since he was 15. He’s clearly happiest when he is doing multiple things.

Gavin was accepted into film school as a teenager. From starting out as a second-assistant director, he ended up at Priest Productions. It’s perhaps difficult – given how woven into the music industry the video clip has become over the last 30 years – to imagine how pioneering on a worldwide stage its Australian owner, Steven Priest, was in the ‘80s as a producer and director of videos, live music specials, and commercials. The work of him and his team included videos for Elton John, KISS, The Angels, Cold Chiesel, INXS, Mi-Sex, Duran Duran, Noiseworks, John Farnham, and Little River Band. This was Gavin’s apprenticeship in production. Acting came into the picture around the same time, when Gavin got his first role (a different character to Hugo) out of high school on A Country Practice.

There were early roles in Australian productions. In You’ve Probably Saved His Life, Gavin played a schoolboy swimmer named Tom whose father dies unexpectedly. In one scene, Tom and his sister (played by Sarah Lambert, who is the creator of the Australian Nine Network’s current hit series Love Child) try to cheer up their grieving mother, Pam (Judy Morris), by cooking her dinner. It’s a spectacular disaster, but a poignant scene in this short film produced as an education tool for St John Ambulance Australia. If you were in an Australian school at the time, you probably saw it one day in class; along with the “where do babies come from?” video. Another part was a guest role as Kieron Taylor, who may or may not be the long-lost son of a dangerous dictator played by Gerard Kennedy, in the 1980’s version of the television series Mission: Impossible. This was a U.S. production filmed on the Gold Coast in Queensland, and again starred Peter Graves.

From there, it was on to Home and Away in 1988. Revhead may have been somewhat misunderstood by the folk of seaside town Summer Bay, but there’s no denying he was a dirty guy. The panel beater (for non-Australian folk reading here, someone who repairs damaged motor vehicles) made enemies of good boys Steven Matheson (Adam Willits), Adam Cameron (Mat Stevenson) and Blake Dean (Les Hill), and was often found hassling (a very Home and Away word) the likes of Roo Stewart (Justine Clarke), Emma Jackson (Dannii Minogue) and Viv Newton (Mouche Phillips). Gavin played nice guys in between his appearances on Home and Away. He was Renato Santinelli on the short-lived Family and Friends on the Nine Network in 1990, and had a guest appearance as a boxer on the acclaimed ABC drama GP. This was one of his favourite roles, and one with significant training involved to get Gavin to have the look and feel of a boxer. When Revhead was finally put away for good in 1991 (he must have been paroled by now), Gavin took on a full-time role on A Country Practice.

From Revhead to Hugo (Photo: TV Week).
From Revhead to Hugo (Photo: TV Week).

Gavin played Hugo Strzelecki on A Country Practice from 1992 to shortly before the series ended in 1993. In his first episode, which aired in Australia on January 27, Hugo’s dreams of the Tour de France are sidelined after a car accident, leading him to stay in rural Wandin Valley. The accident was at the hands of the person who eventually becomes his best pal, Darcy Hudson, who was played by Kym Wilson. Admittedly, most of the people who got anywhere near Darcy’s driving didn’t fare much better. Once she even ran down someone who was just borrowing Hugo’s bike. It all seems a little sinister. Nonetheless, Gavin and Kym were a great pair on-screen as the new kids in town, as were Gavin and Judith McGrath, who played Darcy’s mother Bernice; Maureen Edwards as the hospital’s director of nursing, Matron Rosemary Prior; and Joyce Jacobs, the town gossip, Esme Watson. Hugo even engaged in a croissant bake-off with Esme. He was a brave boy to go up against someone who had been baking since before he’d taken the training wheels off of his cycle.

Gavin and Kym (Photo: TV Week).
Gavin and Kym (Photo: TV Week).

A Country Practice was one of the premier dramas on Australian television at the time, and mixed light and dramatic moments with dexterity. Some of the heavy for Hugo included significant injuries and illness; conflict with his father (something that seemed to be prevalent for many of Gavin’s characters); and a moral ambivalence that was involved in some of Hugo’s decisions, such as when he had the chance to inflict a damaging “sucker punch” on a boxing opponent. In the two-part “Little Boy Blue”, which was very much ahead of its time in dealing with gay issues on television, Hugo and training friend Brett Cooper (Simon Stokes) are beaten up in a homophobic attack. It remains one of Gavin’s favourite storylines.

Eventually it was not Darcy or the Tour de France that kept Hugo in or out of the Valley, respectively, but a romance with Christina Agapitos, a young woman with leukemia. She was played by Gavin’s real-life friend and former Home and Away co-star Rebekah Elmaloglou. For those episodes, there was significant consultation between A Country Practice staff and CanTeen, the Australian support service and charity for young people living with cancer. At the time, Gavin also had significant involvement with another support service for seriously-ill children, the Starlight Foundation. His involvement with Starlight was driven initially by the loss of a childhood friend to cancer.

After Gavin left A Country Practice, he headed to L.A., where he hit the ground running in a string of programs. There was the British-American mini-series Signs and Wonders involving a mother trying to wrestle her daughter from a cult with the help of a de-programmer played James Earl Jones; Amazing Grace on NBC starring Patty Duke, in which he played a runaway named Link, and where Gavin felt he experienced one of his best moments on screen; and bad-guy roles on CBS’ Chicago Hope and Diagnosis Murder. You’re pretty bad when you have Mark Harmon, and especially Dick Van Dyke, in your path of destruction. In film, he co-starred as real-life Fred “Freddie” Barker, the youngest of Kate “Ma” Barker’s (Theresa Russell) boys, in Public Enemies.

As Fred Barker in Public Enemies.
As Fred Barker in Public Enemies.

After a role in 1998’s Exposé, Gavin realised that he wasn’t going in the direction that he wanted. After some downtime, which in many ways was some of his first since he was 15, he started working again as a camera assistant. Among those he worked with were Helmut Newton and his wife, June Browne, known for her photography by the name Alice Springs. While Gavin had always intended to work in front of and behind the camera in the U.S., part of his decision was that his current career would be disconnected from his acting work. In his words, he “buried” his old life as an actor. He built a new career in photography. One night, after an accident, he found that he couldn’t work in that role anymore. It was then, at this potential crisis point, that the seeds were sown for what would become Section9 Productions.

Gavin and I spoke recently, and in great detail, about his early life, roles on the iconic television series that he was a part of, and his life for the past 20 years in Los Angeles. I think you’ll be particularly interested in Gavin’s perspective on how all the components of his life – what he has done as an actor, producer, photographer, and filmmaker – have recently come together for him. We also spoke about his relatively new foray into making music under the artist name mtrack. Oh, and he told me to come join him next time I’m in L.A. for (depending on the season) snowboarding or water skiing. Gavin assures me that “it doesn’t matter what level you’re at”. He might just eat his snow hat.

Adam: How did you start in the business? Was it an interest in production or acting that initially led you down this road?
Gavin: Basically I used to love photography and music when I was younger at school. I was a day boy at Newington College. I played violin from third grade through and so I played violin in the Chamber Orchestra. I really enjoyed it for the most part and then you got exposed to a bit of theatre at school, which was great. In Year 10, I really wanted to get into film. My parents basically said if you can get into a college you can leave, but they were not about to have me leave Newington in Year 10. My mum’s an artist too – she’s an amazing painter and does ceramics, she’s a really fantastic, grounded woman – and she was really supportive. My dad was too, but he’s a bit more pragmatic; he’s an engineer so he’s a little bit more nuts and bolts while my mum is a bit free-flowing.

My mum helped me look into KvB College. You had to be 18 or be in an industry where you could submit some work. I went to the AV studio and asked Mr. Swain, who was also really supportive and a great teacher, to let me use the gear at lunch time and after school. I was making music videos. I was shooting them, editing and I was in them, because who wants to give up their lunch time or after school? I was the nemesis in it so I’d wear different clothes and then I’d chase myself around in the same music video. That’s how I started to produce something to see if I could leave school and pursue something that I loved.

KvB College really liked what I had done and they gave me an aptitude test because I was 15. Based on the aptitude test and the work, they actually made an exception and I went straight into that film school. I hadn’t even turned 16 yet.

Adam: You were probably a bit of anomaly going in fresh without having done a lot?
Gavin: I think even just given my age. I had so much energy at the time – I kind of still do – and was so into it. If anybody needed anything done, I was doing it. I was a cameraman if they wanted to work late. I was only 16 so I didn’t really have a social life, and I didn’t have a girlfriend. Of course you’re running around at that age and doing your thing, but I was in there late night working, editing, and just doing a mammoth amount of work because I loved it. It was very easy for me to put the time in.

Adam: Is that how you started working with Steven Priest or am I getting ahead there?
Gavin: No, that’s correct. I was working with a first assistant director as a second assistant on sets of TV commercials and some music videos. I met a director, John Jobson, through this first AD. He started to do some work at Priest Productions, some music videos, and then he brought me in there as his assistant working with him in the back office. I got to know those guys there, and when John Jobson went back to L.A. they asked me to stay on. I became a part of the production team coming out of college when I was around 17.

Gavin as Kieron Taylor in Mission: Impossible.
Gavin as Kieron Taylor in Mission: Impossible.

Acting had kind of started a little bit before that as well. I got my first role on A Country Practice when I was 15 or 16, just when I was leaving Newington College. I played my first character. I was really more focused on being behind the camera rather than in front of the camera. I felt that if I couldn’t be stable in front of the camera all the time, I might as well learn behind the camera. My parents felt that was a good decision for me to want to understand the complete medium of film and television, wherever I might be working.

Adam: Did it kind of feel very bang, bang, bang, like it kind of all happened at once?
Gavin: Yeah, I think so. How it really started was I would pick up my sister from dancing in the city. She was at a ballet school that merged with a talent school. My parents felt safer if I take my little sister home so when I finished playing rugby I would go in and wait for her. I was waiting in the lobby all the time, and a talent agent asked me if I wanted to take any classes or get involved in any part of what the school was about. I landed a role in what I think was an international Coca-Cola commercial, skateboarding or doing something like that.

Adam: Just completely kind of random.
Gavin: Yeah it was random. I mean I was into photography and film and music, but I didn’t think that it would start before leaving school. I started going on some auditions and then I landed my first role in A Country Practice. I think I did A Country Practice twice before I became a regular.

Adam: I think that I remember them. You were a musician or something like that?
Gavin: I was a musician, yeah, and I played guitar and had a crazy drunken dad. I think I played really quickly a jockey or something as well. It all started happening pretty quickly and I was learning as I was going.

Adam: Did you know Steven Priest well?
Gavin: Yeah, I worked there for a while. It was kind of toward the end of the company’s time, like Russell Mulcahy and those guys had come out of that house. I worked with them for 14, 16 hours a day and you get to know them pretty well. I even saw Steven just before he passed away. He had a pretty colourful life throughout the excessive superstardom era of the ‘80s and ‘90s.

Adam: What are some of the videos that are you worked on which are memorable to you?
Gavin: I think working on some Noiseworks videos when they were just coming up and some really great shots out in the desert, Cronulla in the sand dunes with these massive lunar crane arms and seeing large production happening. Then working with Jimmy Barnes was a lot of fun. Anywhere where you’re on a set and the camaraderie is there and people are being creative and there’s loud music.

Johnny Diesel was super cool. He was like the Australian version of Johnny Depp. I thought he carried himself really well and was very professional and really together. He had a stand-alone unique kind of energy about him that I thought was really interesting.

Adam: I like that description because when you come across people like that, it’s there, it’s all in the way they carry themselves.
Gavin: It’s innate, it’s not put on, and they don’t dress up. It’s just innate in their nature and their energy and it’s kind of nice to be around that.

Adam: Were you ever star-struck by anyone who you were working with?
Gavin: I don’t think so because I’d been on the set as an actor before and I’d been around all the guys in A Country Practice and GP. For us as kids in Australia there were three or four television stations so they were really famous people besides your movie stars. They were local, home grown, really fantastic accomplished actors. But I think it was mitigated in me because I had been in front of a camera with them. I was pretty comfortable around these kinds of people who were in the public eye.

Adam: I think that describes it really well. It was a very different time over here in terms of TV. People on A Country Practice and shows like GP were really at the front and centre.
Gavin: Yeah, unless you went to theatre, but as the general population at home GP, A Country Practice, and Home and Away were the people who were amazing and you could be star-struck by it. Then there were the musicians. We covered a Hall and Oates concert and we did Julio Iglesias. It was always interesting to see the big international productions. We worked on the opening of the Melbourne Tennis Centre and I accidentally ran into Martina Navratilova. I was running getting all these banners set up and it was busy. She stepped out of one of the dressing rooms and I pulled up really quickly, and she was right there; I almost really slammed into her. She was in my eye line and I was like, Wow, that’s Martina Navratilova. I was pretty in awe of who she was at the time.

Adam: Were you into sport?
Gavin: At school yeah, I liked rugby and I liked running, swimming, and water skiing.  I tried to watch some sport – you know how you’d watch cricket with your parents while they were having a cool drink in the afternoon on a weekend – but, in general, I played more of it than I watched.

Adam: I remember a photo shoot in TV Week where you were water skiing with Dieter Brummer and Tristan Bancks from Home and Away. You were on A Country Practice at that point. Did you start water skiing young?
Gavin: We grew up in southern Sydney in Oatley. My parents bought a house on a valley on the river there so that’s where water skiing comes in. A good friend of mine’s parents would go up to the river – they had a little house – and they kind of taught me when I was 10 or 11. I would just ski every weekend. One of my closest friends and I would just grab some friends and we’d ski all day long. Dodging jelly fish and having a good time, basically. Later on, I bought a boat and some friends and I would go to the Hawkesbury River on the weekend. I just love being on the river and skiing. I find it very meditative. I still do it here when I can get the chance. Summer I’ll go water skiing and then winter my wife and I go snowboarding as much as we can.

Gavin on the water (Photo: TV Week).
Gavin on the water (Photo: TV Week).

Adam: Returning to Steven Priest and working at Priest Productions. When he died was that the first loss that you’d experienced?
Gavin: No, I had a really good friend of mine pass away when he was 21 and I was 16, 17 and that’s why I got involved with the Starlight Foundation. One of my mum’s closest friends growing up, her son got cancer and then he fought that fight and then he lost that fight. I saw him before he died and went to the funeral. I found that really hard to wrap my head around at the time. You know you have those knee-jerk reactions of, “Why him? Why this? Why that?” In the end there’s really no reason why, but I grew up pretty quickly at that point seeing my friend die from cancer.

At the height of A Country Practice, I did a lot of work with Starlight Foundation going to the children’s cancer ward and spending spare time there. It kept me grounded rather than running around being on TV, so to speak. Even when I moved to the States, I took some people who were having their wishes granted to Disneyland. One of the guys who I met, Steven Walter, passed away. I became really friendly with him and his mum. I’m still really good friends with his mum. She’s legendary in how she’s kept her son’s legacy alive, and how much money they’ve raised for the Steven Walter Children’s Cancer Foundation. They do the Snowy Ride, a motorcycle event. He was a motorcycle fanatic, an amazing rider. That was another young death, he was 19. It’s very grounding and gives you perspective.

Adam: I guess with time you get to understand these things more and, like you said, there’s no reason to it; it just is. But at a young age it’s an experience that changes you.
Gavin: It does, it challenges you, and you just have to be more accepting. I mean you obviously feel the emotional side of it, and sometimes there are no answers to some of the questions and you have to make peace with that. Then you also can’t use that as an excuse to be down, because I don’t think that’s a great way to move forward. You can’t bury the emotion, but you just can’t use it as an excuse to be down.

Adam: I found with some losses that experienced later on, in particular two suicides, I didn’t realise how hard they hit me. When you’re older, you kind of keep going, get ready in the morning, and go to work. And you do it until you stop and realise, Hey, I’m not really functioning here.
Gavin: Yes, especially if you’ve got that and suicide. I’ve had a few friends who I went to school with commit suicide. Sometimes it takes a while because I think as an adult your safety mechanisms come into play and they only let you feel enough not to basically go off a cliff yourself. So I think it’s the slow, unravelling of being able to deal with emotions, like you said. It slowly starts hitting you as these things come on. It could be a year later and you’re sitting down in the morning just crying your eyes out and you realise it’s all of these things.

Adam: Can we talk – oh I sound like Joan Rivers – that’s what she used to say.
Gavin: She’s gone too.
Adam: I loved her. I met her in a hotel lobby once. Let’s talk about some of your early acting work. Do you remember You’ve Probably Saved His Life, which was a public educational video from St John Ambulance, but one that was structured as a dramatic story? You played Judy Morris’ son and your father dies because no one knows how to perform CPR.
Gavin: Oh yes, Judy Morris, I totally forgot about this. What year was that?
Adam: 1987.
Gavin: So I would’ve been 16. That was probably around the first A Country Practice. I can’t remember now what the premise of the story was, but what I did know at the time was that was a pretty amazing opportunity to be working with Judy Morris.

Adam: The other one I wanted to talk about was Mission: Impossible. You were Gerard Kennedy’s potential son in that.
Gavin: Yes, his holographic potential son. That was around the same time I think. It was really interesting to watch again because it was one of the first things I had ever done. You’re going off whatever instincts you might have at the time. It was really a great experience. I had to learn how to scuba dive and swim without a mask, and be trained in all these pools up on the Gold Coast. Terry Markwell was really great. Peter Graves was also very nice, and so was Thaao Penghlis. They were all very welcoming, and to be a new member of the Mission: Impossible team in that episode at my age was pretty amazing. Then there were the helicopters and people chasing you down with guns. It was kind of this fantasy land that I got to run around in, and one that you’d watch on television as a kid.

Adam: When you look at it now does it take you back?
Gavin: It really takes me back and you look at it as a different person completely. It’s amazing how, if you get caught on video or film at a really young age and you look back at it, it really gives you a good perspective on who you were at the time.

When I was watching it, I was actually quite separated from it. I was enjoying it thinking it was kind of, not funny, but endearing to see this really young guy – who happens to be me – stumbling my way through and trying to find my feet as an actor. I was going for it and doing the best I could, and trying to wrap my head around being really young on this international show. I kind of felt proud of myself for going after it at the time without a ton of experience.

"Father?" Kieron meets his potential pa.
“Father?” Kieron meets his potential pa.
The Mission: Impossible team.
The Mission: Impossible team.

Adam: How did you start working on Home and Away?
Gavin: I think I auditioned for it. I can’t quite remember. I believe that Revhead was the first and only role I did on that show. They kept bringing me back all the time. Naomi Watts played my sister in a few episodes in a wheelchair.

Adam: What do you remember of her?
Gavin: She was a sweetheart. I thought she was really sweet and grounded. I saw her outside of the show a couple of times with different friends and she always was grounded and very nice; and she was really easy to work with. With all her success, I think she still comes off that way. Naomi’s also a little bit private, which I like. She just lets the work speak for itself.

Gavin and Naomi Watts
Gavin and Naomi Watts

Adam: Were there other people on the show that you particularly liked working with?
Gavin: Rebekah Elmaloglou was a good friend of my sister’s. They did ballet together, so Rebekah and I had a long relationship just as friends from my sister. And then Ray Meagher was nice. I’m switching here, but when you said who did I like working with, Judith McGrath on A Country Practice was a person who I thought was amazing, too. She was great.

With Rebekah Elmaloglou.
With Rebekah Elmaloglou.
With Belinda Jarrett.
With Belinda Jarrett.

On Home and Away everyone was pretty nice. Belinda Jarrett was nice. I think when you’re playing these characters and you have to be in different situations or have a love interest, and you’re pretty young, that can always be a little bit difficult. We had to kind of work at those things on set because she was quite young and she had to have this relationship with my character – and I’m nothing like Revhead – in front of cameras. I think that was a little bit challenging just because of people’s ages at the time, but she was a nice person absolutely.

Adam: Not that Revhead was a teen idol as such, but did those sorts of labels sit well with you?
Gavin: I think at the time I didn’t mind whatever they wanted to call me so I could continue to do what I was doing. That is completely a part of the business and a part of the publicity. Jane Nagel, who did publicity at Home and Away and A Country Practice, gave me a good business perspective on it, especially on A Country Practice. Since I had also been involved in both sides of the industry, I learnt really young that there’s the person, the professional, and the product, and that these three aspects of my life should be viewed as such when I was doing certain things.

Adam: Was being associated with playing a character like Revhead difficult?
Gavin: At the beginning. I didn’t really like the name at all, and as a kid I’d copped a few hits from guys like him. Then once I realised that I could fit the character and it was a challenge, then I found a lot of fun in it. I could tap into this kind of rough “Westie” ocker-type guy, but you could actually style it in a way that was a little cooler out in amongst a beach town. I resisted it at first and once I realised it was a challenge it became a lot of fun actually.

You know what’s funny right now is that my nieces and nephews are playing reruns of Home and Away, so Revhead is back on the screens. I think my eldest recognises me but the other two say, “Is that really Uncle Gavin?” Then they search me out on YouTube and they think it’s really funny that their uncle is running around with this heavy Aussie accent looking the way I do, playing Revhead the spanner man on television in Australia.

Adam: They’re probably not used to Uncle Gavin saying, “Rack off!”
Gavin: No exactly! It’s so funny, all those colloquial terms that we used to throw out there – all the “mates” and the “rack offs”, and all that kind of stuff.

Adam: How did you get you get Renato on Family and Friends? Was it through your association with people working on that show who had been involved in Home and Away?
Gavin: It was a Channel 7 show and I’m trying to think whether they offered it to me or I auditioned. I can’t really remember. I don’t think I really knew anybody going into it.
Adam: Home and Away producers John Holmes and Alan Bateman were on there.
Gavin: Well that’s probably why. I think if I had been working on that show with them they probably had me audition from Revhead to Renato, the Italian-Australian kid in lots of scenes in speedos. He was a swimmer. I really enjoyed that show. Jonathan Hardy was great. Rachael Beck and I became friends. I thought she was an amazing artist also and, to this day, I think she’s a really consummate professional. But I enjoyed the show and I think it came from A Country Practice early on and Home and Away that maybe the producers thought it would be a good fit and I auditioned for it.

Adam: One show that you said at the time was a really good professional experience was on GP, when you played a boxer. You trained with Bernie Hall for that? From what I’ve read, he was quite a character.
Gavin: He was a character. I remember going up there to the gym and asking him about it, and he’s straight out of that leathery old – like the trainer from Rocky. He was just in the gym his whole life and he felt like the gym, smelt like the gym, looked like the gym. There was an authenticity to him, and I think training with him really prepared me mentally to understand what it was like to be a boxer to the certain degree that you could.

I trained incredibly hard for that role and it was really important for the dynamic of the character. I think that the guy who I fought against in GP was a national champion. He was a very accomplished guy and he had to lose to my character, which he graciously did. I was in good shape at the time but I realised that you don’t have to look like The Rock to pack a punch. I got hit a few times in training with the guy, and he was so powerful and so fast. I didn’t know what it was to be fit until I trained as a boxer. My whole life I’d been pretty athletic, but to train as a boxer it was a whole other level.

Up against the ropes.
Up against the ropes.

Adam: Let’s speak about to A Country Practice. How did you get that role?
Gavin: That was an audition process as well. That’s the most vivid audition I remember because there were two or three guys sitting outside and we all kept coming in and doing the scene with Kym Wilson. We obviously knew it was for a recurring role or to become a new cast member so I knew it was a big deal. But I really enjoyed the process. It was one of those times where I told myself to just let it go, enjoy yourself, and be in the moment. I really loved the show. I had done it a few times before and I felt pretty comfortable. I also knew Kym Wilson briefly from the talent school or something like that so she wasn’t so foreign to me. Of course, I hoped that I would get this part, but I didn’t really have this crazy energy of “I’ve got to get this – this is going to change my life”. At the time, I was directing some music videos and working on other different sets when I auditioned so it wasn’t the thing that was going to make or break my life at the time. It was amazing when it did happen.

With Fatso the wombat on the set of A Country Practice.
With Fatso the wombat on the set of A Country Practice.

Adam: How old were you when you started on A Country Practice?
Gavin: I was 21.
Adam: And Kym Wilson’s great, I love watching her.
Gavin: I think she’s working in fashion and is over here in the States. I’ve kind of gone back and forth talking through people and friends that say “Hi” to her. We had a great time working on the show. We had great chemistry and she was always fun to be around.

Adam: At the time that you and Kym came on to the show it was a period of change for the series, in particular with a number of cast changes. Was it a difficult time or was that not really in play?
Gavin: No, it wasn’t really in play. I think for the people who were still in the show it was probably exciting to have some changes since it had been on for so long. Maybe the ratings also weren’t where the network wanted them to be so they said they were going to bring a younger storyline in and introduce some other characters to add some new flavor or energy to the show. It felt good. It kind of felt like you were a part of something that had been around a long time, but you were also responsible for helping it to continue. For me, it was exciting to be there and you really wanted to do an amazing job and maintain the integrity of the show.

I thought A Country Practice was one of the most respected programmes that you could appear on at the time. Everyone wanted to support each other so it made it fantastic to work within the cast. It had social depth and it had humour, which I really liked. When your storylines would come around and they were about heavy issues, you felt that you had a responsibility to do it well and to tell the story. There were so many levels to the show that it helped me mature and really taught me a lot as a person, just from working on it and reading the scripts.

Adam: How did you approach Hugo?
Gavin: With Hugo, for me, it was an open canvas to bring parts of my life to this guy who was riding through town getting ready to go to Tour de France and had all the promise in the world. Then he just got sideswiped and ended up in Wandin Valley Hospital, and the challenge was to accept what had happened to him. As I said earlier, I think you need to go deep and feel disappointed and ask questions like, “Why me?” Then it’s how you deal with those set of circumstances that define you. The beginning of the character in the series was a defining moment: his dream just got shattered and everything changed in that moment. It was really him redefining himself because he had put everything and every bit of energy into this one goal of going to the Tour de France.

I found a journey of Hugo trying to figure out how to build new dreams, and how to deal with who he was in this new place. He also had the ability to be anybody in this new place. I was really trying to be open to and interpret the writing and what they saw for the character. Because there wasn’t really a great idea of who the character was, except that this is where he’s going and this is what happened. From there, I was kind of open to build on it.

Adam: I liked the subtlety in the character. Hugo comes across as a very happy-go-lucky guy, but there are those levels of change and transformation going on.
Gavin: Yeah, and I think he was happy to be in the town, and he hadn’t really had a home. Hugo’s always been on the run to get somewhere. Then his dad came and they fought and it’s basically like, “Hey, I’ve finally found some happiness somewhere, and you’re coming in here and reminding me of why I wanted to ride my bike to get away from my life”. When things hit him hard, like his Lyme disease, he got a bit aggressive. I think that was because he just started to like what was happening, and then it was changing again.

Adam: Hugo’s experience is like when you find yourself moving along and then all of sudden something stops you. It may be getting ill briefly or something like that, but there’s a reason for it. Your body or something else is saying to you, “If you don’t stop I’m going to stop you, because you’ve got something to learn here”.
Gavin: Yeah it’s the Universe putting the brakes on for you and it’s hitting that Universal wall. At some point you’re going to hit it: emotionally, personally, self-created, out of the blue, an accident. I think sometimes it’s a really good thing. Sometimes in life when those things happen, they’re good.

Adam: You mentioned Judith McGrath before. Was there anyone else that you really enjoyed working with?
Gavin: I would say everyone. I’m not just saying that, but everyone was great. Some people you know better because you’re in more scenes with them. I made good friends with Jamie Croft. He’s a great young talented actor who was on the show. Shane Porteous just commanded so much respect; he was almost like the Buddha cruising around because he was the consummate professional and so he commanded a lot of respect.

With Jon Concannon and Judith McGrath.
With Jon Concannon and Judith McGrath.

I worked with Syd Heylen and Gordon Piper in the scenes in the pub. Since they’d been on the show for so long, it seemed like Syd, Gordon, and Joyce Jacobs were always having an incredibly good time. You just loved them and thought for each of them, What a life. Michelle Pettigrove was a sweetheart. Georgie Parker was there when I started, and she was really nice too. They were so welcoming. It was incredible. I hate to say it, but when you get a bunch of actors together who really care about what they’re doing they seem to really take you in. I found when I was younger that they took you in and wanted you to succeed.

I got to do a bunch of scenes with Joyce Jacobs. She’d come in to the bar and I’d always have some interaction with her. I thought that was always really great for my character because she was such a classic, funny woman. I really enjoyed those moments that I got to spend with her. Brian Wenzel, he was tough and down the line, no messing around, super pro, get it done. And Maureen Edwards was really sweet. She couldn’t be nicer actually; a classic wonderful woman. I think we were really lucky with the crew and the cast that were on the show.

Gavin has something on his mind (with Brian Wenzel).
Gavin has something on his mind (with Brian Wenzel).
And he loses it. "What is my line?"
And he loses it. “What is my line?”

Adam: What were your favourite storylines?
Gavin: The episode when they had the cyclist and he was gay and we got beat up. That really rang true to me because I used to get hassled on the trains. I had a school uniform on and we would get roughed up and beat up and spat on, and called a bunch of names as well. When that character came in, I lived in Sydney and was a big part of the gay community. The most comfortable and safest I felt when I was on television was in Darlinghurst. I would go out to the clubs and dance. I loved it because I felt safe and accepted. There would never be some guy who wanted to flatten me because I was on television. Being a part of that community at the time was really healthy and it was very protective. And I love to dance my ass off all night long.

I remember thinking that it was important to do it right. I thought it was a pretty amazing thing to do at the time. Also those blurred lines with the two characters. Hugo was a bit naïve, but to be meeting this guy and go on the journey with him was great; especially because the community at the time was like my incredibly safe family. That’s why I remember that as one of the most important ones.

Adam: Even before A Country Practice you had the intention to head to the U.S. at some point. How did American come to be part of the plan?
Gavin: I have such fond memories of A Country Practice. I could’ve stayed and kept doing all of that, but it was in my nature to keep testing it out and there were no other TV stations at the time. The producers weren’t upset. They were really supportive about doing it. At that time you’re just young and running as fast as you can, to experience as much as you can. That’s why I really loved the show and was thankful to the producers on the show. They had a lot of class and integrity.

TV Week announcing Gavin's departure from A Country Practice.
TV Week announcing Gavin’s departure from A Country Practice.

Adam: That’s great to hear. I guess they’d had a lot of younger people on the show before and saw the need for them to go and spread their wings and develop and keep moving.
Gavin: Absolutely. They were great. I think it was based on me just wanting to see what’s out there. It’s not that I didn’t want to be in Australia or be on Australian work. I had been working with production companies and talking with international people. When I was on Mission: Impossible, some actors and people who were coaching me then all said that whenever I came to the States to look them up. The door was open to me that, if I went there, I knew somebody. That made it easier to talk to my parents and tell them that I really wanted to go and check it out. I had no real idea what it would be. I knew some people there, and I thought it was best at the time to go and test myself on a global stage. It was really more the exciting pursuit of adventure.

Adam: Did you get an agent straight away when you were there?
Gavin: I spent a few years going back and forth so I had a manager and then I had an agent. I had all this stuff set up and then I set up all my legalities while I was on A Country Practice so that when I got off the plane I was legal and ready to go.

Adam: Was Signs and Wonders the first project you did once you were there?
Gavin: I think the first thing I did was a voice-over for Disney, Toto Lost in New York. I did a Kahlúa commercial voice as well, and then the first thing I booked was Signs and Wonders. It was a BBC miniseries with a bunch of amazing people in that as well. That particular experience doing a two-hander with James Earl Jones when we were in scenes together was a little bit mind-blowing for me. I remember sitting down with him in between scenes and he was very relaxed and quite talkative and a really nice man. Then he opens his mouth and you’re like, It’s Darth Vader and Mufasa from The Lion King; and it’s all of them in one. I’m talking to all of these people in one go. Then he says my character’s name and you’re thinking, Oh man, this is Darth Vader talking here right now. His voice is so amazing.

Adam: Do you remember that episode of The Simpsons where James Earl Jones’ characters – Darth Vader, Mufasa, and even his CNN voice-over – talk to Lisa one-by-one?
Gavin: It was like that.  There’s a scene where he walked down the stairs to talk to me and I’m just standing there looking at him. I was quite amazed that he was walking down the stairs to talk to me, or my character. That was one of those out-of-body experiences that I did have when I first arrived because he’s pretty huge as far as his career goes and just him as a man and his talent. I obviously snapped back in and had a conversation with him in the scene.

Adam: There were some heavy hitters in Signs and Wonders.
Gavin: Yes, Jodhi May, Prunella Scales, Donald Pleasence, David Warren, and Colin Farrell was in some of it. I did most of my work with Jodhi May and just a few scenes with James Earl Jones, but that was just amazing unto itself.

Adam: Were your parts filmed only in L.A.?
Gavin: Yes, I think it was shown in the UK and it was shown here. We just did the L.A. part of it.

Adam: I think that was Donald Pleasence’s final role.
Gavin: I think it was one of his last screen appearances. I think he died soon after that or at the very end of that. And Jodhi May was in The Last of the Mohicans. I really love that movie and the soundtrack to that movie. I thought that film was another great cinematic masterpiece in how it was shot. So to work with her was also fantastic.

Gavin in a photo by Tim Bauer.
Gavin in a photo by Tim Bauer.

Adam: Was Amazing Grace next?
Gavin: I think I came off of Signs and Wonders and then I was cast in Amazing Grace. It started off really well when I first arrived here.

Adam: Amazing Grace had a struggle from the beginning. It was supposed to premiere in the fall and it didn’t. Then when it did premiere it was up against Dr. Quinn, Medicine Women, which you imagine may have a pretty similar audience. It seemed to also have that problem striking a balance between being a religious or a spiritual show and appealing to a non-religious audience. Did you enjoy that one?
Gavin: I enjoyed the character and working with Patty Duke immensely. That was shot up in her home town. I don’t think she wanted to move and there were a lot of challenges with the weather being up there. I think they struggled to find a balance, as you said. It was a police show then they had spirituality, and ex-addiction coming back. I don’t know whether she also wanted to continue on with the show. It was quite grueling shooting it in Idaho during the winter. It was really cold. I loved it, but I think it was quite grueling doing it. I moved there to be in the show.

Adam: What was Patty Duke like to work with? I enjoy her as an actor but also her mental health advocacy is very much an interest of mine.
Gavin: I thought she was very stable and very strong. She really cared about the welfare of the younger actors who were her son and her daughter on the show. Of course you have to because there’s SAG and there’s welfare and all of that. But she took it to another level I think because she was a child star herself. She was a producer on the show, as well, and so she really rallied around the show. I think it was a lot of work for her but she believed in it. I found her to be very warm.

Gavin on the porch with Patty Duke.
Gavin on the porch with Patty Duke.

One of the best moments I’ve ever had as an actor or doing a scene with somebody was a scene with her on the porch. In that show I finally felt what it really, really meant to be in the moment with somebody. Still to this day, I think that was the best experience that I’ve ever had. I had done a lot of work beforehand, but something was different in that one scene on the porch.

Adam:  That’s such a good progression as well.
Gavin: Yes, to realise it and to not really know that it was happening. When it happened it was so calm and connected, and then when it was over and I watched it back later, I really believed it. That’s something you want to achieve.

Adam: I thought that Fred Barker in Public Enemies was the most interesting of the Barker brothers portrayed in the film. He changes and it’s a change you believe. You can see his development from being a rather innocent kid to becoming this sort of cold-blooded killer. It also made me realise how much I’d missed seeing you on TV or in movies.
Gavin: It was an incredibly interesting fun adventure to be working with Eric Roberts and Theresa Russell and the other guys who were in the film. I felt very honoured just to be a part of it. It’s a run around, shoot ‘em up kind of movie, but you’re working with people who are really accomplished. In scenes you’re putting yourself in your craft with really great people who you have a deep respect for. In a way, it brings some kind of comfort that you feel you’re growing and moving in the right direction. So there’s some validation by working with these guys.

Those not so fabulous Barker Boys: Freddie (Gavin), Herman (Joseph Lindsey), Doc (James Marsden), Lloyd (Joseph Dain), and Ma Barker (Theresa Russell).
Those not so fabulous Barker Boys: Freddie (Gavin), Herman (Joseph Lindsey), Doc (James Marsden), Lloyd (Joseph Dain), and Ma Barker (Theresa Russell).

Theresa Russell was a beautiful, professional person. Similar to working with Patty Duke, there were those scenes where you feel that you’re no longer outside yourself looking in. You actually become present and the moment becomes real. It doesn’t always happen, but when it does it just passes you by like you experienced it without any objective self point-of-view. You could get that with her. It was the same with Eric Roberts. His timing and watching him was like going to class so I felt very fortunate.

The character itself had a really fantastic arc, from basically being mummy’s boy to becoming the most ruthless of all the brothers. As an actor you could find these markers where you could shift and change and evolve the character. It was really great to do a period piece as well. I hadn’t done that before. The extent of using weapons was interesting. It’s intense because you know it’s dangerous, but you have a really good time doing it.

Adam: When you talk about being in that moment with Theresa Russell you can really see that. The mother-son relationship that Ma and Fred Barker have is a very complex relationship, but it’s sort of a natural fit in a very weird way.
Gavin: Back in those times, if they were on the run, they were never exposed to any women or even just other people. Her having that kind of intimate, weird relationship with her son, or sons, was all they really had so blurring those lines at the time seemed like it was natural. It’s almost an extreme version of home schooling with weapons. They see none of the outside world and the only female around him at the time was her. The other brothers were older and they were off doing their thing, but he had just come into that age where he was looking outside his mom. He never really got there.

With Theresa Russell.
With Theresa Russell.

Adam: There’s that great scene where Eric Roberts’ character is coming to his end and Fred is the one responsible for that.
Gavin: It’s straight jealousy. I put a gun to his head and basically it’s a man-to-man stand-off. It’s not only “You’re hitting on my mom”, but in his mind it’s his woman. It was this blurred line about who she was. When it came to being able to kill the guy, it was quite satisfying for the character. It erased the competition.

Gavin and Eric Roberts face off (with Theresa Russell and James Marsden).
Gavin and Eric Roberts face off (with Theresa Russell and James Marsden).

Adam: Was Chicago Hope filmed in Las Vegas?
Gavin: Yes, it was filmed in Las Vegas. It was quite brief, a little street scene with Mark Harmon. But it was fun being from Australia in Vegas, and I had a great time being on set shooting with Mark Harmon. That was another one of those unique characters you kind of get in their world a little bit and you find out what’s happening at that level, which was making money and no fear of committing some violent act if you have to.
Adam: Nothing to lose.
Gavin: Exactly, yeah.

With Mark Harmon.
With Mark Harmon.
With Dick Van Dyke.
With Dick Van Dyke.

Adam: Let’s talk about Diagnosis Murder and your character Aaron Ving. That was a big part.
Gavin: That was a big part and I loved the character. He was very single-minded, ultra-violent, and believed in everything that he was doing. Aaron was almost this pre-programmed person, whether he was brought up that way or whether he found his belief somehow, but something snapped in him and then he became so single-minded about what he had to achieve. It was such a focused energy that he couldn’t have any objective perspective. I found the intensity of that character really enjoyable to play.

Adam: He was completely committed to the cause. I thought it was quite a sophisticated script. It almost drew on that 1960’s kind of idea of revolution and militants.
Gavin: I thought so too, and they were kind of addressing those things. It’s not a family show, but similar to A Country Practice it’s got comedy and humour, and then it has its deep stuff. This was before all the things that are happening in the world now. I think the approach taken made it come together.

I remember going into that audition and L.A. traffic was brutal. I think it was a producer session where they make their decision. I just came in there and, with the energy of dealing with the traffic, I couldn’t overthink it. I just had to get in there and unload. Before I knew it, the audition was finished and I walked out of there and thought, What really just happened? It was another one of those moments where I didn’t really know what just happened, but it felt really good. Then they called and offered the part to me.

Adam: You can do all the preparation for something, but sometimes it’s just being in that moment.
Gavin: Yeah you can’t overthink it, but that’s the challenge sometimes.

Adam: Your characters have a penchant for trying to kill off loved characters. Revhead in Home and Away was kind of responsible for killing off Guy Pearce’s character. Then there was Mark Harmon in Chicago Hope and Dick Van Dyke in Diagnosis Murder.
Gavin: Yes, I think Revhead was responsible for his death. It was same with Dick Van Dyke. I was playing this militia-type domestic terrorist guy, and all I’m thinking about is, I’ve got a gun to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’s head right here. I grew up watching his movies and all of a sudden I’m on top of him with a 9mm hand gun and then taking fire. I don’t know what it is. I’m really laid-back and I like to get along with people, but for whatever reason those roles seemed to work pretty well for me at the time.

Adam: I watched Exposé last night.
Gavin: How was it?
Adam: I enjoyed it. I think your character was set apart because everyone is completely out there and he just kept it all together. He was a photographer as well so that’s quite close to you. I thought it was interesting what they were trying to do with dealing with the idea of adoption and foster care systems within this thriller.
Gavin: I thought the idea was good. It was a first-time director and I don’t know how well it came together for what it was doing; but I liked the idea of the character. I got time to go out with the “stringers”, the guys that get the calls on the police scanners and drive straight to the event or the incident. Sometimes they arrive there before the police officers. This is kind of before TMZ, before everyone’s running around with cell phones and capturing reality incidents, horror shootings, car wrecks. Because my character was a stringer, I got to go out and run around with some of these guys around L.A. in their vans. It got pretty intense because a scan comes across and there’s a shooting they’re rolling straight over to the location. It certainly gave me the feeling of being in amongst the brutality of a city and when you’re on the front line, so to speak, of looking at the aggression and the violence it really opened my eyes to what these guys deal with every day. The character was also me coming back from Amazing Grace, and being able to be a little bit more laid-back in my own skin instead of being the guy that wants to go around and shoot everybody.

Gavin plays a "stringer" in Exposé.
Gavin plays a “stringer” in Exposé.
With Sandra Bernhard and Damian Chapa.
With Sandra Bernhard and Damian Chapa.

Adam: Was that the last thing that you did?
Gavin: I think that it was the last thing that I did, and then I made the decision to stop acting.

Adam: Tell me about what was going on.
Gavin: I wasn’t really comfortable not having control of where I was going in my life. I’ve always done multiple things, being a freelance filmmaker or working in music or being first assistant like what I was doing in Australia. In America, I was so busy auditioning. That’s the part of acting where you can have 10 good actors, but only the person who is completely right in the director’s mind is going to get booked. Then there’s that factor of the Universe coming and slapping you in the head a little bit. There were a lot of people who I met and thought were a certain way, but weren’t really who I thought they were. I felt a bit disillusioned with everything that was around me, and what I had built in L.A. felt very uncertain.

I moved down to Huntington Beach, out of L.A., to a really good friend’s. It was to take a breather and a break from the energy that I’d used to get from Australia to the States. I had also been working since I was 15.  From a really young age up to 28, my life had been a whirlwind. I think my mind and body were telling me that I needed to stop and look at what I really wanted to do.

Adam: What did you do next?
Gavin: I took about year off. I really just did some odd jobs, played music, wrote and did a lot of drawing. It was slowing my life down for the first time since I was 15 years old.

I got back into the production side of things. I just wanted to do something that, when I showed up, was based on my technique and my abilities, and not just on whether you are right or wrong for the part. I really wanted to own what I was doing and so I decided to get back into being behind the camera.

I started working again as a camera assistant in print. I had spent so much time being photographed in Australia and had a really good understanding of it. I didn’t tell anybody that I was ever an actor. I had this random disconnect from acting where I buried my entire past of being an actor in this country or anywhere else. I wanted the people I was working with to see or judge me for my abilities as a camera assistant or a lighting designer, DP at the time. So I went on this journey. I don’t know how healthy it was, but the only way I could do it was to absolutely bury everything that existed to me as an actor.

Gavin Harrison window

Adam: It may seem like an intense decision, but at the same time it was based on everything that was leading up to it.
Gavin: I think so. I think sometimes it seems intense, but it gets to the point where it can be the only decision. You just have to see in front of you and let go and trust the process somehow, and have some solid people around you to do that.

I started camera assisting for some celebrity photographers. As well as dealing with all the cameras and the film, I was pretty much the DJ at the photo shoots in the studio because I love music. Over time, I became really good at being a first assistant, doing a lot of lighting for different people: whether we were doing British Vogue and you’re working with people such as Pamela Anderson; or you’re working with Helmut Newton and shooting Mickey Rourke. I was handling all the technical side of it, a lot of the lighting for photographers, and running film before it went digital. I spent a lot of years doing that.

One night I was in a taxi coming home from an L.L.Bean shoot in L.A. The cab driver fell asleep at the wheel and careered off the freeway. The car hit the curb and some signs that broke and smashed. It was quite violent smashing a bunch of things on the side of the freeway, but we didn’t hit something dead ahead. I thought that I was okay. I went back to my place, and in the middle of the night I tried to move and I couldn’t move my head or my neck.

I was taken to hospital. I had a bulging disc in C6, C7 and all this nerve damage in my arms. I couldn’t move and I couldn’t pick anything up. It was really bad. I had to do two or three months of rehab. Part of the job was setting lights and moving cameras so all of a sudden I’m no longer employable.

A producer who I’d worked with as a first assistant called me about a Toyota job or something. I told him that I’d been in an accident, but that I can pick up the trash and I can make some really great tea and coffee; I just need to work. So from being at the level that I was as a camera assistant to basically being really humble and sort of saying, “I need to pay my bills. Can you at least give me the opportunity to pick up the trash and serve tea and coffee and sort out craft service? I would be indebted”. They knew me so they were able to help me out, which was nice. From that point I started back in production as a PA and then going from there to location scouting and location co-ordinating for other companies.

Adam: How did Section9 begin?
Gavin: This accident took me out, but then it started to make me use my mind and skills that I’d learned over the years to tailor into what would become Section9. I saved up enough money to insure myself, which is a big part of owning a production company. I insured myself and went out on my own with Section9 as an advertising production company in print. As soon as that happened, people in the industry heard that I was doing this on my own, and we got incredibly busy. It was satisfying because I could do things creatively, and work with all the layouts and great photographers. I understand lighting, casting, so in a way all those things that I had done set me up to be a very calm, deliberate producer. It started to shape itself as what a gift this was that I could create something I never thought I would – out of necessity. It’s something that I’ve really loved to do over the last 10 years.

Gavin Section9

Adam: You do a lot of work involving high-performance and luxury cars. Is that your core business?
Gavin: Yes, it’s my core business. Section9 core business is advertising nationally and globally, and it’s completely encompassing when you’re in production. We did a job that was a 54-day shoot schedule and I was on the job for around 90 days. People look at photography and say, “Oh wow you got a photo”, and think that it’s done in a day, but the kind of production that I specialise in is like doing mini-motion pictures. It might be a 12, 15 day shoot and you’re prepping for three weeks, and wrapping for another two or three weeks. Generally I take on these larger, technical, complicated jobs where you’re shutting down roads or closing down bridges and landing helicopters. You’ve got people flying in from all over the world and it’s a very big logistics creative production. We also do a lot of technical stuff where they shoot standing cars, and then add CGI vehicles in later.

I mix those sorts of projects in with some of the simpler logistical productions. With Philips electronics, we cruised around downtown with a small crew. I really enjoy that as much as I enjoy closing down parts of the freeway and shutting bridges and things like that.

Gavin's Section9 Productions works with Tesla.
Gavin’s Section9 Productions works with Tesla.

Adam: The Philips ones were very creative.
Gavin: They were really good and the talent was great. We did a lot street casting.

Adam: I guess location, particularly for the vehicle advertising, is really important to what you do as well.
Gavin: It’s paramount. It’s really about finding amazing locations to put the product in to represent the demographic and reflect the feel of the vehicles. You want to come back and present locations to a creative director and a client where they say, “This is amazing. Our car will look incredible here in this light”. I find the preparation and the scouting of the location really exciting and very interesting.

Adam: Did you work with Helmut Newton for Gillette?
Gavin: He died just before we shot Gillette. I worked for him up until he died when I came out here for two months at a time. I had assisted a guy for Vogue when I was a camera assistant, and then I had the car accident. I kind of just recovered and was getting physically back and he said “Helmut Newton is looking for a new assistant in L.A., and I really want to recommend you to him”. I asked, “Is he gear heavy”. I was thinking that if he’s going to do massive lights, I won’t be able to help. He told me, “No, he’s not gear heavy at all. He’s got a couple of cameras and small amounts of lighting, and I think you’d really connect with him”. So I was called by his rep and his agent and then they set up a phone call with Helmut and I had to be available.

He called me and he said “So you’re the Australian, right?” I said, “Yeah”. He told me, “I’m married to one”. I said, “Lucky for you”. He laughed, he was just laughing, because his wife’s Australian. We kind of hit it off, and he asked me to come to the Chateau Marmont and sit down and look at his equipment. He took me out into the hallway and made sure that I understood technically everything that was happening with the negatives, film, making sure nothing was thin; making sure that everything was how he wanted it and how he expected it. From there I started working with him shooting Ben Kingsley and all sorts of different people from there.

Working with Helmut Newton was amazing because he showed me that you don’t have to be an asshole to be a world-class artist. You can actually be really focused and have all of this success, and have an incredibly long career, and still be a really consummate and nice professional individual. Another thing that I took from working from him was that he said, if you don’t have a point of view or a vision from which you see the world, all you are is a technician. Being a technician is not bad, but what made him who he is was his strong vision and point of view from which he saw everything. His perspective on the world was his and it’s very distinct. When you see a Helmut Newton picture, you know it.

I became really friendly with him and his wife. I spoke to Helmut the day before he died. We were about to do a big Gillette campaign and everything was ready. I got a call from the producer saying that he passed away. We met at a café and the producer was talking to myself and June, his wife, who’s a really accomplished photographer in her own right. She’s Alice Springs. June says, “I’m going to shoot it, and Gavin you’re going to light it”.

I went back to the studio the next day. I remember standing there looking up and wondering what I should do. In that moment I realised that he wasn’t around and I needed to do what needed to be done. I would take the Polaroids back to the Chateau every night and June gave me direction and input on what was happening. We created a really amazing bond through the time from him passing away to her and I going through this whole job together. I think it helped everyone get through it that she really took the lead. She’s an amazing woman for doing that.

Adam: When did you start making music?
Gavin: I spent years not doing anything because I had a bunch of excuses of why I wasn’t at the level that I needed to be to start: I don’t know how to use Logic, I don’t know how to record anything, and I’m so busy doing production. One day I finished this massive campaign and I was pretty exhausted but it felt really good to be at home. My wife was sitting on the couch talking to her brother and I was thinking, How happy am I right now. Then I realised I have an iPad and I can program the music. I didn’t know how to record on it so I plugged the Bose speaker in, put my iPhone next to it, downloaded a recorder, and hit record. My mind just went don’t be so precious and find a way to record this. I recorded it on my iPhone off a Bose speaker playing it live off the program in my iPad. That’s the first kind of starting point of me doing music.

I don’t set out to make a song or sit down and compose or write a song. I’ll be at home after a job and my computer’s there, and I just have a certain energy or someone will be talking to me about something. I’ll sit down at the computer and I’ll write and compose it in that moment and then tweak it later. I was having a big conversation with someone and they had a friend who had just died. We were talking about life and funerals, and going through life. He left and I just sat down and made the song “Calm Life Mind”. When I sent it to him it allowed him to cry and that he could let go and feel good energy about his friend. That’s what I love about making music.

Cover for Gavin's single "Calm Life Mind". The picture was taken during the Gillette shoot.
Cover for Gavin’s single “Calm Life Mind”. The picture was taken during the Gillette shoot.

Adam: “Gentle Gloves” has a very ambient chill-out type thing, and “Nava” almost has a Thom Yorke style to it.
Gavin: People mention some stuff like that. Those two songs and “How Happy Am I” get the most kind of feedback from listeners. “Gentle Gloves” came from my friend being really hard on himself about something that didn’t work out and I just said, “Hey, it’s okay to be hard on yourself, but when you’re kind of knocking yourself down you should at least put on some gentle gloves”. I understand the need to be hard on yourself for maybe a wrong decision, but if you’re going to do it just be gentle about it.

Adam: Music seems to happen for you organically, when the need or thought arises.
Gavin: I think so.  For “Okay Ole”, Ole is a really good friend of my wife’s and he’s this unsung super positive amazing guy, always calm, always in the background, and really reliable. Everything’s always okay with Ole, everything is cool. There’s this really incredible strength in his calmness and his consistency. I was walking around a store with my wife, and when I got home I started that song.

Adam: I guess your house is not necessarily everyone around the piano, but it’s a musical house.
Gavin: Yes, there are three guitars out there. If someone comes over and wants to pick up a guitar and play, they can do that for sure.

Adam: Just one more to talk about, “Low Rolling Cinema” is pretty different from some of the other songs.
Gavin: That’s me just checking into beats and fields that I like, and blending certain styles and sounds that I haven’t necessarily heard so much in my life. It’s a part of me discovering new music that I haven’t really heard myself. I remember hanging out in the lounge room listening to Triple J super late night as a kid with the boom box, and then falling asleep with a transistor radio under my pillow and waking up with a screaming ear ache. Then when I had a double tape deck, I could actually start making mix tapes of what I’d spent weeks taping off of Triple J. I was 11 when I used to do that.

Adam: I hope kids still make mixed tapes. I mean they probably make mixed playlists now.
Gavin: Yeah, I think it’s all mixed playlists now. I used to love the art of the albums.  All the art I try and produce myself for all the singles and whatever music I’m putting out. I use that as a creative outlet now so music gives me music and it also gives me photography. All of the images on the mtrack Instagram are my photography.

Adam: What is your life like today? You’ve been travelling?
Gavin: Yes, I was gone for a little while ago for about three weeks to France, Germany, and Monte Carlo. I was looking into some new technology we’re working on for mobile apps. In Monte Carlo, I spent some time with Helmut’s wife. We also just got back from Sydney. I hadn’t been back in a while. I used to always go home every 18 months or so to see mum and dad, and see my brother and sister and their kids. Since I’ve bought a house, they’re all, “Let’s go to L.A.”. I’ve kind of been the Hotel Harrison in L.A. for my family so it’s been really great.

I did an audition on tape just recently for fun for myself for a project in Australia and it felt really good. I love my life today, but the fact that it is opening up and it’s reflecting my life up until this day is making it a little more interesting. It’s giving me a wider perspective to have a little more fun, and do a few more things that I used to love to do again.

Adam: Acting is something you’re open to again?
Gavin: Absolutely. I’m starting to look at doing more acting in the future. I miss the process and connection. Recently I just decided to let go of all these ideas of who you create yourself to be – whether it’s an actor, a producer, a writer, or whatever. You actually are who you are, and all of those elements of your life really link up. It’s very simple to say but when they’ve taken you in extreme directions, and when you have had to make some really big changes to refocus your life and see yourself in a different light, that’s when you compartmentalise parts of your life. Part of opening that up was when you actually reached out to me. I started looking back at some press and things from the past and put them on IMDb. It was very much a reconnecting thing for me to do, which was to look back at all that stuff and say, “You know what, I did it and I actually really enjoyed doing all of it”. That’s why it’s really great that you reached out to me because it was a part of me reconnecting with this whole chapter of running around doing stuff with guns and everything else. So you’re a part of that because if I was to say yes to you, I had to say yes to my life.

Gavin Harrison portrait

You can visit Section9 Production’s website to see and read more about Gavin’s work, and the company’s Tumblr page provides images and a behind-the-scenes perspective on some of the shoots.

Gavin’s music is available from iTunes, SoundCloud, and Spotify. He also has a Tumblr. I highly recommend looking at the art and images there as you listen to the music. You’ll stay on the site for a long time, and have a great time doing so. Music videos for his singles will be among Gavin’s next projects.

Gavin’s photography is available on Instagram. His IMDb page is here.

Top photo by Jaason Simmons.

Drive On

MikeyWax9Mikey Wax has had a busy year. His third album, Mikey Wax, was released in June, and its lead single, “You Lift Me Up”, has been doing just that. The album is his first after signing with Toucan Cove/Universal Music, and was produced by Scott and Ed Cash. Having producers from Nashville is rather fitting, given the New York-born Mikey went to university there (for those who are wondering, he graduated with a teaching degree). That Nashville-New York hybrid should tell you something about the diversity of sounds you’ll hear on his album. He might be best classified as pop/rock with his acoustic guitar and piano, but as stated on his website there are parts electronic, country, funk, and folk. I wouldn’t usually reference the artist website to sum up work, but when I read his biography on there after listening to the album and taking notes, those were the words I came up with too. I also got blues. I wonder if Mr. Wax gives out gold stars.

Signing with a label is certainly a new chapter for Mikey, but in many cases a continuation of what he’s been doing since his first shows in New York in 2008. That is, writing (something started at eight years of age), performing, touring, and continuing to stretch himself. In addition to his three full-length albums, he has four EPs, including one very topical one, “And a Happy New Year”, the title track of which will be heard next week on ABC Family’s Switched at Birth.

Mikey Wax, released June 10, 2014 (click here to purchase).
Mikey Wax, released June 10, 2014 (click here to purchase).
And a Happy New Year (click here to purchase).
And a Happy New Year (click here to purchase).

Mikey would be a familiar face to his followers (and hopefully, after reading this, there will be more) on social media, video sharing, and digital music platforms, and these are integral components to getting his music out there. On Spotify, the Live City dance remix of his anthem “You Lift Me Up” from Mikey Wax has been streamed over 4.5 million times. That is worthy of a Dr. Evil-style moving of your little finger to your mouth. I can’t do that right now, I have a drink in my hand. Of course, someone who wrote a rather funky song called “Bottle of Jack” would hopefully understand that. The album itself has hit the iTunes Top 100 Pop chart, somewhere Mikey has been consistently since his first album Change Again in 2008. That album included the song “In Case I Go Again”, which did the rounds on Ghost Whisperer, Pretty Little Liars, and a little something called the 2012 Summer Olympics. I remember the joy I felt when one of my articles was (I think it still is, I haven’t checked in the last few hours) the most viewed of all articles in the journal where it was published. That may be only 10 people reading it though; it’s hard to know with all the complicated metrics. I won’t get into it here…

In any event, his 2011 album Constant Motion got iTunes and Billboard attention and included “Counting on You” that also got a lot of attention. It was included in the contestant elimination part of the series So You Think You Can Dance. While the song has lovely associations for me (do give it a listen), I kind of wonder if it is part of some Pavlovian nightmare for those who were eliminated on the show and had to hear it. Every time they hear it now, they might just be bracing for rejection.

Perhaps a digital native like Mikey finds these new frontiers easy to navigate. I checked, supposedly “natives” are people born post 1985…so he scrapes in and I miss out by a couple of years. I’m an “immigrant”, supposedly. But it’s more than that. He is willing to connect with his fans in these ways and does so regularly and earnestly. This includes over 250 concerts that he has performed for fans in their homes.

On his YouTube channel, Mikey also documented his recent tours with Brendan James, and Parachute and Matt Wertz (he also just finished touring with Michelle Chamuel). These were not, however, just excerpts of live performances, but the getting to and from gigs (sometimes driving for hours), shopping for air mattresses, laundry day, or hijacking a hotel piano. Think about how you are after a long road trip with good friends. I have what I think is a fake memory (on my quick review of the movie there doesn’t seem to be such a scene) of Bette Midler’s rocker character in The Rose starting a food fight in a diner with her entourage during a tour. So when first watching these videos, I was expected that sort of thing or even a couple of trashed hotel rooms. However, Mikey and his posse just seem too polite to do anything other than clean up after themselves at the various places they visit. There is, however, copious chicken, guac, and brown rice at Chipotle Mexican Grill, where Mikey tells us it’s “All about that rice, ‘bout that rice”. I’m starting to realize where he may have got his inspiration for his recent mashup of Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” and Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass”.

Mikey has been a pal of this site (click here to read an article from earlier in the year) and we recently chatted about his year and what’s next.

 

Adam: Tell me about your recent shows with Michelle Chamuel of The Voice. Have I got you after some sufficient rest?
Mikey: Ha – Yes! The shows were a blast. Michelle is so cool and being on the road with her and her crew was a lot of fun. Thanks so much to all the fans that came out to see us!

Adam: You’ve spent a fair amount of time on the road since the release of Mikey Wax in June. What’s the best thing about being on the road?
Mikey: It’s definitely a very freeing experience, and it’s a thrill performing for fans every night. It’s a great chance to continue building my audience and getting to meet awesome people.

Performing at Fitzgerald's, Houston, TX on September 22 as part of the Parachute tour (Photo: Sarah Hoffman).
Performing at Fitzgerald’s, Houston, TX on September 22 as part of the Parachute tour (Photo: Sarah Hoffman).

Adam: What’s not so good?
Mikey: You eventually miss your bed and your friends and family, and sometimes getting a good meal can be a challenge.

Adam: Your YouTube followers would be familiar with the #WaxOnTour video diaries, covering your back-to-back tours in September with Brendan James and then Parachute. Travel pals were Joe Striff, guitarist, and Sammy, band mom/tour manager. Oh, and a GoPro. Are there any stories from the tours that didn’t make it through the editing process?
Mikey: Ha – I’m sure there are a few. But they don’t make the video for a reason! 🙂

Mikey and Joe Striff (Photo: Cameron Rad).
Mikey and Joe Striff (Photo: Cameron Rad).

Adam: Has going from being an independent artist to signing with Toucan Cove, which is a part of Universal Music (but with very independent roots), been a smooth transition for you?
Mikey: Yes, very smooth. In general not much on my end has changed. My job is still to tour as much as I can, write music and stay close with my fans. I love what I do and I’m so thankful for all the people who support me.

Adam: How did Scott and Ed Cash, producers of Mikey Wax, come into your life?
Mikey: I was a fan of a few albums they did, including those with my touring buddy Matt Wertz. I had sent them the stems of one of my songs to see how they would produce it and it came out incredible. I was so blown away, that I knew they had to produce the entire record.  Fortunately, they loved my other songs and were on board.

Adam: It’s hard to choose favourites from your new album, but I particularly like the almost blues or country “Baby Don’t You Let Me Down”, the very lush “Take Me Home” and the rolling ballad “The Calm”. I’m going to ask you to pick a favorite child from your album and tell me why it’s special to you.
Mikey: That means so much! Thank you. I know artists say how difficult it is to choose, but it really is! I go through phases – At first I thought “Take Me Home” was my favorite, then “The Calm”, but I think a consistent favorite and fun one from the album to play is “Bottle of Jack”.

Adam: New York, and in particular the promise of that city, features prominently in a few of your songs, including “Alive in New York City” and “Last Great Song”. Being a native of Long Island, what still excites you about the city?
Mikey: The city is still so inspiring to me. Whenever I feel like I need an escape or some clarity, a walk in the city always opens my eyes and helps me see things clearly. 

Adam: I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you to describe one of the musicians who you recently appeared with, Teddy Geiger, in a sentence. As an aside, I have one of his paintings in my house (no, that doesn’t mean that Teddy Geiger is missing one of his paintings).
Mikey: Hah! I didn’t know he did paintings; that’s so cool. Teddy was a really awesome and chill guy. We only got to hang out backstage for 10 minutes or so, but I hope to be able to do more shows with him soon!

Mikey-Wax-You-Lift-Me-Up-Live-City-Remix

Adam: The remix of “You Lift Me Up” recently hit 4.5 million streams on Spotify. Plus a lot of people temporarily without Wi-Fi would have enjoyed you with their dinner and a (miniature) bottle of Jack as Artist of the Month on American Airlines in October. Is it hard to get your head around numbers like that?
Mikey: That number is pretty insane! Yes, it’s extremely hard, so I try not to check back too often to see how it’s doing. I feel like the less I know the better ha. I’m so thrilled that people are relating to it and including it on their playlists. The American Airlines interview/performance was incredible to do. I get tweets every once in a while from fans who are listening to it from thousands of feet up in the sky.

Adam: A month ago you covered Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” in a mashup with Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass”. How did this mashup and the incredibly inventive music video take shape?
Mikey: I was in the studio with my bandmates doing live performances to a few of my songs, and I was trying to do a six-second vine. Those two songs were being played so often on the radio that I thought it would be funny to mash them up. The melodies worked so well with each other that I ended up being able to do it for the entire song, not just six seconds.

Adam: When will your song “And a Happy New Year” be heard on ABC Family’s Switched at Birth, and what are your plans for Christmas and 2015?
Mikey: It’s being featured on the show next Monday, December 8 at 9/8c. I’m really excited for it and I know my fans are too. On December 21st, I’m playing a free online show available worldwide to help celebrate the holidays (Stageit.com/MikeyWax). For Christmas I’ll be spending time with family and friends in New York and Michigan so I’m getting ready for lots of snow!

Adam: Thank you, Sir!
Mikey: Thanks for the awesome questions!

 

Mikey’s has many homes online, including his official website, YouTube, and Spotify. If you’re feeling social, visit Mikey on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Vine. To purchase his albums and singles (through iTunes, Amazon, or signed from Mikey himself) click here.

In 2015, Mikey’s song “Drive On” will be heard in the film The Road Within starring Robert Sheehan, Dev Patel, and Zoe Kravitz.

Top photo of Mikey by Justin Steele. Thanks to Jonathan Wax, Mikey’s manager, for teeing this discussion up.

…And Then I Wrote

Kellie FlanaganMaybe it’s happenstance, but there’s something just a little delightful about where Kellie Flanagan lives and the career that she has chosen. In her most well-known role, Kellie played the young daughter of the eponymous Carolyn Muir in the television series, The Ghost & Mrs. Muir. Mrs. Muir (Hope Lange) moves with her two children, Candace “Candy” (Kellie) and Jonathan (Harlen Carraher), housekeeper Martha (Reta Shaw), and the family dog (Scruffy who played…well, Scruffy) to the seaside Gull Cottage. Her real estate agent (Charles Nelson Reilly) warns her against it, thinking of any excuse including its isolation (it is, of course, haunted). Mrs. Muir is, however, not fazed telling him, “That’s perfect, I’m a writer”. Today, Kellie is herself a writer and while not living in a seaside shack, she does live in the Sierra Nevada foothills with her husband and teenage daughter. No word on whether she’s encountered a ghost of the likes of Captain Gregg (Edward Mulhare), but she did encounter a “bobcat and her twin cubs emerged from their den to play tag” in her neighbourhood park. That neighbourhood park is Yosemite National Park.

Kellie once posted on her blog Willa Cather’s words: “Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen”. In talking with Kellie, you find that she has many more stories to tell after 15; although by then she had started journaling her experiences. It was also by 15 that Kellie had lost both of her parents, and she had left show business a few years before. Kellie was “discovered” at three in Santa Monica and put into television commercials before a role in a classic episode of Star Trek called “Miri”. The episode dealt with a place where adults had been decimated by a disease they had started in a scientific attempt to prolong life; and one which the children would contract once they entered adolescence. Did I mention it causes you to go mad? It may be that entertainers are told to never work with children or animals, but you could understand if Kellie subscribed at that time to “Don’t trust anybody over 30”.

School Daze. Kellie, with Michael J. Pollard and John Megna, in Star Trek.
School Daze. Kellie, with Michael J. Pollard and John Megna, in Star Trek.
Miri (Kim Darby) plots with the children, as Kellie looks on.
Miri (Kim Darby) plots with the children, as Kellie looks on.

That being said, in one of her next roles, as Hal Holbrook’s daughter, Mary, in Wild in the Streets, Kellie faces off with a rock star named Max Frost (played by Christopher Jones) who sets out to make 30 the mandatory retirement age, and put anyone over 35 in rehabilitation camps, with his plan, “in groovy surroundings we’re gonna psych ‘em all out on LSD, babies”. Young Mary (Kellie was eight at the time, although she is likely playing younger) thinks that she may know a thing or two more than this 24-year old. Well, Max and his counterculture band (literally and figuratively) do have trouble focusing on the cause – they always seem to be coming down from something or, in the case of Diane Varsi’s character Sally LeRoy, tripping out while lying in the top of fountain.

Kellie as Mary Fergus in Wild in the Streets.
Kellie as Mary Fergus in Wild in the Streets.

Lucky for Kellie, there were some more benign senior forces at play when cast in The Ghost & Mrs. Muir. In the first season of the show, Candy didn’t see the Captain. But with a switch from NBC to ABC, she did. In one episode in the second season, Candy is the star as she falls for a boy (played by Mark Lester of Oliver!) from London, England. It’s not all smooth sailing, with the nine-year old Candy worried that compared to her rival Penelope Hassenhammer (try saying that one as many times as the cast; she was played by Debi Storm), “I haven’t any sex appeal” and asking her mother for a training bra, “I need all the help I can get, look at me”. It’s a shining moment for Kellie.

And they call it puppy love.
And they call it puppy love.

Lucky for Australia (other countries await), both Seasons One and Two of GaMM recently received a DVD release from Madman Entertainment, and Kellie can be seen again in this and the other episodes. Being an Australian myself, it’s only fitting I guess that Kellie and I have been in contact. And what better way for a writer to communicate than with writing, which is how we conducted this interview. In The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger refers to those rare authors who, after reading their work, “you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it”. I think you’ll find in Kellie that type of person.

 

Adam: You didn’t come from a “show business family”. How did it all start for you?
Kellie: While it’s true that I didn’t come from a show business family, my mother Geraldine was very stylish, as I recall, and loved fashion. My two older sisters, Jill and Wendy, who are 17 and 16 years my senior, did some local modeling in their teenage years.

The story goes that Geraldine was working part time for a small department store called Henshey’s in Santa Monica. I was about three years old at the time and precocious for having been raised by a bunch of adults and teenagers. I also have two older brothers; my birth was an afterthought, when my parents were almost 50. They called me “how-come-you-come”.

My mom also went by the name Jerry. She could really sew, and made me little linen masterpieces for holidays like Easter and Christmas. Her trademark was a seemingly endless trail of button, because she adored the buttonhole setting on her sewing machine. Often I would wear outfits that included a crinoline skirt, a dress, a little coat, hat and patent leather shoes. My mom got a big kick out of dressing me up, I think.

Geraldine organized a fashion show at Henshey’s Department Store, the story continues, and put me on the runway at the end of the program. Someone in the audience with some Hollywood connection called an agent and described me as “like a little Shirley Temple without all the curls”.

The very next day, I was sent out on an audition and I got the part. It was a toothpaste commercial starring June Lockhart, and I played her little girl. I remember there was a pool, a very blue and inviting swimming pool. The sun was hot. By the end of that job, I had a new agent in Dorothy Day Otis, who handled children exclusively. The career took off from there, with my mom and Dorothy at the helm.

Adam: The Trekkies won’t be happy with me (not that I have any reason to think that they read my blog, but I hope they do) if I don’t ask you for a couple of memories from the set of Star Trek. What struck me of that episode (“Miri”) was the intensity of the scene where Captain Kirk is pleading with the children. Was this your first television role?
Kellie: That was the first season of a show that wasn’t expected to be much of anything. The big excitement on the set, as far as I knew, was that Mr. Shatner was rather attractive and scandalously being divorced (I think he was Catholic, and we were Catholic, and I remember overhearing my mother complaining).

The episode was my first television show – prior to that I’d done print and television commercials, but never a series TV show. My agent, the fabulous Dorothy Day Otis, got me the job and the set was lots of fun because of all the kids and all the dust and disarray and wildness of the episode.

Kellie was credited as Blonde Girl, even with a little green.
Kellie was credited as Blonde Girl, even with a little green.
Yeoman Rand (Grace Lee Whitney) and the children await their fate.
Yeoman Rand (Grace Lee Whitney) and the children await their fate.

The Starship Enterprise lands on a planet that’s just like Earth except there are no adults, or what the remaining population of children call, “grups” (I still think of the word adult as grup in my head, today). When kids hit puberty, they get this horrible skin rotting condition, waaay beyond acne, then basically foam at the mouth, go mad and die.

So there’s the big scene where the kids are sort of revolting and Captain Kirk is talking with them, and I remember the director or someone put me on the table – physically lifted me up so I could be seen (wearing a green wig) and plopped me on the table, which felt quite special. There was lots of commotion between takes, and at one point Dorothy came up to me and whispered in my ear. She told me what to say when the scene started up, a very simple line any kid could remember. I was only about six or seven years old, and petite, so I looked younger. When the camera rolled and the scene started up, I hollered out what Dorothy had told me to, “Call the police!”

Kirk (William Shatner) appeals to the children's sensitivities.
Kirk (William Shatner) appeals to the children’s sensitivities.
It's not going so well (Kellie with Steven McEveety, Shatner, John Megna).
It’s not going so well (Kellie with Steven McEveety, Shatner, John Megna).

As I recall, it was a cut/print at the end of the scene – they wound up keeping the scene with the Dorothy-dialog in it, and that’s how I got my SAG card. Dorothy was the greatest.

Adam: There was some time between Star Trek and other television guest roles, but then you appeared in Family Affair and The Andy Griffith Show. Newspapers singled you out in the Andy Griffith episode, asking that viewers “Watch, too, for a blinding grin at the end by a blonde youngster named Kellie Flanagan, it’s worth the whole show” (The Bridgeport Telegram, March 18, 1968, p. 14). Was your routine and that of your family still “normal” or was there a momentum starting to build?
Kellie: The gap in my television work between Star Trek in 1966 and other shows later on was filled in with commercial television appearances and print work. My dad Cornelius (Neal) kept a very good scrap book and he had a hand-written list of all the commercials I worked on in film and print. If I recall correctly, there were over 100, many of them classic American companies that are still in business today.

My routine was still fairly normal throughout that time, or what was considered normal for me. I had a lot of little jobs and many auditions. I went to St. Monica’s Catholic School, was a Brownie with my mom as Troop Leader, and took dance lessons in Malibu from a French woman named Marjorie Jeanne. Sometimes I took riding lessons and diving lessons, I loved The Flintstones and Captain Kangaroo.

At St. Monica’s we wore plaid pleated skirts with suspenders, white pressed shirts, white socks and black and white saddle shoes. That was my school uniform. I also had an “interview uniform”, that was similar, so I could just change in the car as my mom drove from Santa Monica to Beverly Hills or where ever the interview was for that afternoon. Usually we were able to schedule afternoons rather than mornings so I didn’t miss much school.

I had friends from school and a best friend, named Stacy who did not go to school or church with us. Regarding interviews and working in the business, I remember that I always had the choice, up to a point. For instance, if my mom and I agreed that I would go on a particular interview, I had to go and couldn’t change my mind at the last minute.

After an interview, Jerry would ask me a series of questions, including “how did it feel?”, and we would talk about what would happen if I got the job. If I agreed to do the job, I had to carry through and again, couldn’t change my mind. I do not remember one instance where I had to do a job I did not want to do. To my recollection, I always had a say in things and was encouraged to use my instincts when it came to reading people (that is, the people who were interviewing me, usually casting or ad people or directors).

To summarize, I think at this point things were pretty normal for me, or as normal as they would be. The details of the business didn’t get in my way of having fun or being a kid at that time.

The Ghost & Mrs. Muir cast. Back row: Edward Mulhare, Hope Lange, Charles Nelson Reilly. Front row: Kellie, Harlen Carraher, Scruffy, Reta Shaw. (c) Twentieth Century Fox, provided by Madman Entertainment.
The Ghost & Mrs. Muir cast. Back row: Edward Mulhare, Hope Lange, Charles Nelson Reilly. Front row: Kellie, Harlen Carraher, Scruffy, Reta Shaw. (c) Twentieth Century Fox, provided by Madman Entertainment.

Adam: How would you describe the GaMM cast members: Hope Lange, Edward Mulhare, Reta Shaw, Charles Nelson Reilly, Harlen Carraher, and wire-haired fox terrier Scruffy? Do you still see Harlen, or did you keep in touch at some point?
Kellie: Hope Lange was beautiful and sophisticated, and always impeccably turned out. Her hair was perfectly coiffed, her skirts were pressed and her sweater sets matched with effortless grace. Well, of course! She was an actress and basically I only remember seeing her on set when we were working. At one time I believe she was getting a divorce. From that I recall a little whispering that we should behave and not bother her. I have never researched to see if that is true. [Adam’s note: This is, indeed, true. Hope and Alan Pakula separated in 1969, with the divorce finalized in 1971].

The Ghost and the Muirs.
The Ghost and the Muirs.
With Reta Shaw.
With Reta Shaw.

Edward Mulhare had to have his beard and mustache put on and removed every day, so he was in make-up a lot. In the first season, the character I played did not see the ghost. So we didn’t have scenes together, except when he was popping in and out, until the second year of the show. Reta Shaw was a lot like she was on the program, very hustle bustle and funny, lots of cracks and comments. Charles was wild and he and the other actors and the main producers, guest directors and guest stars, would have a great time at the every-Friday night wrap parties. Lots of food, cocktails, cigarettes and grownups talking, gossiping and laughing about the business and most of it was, quite literally, over our heads, as kids. It was a very happy set. Lots of fun, everyone was always very nice and accommodating to us, and there were no problems whatsoever that I recall.

Harlen, Charles Nelson Reilly, and Kellie.
Harlen, Charles Nelson Reilly, and Kellie.
Harlen, Kellie, Scruffy, and Algie the Seal as himself.
Harlen, Kellie, Scruffy, and Algie the Seal as himself.

Harlen and I did not keep in touch, that would have been something my mother would have done and so since she died in 1970 a lot of relationships fell by the wayside. I don’t know if Harlen continued in the business, though I have heard that as an adult, he’s an engineer for the City of Los Angeles. I’ve heard there’s a bar he likes to hang out at occasionally in Culver City or Hollywood or something, and always have heard he’s a “nice, regular guy”. It has never occurred to me to get in touch with him, and (as you now know) I am a terrible correspondent. In the last couple of years people have suggested that we get in touch so perhaps that will happen at some time.

Scruffy was named Scruffy in real life, and when I once asked my mom how much money I made she told me, “Scruffy makes more!” In my life at that time, we did not have a dog. I had a cat, a rat, miscellaneous reptiles, but no dog. At least once handlers put dog food on my cheek for Scruffy to lick off, a trick of training that I was not pleased with at all. Honestly, and I know people don’t want to hear it; I was not a big fan of Scruffy! Somehow I must have already known to avoid working with kids and animals.

Adam: Newspaper publicity pieces at the time had stories from the GaMM set at 20th Century-Fox on Pico Blvd., including you and Harlen being taught to ice-skate by Hope Lange and schooled in the Queen’s English by Edward Mulhare; as well as the two of you playing a particularly long game of tic-tac-toe when you weren’t teaching Scruffy to play ball. You’ve also written of being schooled on set with Harlen. Was it a happy set to be on?
Kellie: I don’t remember anything about ice-skating, and it sounds as though that may have been a photo opp. If it was anything genuine I think I would have remembered it, but I can’t deny it either. We were schooled in learning how to say “blast!” and “shipshape and Bristol fashion”, and a few other phrases but that’s all I remember. The tic-tac-toe game you refer to was definitely from a publicity shoot, as I have the Polaroid and stills. As I remember it, tic-tac-toe was just something to do while we were photographed, and that was one of those times when the dog food was put on my face. This all sounds like publicity, I don’t really remember anything specific.

Being schooled on set was great, and only took three hours a day, which I think is plenty for school. We had a bus – I think it was a school bus – parked right outside the main doors to the soundstage and that’s where we went to school with our teacher, Mrs. Bone. That was a very fun name for a teacher to have, and played in perfectly with the whole haunted house theme of the show. She had a funny way of sneezing, where she’d do a big wind up – ah, ah, AH… – and then a little tiny “choo”.

Kellie and Harlen in 1968. (Photographer: Ivan Nagy. Adam Gerace private collection).
Kellie and Harlen in 1968. (Photographer: Ivan Nagy. Adam Gerace private collection).

When we had days where we weren’t needed a lot, we were released to go across Pico Blvd. to Ranch Park, where they even had a swimming pool. Often our schooling would involve studying in my individual dressing room, which was a little hot aluminum box next to the school bus. It may have been a small trailer, with a bed, makeup table and lights, restroom, and little dinette area.

No air conditioning, and it sweltered so badly that once a snake given to me by another kid who worked on the lot (Darby Hinton, he was in Daniel Boone) was forgotten over a long weekend. We should have taken the pet home to cool Santa Monica, but instead we left it in the dressing room at Fox and came back after the break to a dead snake.

Adam: Early in the run of GaMM, you were Burl Ives’ co-star in the Thanksgiving TV-special, All Things Bright and Beautiful. What are your memories of that?
Kellie: Appearing in All Things Bright and Beautiful with Burl Ives and other stars including jazz great Lionel Hampton, was an absolute high point for me and my family. The show was directed by the same person who did Wild in the Streets – not sure which came first though I think it was Wild in the Streets before All Things Bright And Beautiful – both directed by Barry Shear.

Mr. Ives, as I called him, was a completely genuine person and when he spoke it was very special. The fact that he could play guitar and sing made him a huge hit with a kid like me. This show was shot on location, I don’t know where, but I think we were picked up in a car every day to get there, a sort of limo called a “stretch”.

The night the show was set to air, which I believe was on Thanksgiving in 1968, our family was gathered to watch it on TV together. The phone rang and it was Mr. Ives inviting us to come to the hotel where he was staying and watch it with him. He was in a suite at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood. My mom, dad, me, my sister Wendy and her son Erik, we all traipsed over into Hollywood and got to the suite in time to watch the show. I have a Polaroid from that night with Erik, who was five, me and Mr. Ives all on our bellies posing with a snow white polar bear rug and the head of the polar bear like one of us in the photo.

Burl Ives, Kellie, and her nephew Erik (Kellie Flanagan private collection).
Burl Ives, Kellie, and her nephew Erik (Kellie Flanagan private collection).

I do not have a copy of this show, though I sure wish I did. What I do have is an audio recording and it’s just priceless to hear my little voice and the man we all know as the wayfaring stranger. I think that’s one of the things he was called! Just a great guy.

Adam: Your favorite GaMM episode, “Puppy Love”, comes from the second season. Candy falls for the dreamy Mark Helmore, played by Mark Lester. He was a hot commodity after Oliver! and Run Wild, Run Free. What was it like to play front and centre, and did you share Candy’s crush (not Candy Crush, mind you) on Mark?
Kellie: The GaMM episode “Puppy Love” was indeed my favorite of all episodes, I am not too shy to say it. One of the reasons that show was so much fun is that so many kids were cast to play Candy’s gang of friends, plus Penelope and Mark.

The scenes in “Puppy Love” are pretty funny to watch, and they were really fun to shoot. I completely preferred that the entire episode focused on my character, because I was a ham and considered myself underutilized on a regular basis – so it was great to have lots of lines to memorize and to be in just about every scene of the episode.

It’s also funny to watch, because you can really see what was becoming or would become or perhaps already had become my actual personality. It’s all just very… Kellie. Since I was raised before video cameras were everywhere, my childhood was documented in a way that not many kids my age would have been familiar with. So when I watch scenes from “Puppy Love”, like the dancing and singing, and Candy mooning over Mark, and the fighting and hurt feelings and I-don’t-care-attitude in the end, that’s all very much like me and for that reason is special to watch. I also think I was a pretty good little actress from what I can tell.

With Mark Lester (Kellie Flanagan private collection).
With Mark Lester (Kellie Flanagan private collection).

Mark Lester was nothing compared to having my own friend from real life on the show that week. Johnny Garacochea lived across the street and up three houses from where we lived on 18th Street in Santa Monica. His dad owned a Basque bakery, and his mother was young and pretty, very classic homemaker-type. My mom talked his mom into letting Johnny do some acting, and then I guess my mom talked the producers into letting Johnny be on the show – he was a nice kid and great looking kid from a very nice family – so that was more fun for me even than having a star like Mark Lester. I was not interested in boys at that age, so it wasn’t a factor really, though Mark Lester was and from what I can see still is, as Candy would say, adorable.

With Michael Barbera, Christopher Shea and Johnny Garacochea (credited as John Garrison).
With Michael Barbera, Christopher Shea and Johnny Garacochea (credited as John Garrison).

Adam: One more quote from a newspaper article that discussed your love of wildlife (you had two pet alligators?!): “One moment, Kellie will be playing with the multitude of dolls who “accompany” her to the studio each morning. The next minute, she may be conducting a serious conversation with an adult three or four times her age on a current national event” (The Abilene Reporter-News, September 28, 1969, p. 12-E). This paints a picture of an articulate young lady. Do you relate to it? Do you think that that was something you brought to the set, or a byproduct of working so young?
Kellie: The description you cite about me as a child having typical childhood pets and also perfectly adult conversations, is quite true and very much speaks to uniqueness in my upbringing. First, let’s address the alligators. My mom was an experienced mom with four kids before me, including two boys. We had all kinds of lizards, snakes, turtles and other animals including rats, mice, and cats. There was an instance of two alligators in the bathtub once, and I do recall seeing that, but I think it was a one-time thing and a self-limiting problem. In other words, my mom kyboshed it and out they went.

I did have a couple of Caimans, and we’d rig the Slip ‘N Slide over the backyard play slide and let the little critters off at the top until they slid into a bucket of water at the bottom. I don’t know if you could get them anymore and that’s probably exercising very poor judgment to drop a reptile down a waterslide, so I do not recommend or advocate that in any way 😉

Jerry and Neal’s youngest child (my brother Terry) was 14 when I was born. By the time I started acting really regularly, my brothers and sisters were out of the house. I was raised with adults and spoken to as an adult more or less from the time I was very little. My brothers and sisters made a great game of teaching me to say “bullshit” to anything a nun asked me. That caused confusion amongst the sisters at St. Monica’s, and was hilarious to my own brothers and sisters, to see a little kid thrown a crabby curse word out for any question asked.

My father had a tremendous sensibility for words, and was always working on word puzzles, jingles, poems and rhymes. He taught me big words from a little age, like “pusillanimous”. I tested well in school and on IQ charts, and I remember being pretty fearless. I believe that I brought a lot to the table in that regard when it came to acting. Also, I was petite and they like that in the business, because you are an older child who can play younger, which makes her easier to direct. She will have better memory and ability, and still look like a really little kid.

Then, once I began working that reinforced itself. As I was exposed to more of the creative adult world, that influenced me to the point where by the time I was 11 years old, I knew everything. At least I thought I did.

Adam: Child actors are surrounded by big names and, particularly in the case of GaMM, some veteran performers. Were you in awe of any particular person/people you got to work with, or has that come with time?
Kellie: The most impressed I remember being (besides Dom DeLuise who was just a riot) was when Harry Nilsson the songwriter was on the show. My sister had his records, or maybe we got them later, but I knew he was a rising star and as I recall he was very young and kind of awkward but extremely kind and generous with the music he played for us that week. I still adore his music and can sort of work my way through one of his songs on guitar, the charming “Puppy Song”, I think it’s called.

With Dom DeLuise as Elroy Applegate in "Today I Am a Ghost".
With Dom DeLuise as Elroy Applegate in “Today I Am a Ghost”.

Looking back, I am astonished and impressed by the caliber of the people with which I had the honor to share a sound stage, if only briefly. We spent a lot of time, as kids on the show, going to school and then going to bed, so except for a few episodes – and Jonathan’s interaction with the ghost – we weren’t in the show as much as kids on today’s shows (like Modern Family) or even other shows like The Courtship of Eddie’s Father or Family Affair, that really centered around the children.

Adam: American International Pictures went hippie (to paraphrase Salli Sachse, one of their long-term contractees from the Beach Party movies) with Wild in the Streets. You had a small but pivotal role as a bit of an antagonist to Christopher Jones. What do you remember of him?
Kellie: I get a huge kick out of Wild in the Streets and always have. Some of the scenes were really fun to shoot, like the political rally. Others were dramatic, like the scene where Hal Holbrook rips the posters off the walls in a drunken rage.

With Hal Holbrook.
With Hal Holbrook.
Millie Perkins puts an end to the Fergus children (Kellie, Michael Margotta, and Don Wyndham) listening to the new Max Frost.
Millie Perkins puts an end to the Fergus children (Kellie, Michael Margotta, and Don Wyndham) listening to the new Max Frost.

I spent an afternoon with Richard Pryor while filming that movie – we were on location near my house (which makes me wonder if my mom told the director about Douglas Park) – and we had a scene together that involved crawdads. Richard and I played with the crawdads, as I recall, and when the day was over, got to dump the bucket of crayfish into the water in the pond at Douglas Park near 25th in Santa Monica.

Shelley Winters was a big force back then – we were not supposed to be on stage when she was on – because of her salty language choices, we were told, but also because I had no scene with her in the movie. I loved her in The Poseidon Adventure.

The music in the movie was really fun, too, as were the costumes. When the movie premiered in Hollywood it was a big deal, as I remember. Something tells me that Martin Luther King’s widow Coretta Scott King appeared at the premiere – but I don’t know why she would be, it was just months after her husband’s death. So that makes no sense but I have that memory of not seeing her but being told she was there.

That movie has gotten Rotten Apple Awards among others. It was listed in the comedy and drama section of video stores at one time. I have no memory of working with Christopher Jones, really, but I do remember the sets in that movie, including the end set. Also those were my boots I wore at the end, they were always taking my shoes for things and just spray-painting them whatever colors the wardrobe department needed.

Once, when I was a teenager, that movie was playing at the local dive theater near my place in Venice, and I got a bunch of my friends in to see it for free, but when the lights came on only dedicated few remained. I love counter culture and the photos of me in the storm trooper outfit with the peace sign are some of my favorites. I really got to act in that movie, the tears were real.

Mary Fergus after her father's drunken rage.
Mary Fergus after her father’s drunken rage.
Kellie, Christopher Jones, and Salli Sachse.
Kellie, Christopher Jones, and Salli Sachse.

Adam: I conducted some research into PTSD a few years back. Something you wrote on your blog resonated with my thoughts:

“A new apocalypse is upon us: a generation of men and women are cut down or condemned to live without limbs, intestines, brain matter, sometimes even without souls. PTSD and TBI tear our young vets apart even after they’ve survived the roadside bombs. Soldiers return from tour these days as hometown heroes, and kill themselves with desperate resolve — overseas and stateside suicides are reported now in numbers unheard of in any war, ever before”.

You described Vietnam as “the war of my childhood”. I read that during GaMM you participated in events for the U.S. Marine Corps, including a ‘Toyathon’ (organized by Los Angeles children’s television personality Sally Baker, a.k.a. Hobo Kelly) and even collecting coffee cans for Marine wives and mothers to pack with homemade cookies. While many children of your age grew up with Vietnam, did you find yourself exposed to more of it as a result of working?
Kellie: I have a vague recollection of cans and fundraisers but I think the real reason I remember the war is because my family was involved. My oldest brother Shaun went to Vietnam very early on in the sixties, “before anything was happening”, he says now, though he was a paratrooper and Green Beret so that’s a little hard to imagine. He was away from home one Christmas and we kept the tree up until he returned later that year. He is 20 years older than me and was married and out of the house by the time I remember much.

Santa Monica was a pretty small town in those days, and I recall that we’d listen to the nightly news on the radio, and they’d read names of the war dead town by town. We had to wait all the way until they got to the “s” for Santa Monica. I don’t know how often this happened, or what station, but I remember being with my parents in the kitchen listening to the radio, very tense until we heard the names and didn’t know any of the dead.

I grew up in an Irish-German household where talk of politics was not verboten and both of my sisters were very active politically on a local level over the years. My sister Jill lived in the south for a while when the Civil Rights marches were going on.

The reason the suicides resonate with me is because I was involved in production on a series called the Civil War Journal for A&E, over 60 episodes and many that I wrote myself. It was a doc style series in the ‘90s hosted by Danny Glover. That gave me a little taste of war and so I caught wind of the suicides early and was really frustrated to note that our government wasn’t counting a lot of them as suicides and I could see right away the numbers were extremely alarming.

Adam: Your mother, Geraldine, passed away in 1970. How did life change after that?
Kellie: My life had already changed drastically when my mom Geraldine died in 1970, because she’d been sick for a long time before that, but when she did die just a few days before my 11th birthday, there was no going back to the way things had been.

When Jerry was diagnosed with cancer, there were exploratory surgeries and other surgeries to try and arrest the thing – she had a colostomy bag from the colon cancer and on the second year of GaMM she joked that she didn’t have to leave the soundstage to go to the bathroom. So I guess she had a pretty good attitude at least in front of me.

She got sicker and sicker, though, so I went to live with my sister Jill who was living with Davis Factor, Jr. at the time. He was the very kind and wealthy grandson of Max Factor of makeup fame. Davis was in the process of getting divorced when they met and moved in together. So it seemed at that time that Jill was in the most stable relationship but also Jill had always stayed close to me and taken care of me. I was very comfortable with her and with Davis, who had three children of his own.

At first, we lived in Marina del Rey, in an apartment with rented furniture, every piece of it, which was fun. Davis had two boats, a yacht and a speedboat. We’d take the speedboat to dinner at different restaurants in the Marina.

I learned to water-ski, eat clams and abalone, started going to a public school for 6th grade when we moved to the Peninsula where each street carries a nautical name: Anchorage, Buccaneer, Catamaran, Driftwood, Eastwind, Fleet, etc.

We lived on Fleet in a big black house with yellow trim and a turquoise door. We had a pet fox that we bought at a pet shop in Century City. When that fox ran away, we got another. My bedroom was downstairs in the two story house, and I was allowed to pick out everything for the remodel down there. It was two bedrooms with a master bath area in between, open style, with a fabulous claw-foot tub and loads of beautiful handmade Mexican tile, and an enclosed latrine. We had kittens, and lots of little trips and things were going about as well as you could expect.

The morning after my mom died, I knew she was gone because I told myself, I’d know. I didn’t want anyone to have to tell me, I thought that would be the saddest thing. I saw her one last time when some nuns smuggled me into the elevator and up to Intensive Care between their long habits. She was very sick and I remember a tear sliding slowly down her wrinkled cheek, it was heartbreaking.

Geraldine Flanagan (Kellie Flanagan private collection).
Geraldine Flanagan (Kellie Flanagan private collection).

So, what changed? Everything changed. My dad was an alcoholic so once Jerry died, Neal went off the rails. There had been no insurance, I think, and so finances were tapped, including any money to speak of, because in catastrophic situations – and this was an utter catastrophe to lose my mom – a child actor’s money can be used, and I had already been head of household financially for many years.

My dad sold our house in a very desirable area of Santa Monica, sold all our things I guess, except for a few pieces. He moved to Inglewood – not desirable. I still saw him – when we all lived at home he was a great daddy to me and I loved him tremendously – but as his disease progressed it became more clear that he was not fit to handle a child my age. He left me in the car once while he was in a bar and I got mad and started honking the horn and he got mad and then one of my brothers or sisters came to get me and they all got mad. Once he drove drunk with me in the car down a very windy road and it was terrifying. He flashed his gun at the grocery store for no good reason. So pretty soon, I didn’t see dad anymore. He died on the hospital when I was 15 from liver disease due to alcoholism. The last time I remember seeing him was at my 9th grade graduation.

Adam: After leaving show business, you attended high school and UCLA. You’ve written of that time that you still have your “private journals from Venice High School in the late-1970s, where Mrs. Schneider impressed the value of a strong essay, and Mr. Batcho tortured students with seemingly endless notes in crisp red pen”. I have fond memories of my teachers and how they shaped what I wanted to do. Can you tell me a little about how you got into writing?
Kellie: By the time I was 15 I kept a journal – a very torrid, dramatic and crazed journal just as you’d expect a teenage girl to keep. So by my teenage years, writing was already an important part of what I identified as me. When I was in 11th grade I entered a random contest to write an essay about trees with a chance to win a one-week stay with a forest family in Fort Bragg, California. The essay contest was sponsored by Georgia-Pacific, a big logging and paper concern.

By this time, I was living with my sister Wendy, her son Erik (five years younger than me) and Wendy’s new husband, Bill. Wendy was the English Department Chair and teacher at Venice High, and her husband Bill was known as “Coach” because he coached football and other sports. Probably it was Wendy who found out about this essay and encouraged me to give it a shot.

Kellie in 1973, Marina del Rey (Kellie Flanagan private collection).
Kellie in 1973, Marina del Rey (Kellie Flanagan private collection).

I have no recollection whatsoever what I wrote, maybe something about my love of nature, but it did the trick, because I won the essay contest and pretty soon was on a flight up north to Fort Bragg, where I was set to move in with this logging family – the dad was one of the bosses in the forest – and stay for a week to learn more about trees and logging and basically a big publicity stunt for Georgia-Pacific.

It would have been great, except, a tragedy had occurred. The logging family’s older daughter’s fiancé had been killed in a logging accident just a week or so before. This I found out on the flight to Fort Bragg. To my shock, when I arrived, they put me in her room and put her with her little sister to sleep. I could not believe this, and thought she needed her own space, but they wouldn’t hear of it. I couldn’t even believe they were having me there, it was so fresh.

The trip itself and the overall experience were wonderful, and I saw many sides of the forest that week. But I learned something really powerful about myself that had nothing to do with trees. One night, the grieving girl came into her room where I was getting ready for bed. She was very young, not much older than me, but I was the one with the wisdom on this particular subject of utter despair. We began to talk. She cried and told me about her dead fiancé and we talked for a couple of hours, and in that time I began to see that some of the painful experiences I’d had – losing both parents – had given me a gift of compassion and understanding that would be a wellspring I’d draw on forever. I mean, it didn’t all come out so succinctly in my head like that, but I realized I had helped her through a tough night – one of many, I’m sure – and in doing so, had healed myself a little. So that was pretty big for a kid.

At the end of that trip, I got to basically hitchhike home via little airports. I had a school dance to get to – spring formal – and the regular connecting flights weren’t working right to get me back home on time. The people in Fort Bragg set me up with the pilot of a little plane who flew me as far south as he could, then radioed ahead to see who else was going further south that way. None of this could happen today! After a few flights I got home, in time for the dance.

Well, that’s a long way to go to talk about writing – but I guess it’s the storytelling and the understanding that goes along with it that I am drawn to. I dropped out of UCLA by the way. If there wasn’t a parking space I flipped my car around and went back home to the beach. I didn’t even have enough sense to properly drop the classes, just didn’t go. So I got my education doing TV documentaries – I have a specialty in Civil War and post-Civil War westward expansion and art of those same periods. During my television career, coming up through the ranks as a production secretary and production-assistant all the way to producer and director – I was always saying, “I can write that, do you want me to write that?” So I just whittled away at it and eventually got to do a lot of writing for television and then freelance writing and now I’m writing you!

I have always been a bad correspondent, though, and am notoriously forgetful with letters.

Adam: When you’re not writing yourself, who/what do you like to read?
Kellie: I read a lot of memoirs because I have been dabbling in memoir for years. My favorite is The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. For fiction, one of my favorites is A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry. I also like Things Fall Apart, The Good Earth, and I have a lot of reference books I love, many for writing. We also read Outside Magazine and I pay attention to lots of sources online. I watch a lot of TV!

Adam: A few years ago you relocated with your family to the Sierra Nevada Mountains. You wrote of that time:

“Most of my identity went missing as we moved. Even after 18,000 pounds of belongings trucked its successful way from Culver City, lugged over the Grapevine and climbed into these foothills, I still struggled to find where I belonged”.

How did you find your place?
Kellie: We left Los Angeles for the Sierra Nevada Foothills eight years ago. One of my favorite movies is Out of Africa with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. If you don’t laugh too hard, I’ll tell you that this move from the city to the mountains is a little like my Africa – or how Africa was for Meryl’s character the writer Karen von Blixen who went by the pen name Isak Dinesen. OK I know it’s not that dramatic but that’s what goes on in my head. We had always intended to leave the city; we thought when our daughter went into middle school. Instead, my best friend had a nearly-deadly stroke that left her in the ICU at UCLA all summer in 2006. She recovered pretty well, amazing recovery, Lazarus-like. It made us realize we wanted to get while the getting was good, so we migrated to almost five acres about half an hour outside the entrance to Yosemite National Park, in the beautiful and currently drought afflicted foothills. We stayed as close to Los Angeles as we could afford to and still be in the mountains.

To a certain degree I’ve found my place. I don’t know that I’ll live here forever. I feel really blessed to have found work that I love most days – something I can do that’s in my field and to be able to work from home, all that is a big joy and a big surprise. Our daughter is delightful and is super busy in her junior year of high school now. She wants to be a forensic scientist not an actor so that was worth the move! My husband Dave and I have been married for almost 19 years, he is a landscape architect and has a great job in the city. I have a dog I adore, and a flock of chickens, and beauty surrounds me. There’s also a hell of a lot of fires, lately, but that’s part of the adventure – and something I never dreamed I’d be writing about, in terms of being a reporter, certainly. So I love the turns my life has taken, and consider myself very fortunate to have made it this far.

At Tenaya Lake, Yosemite National Park (Photographer: Steve Montalto/HighMountain Images. Kellie Flanagan private collection).
At Tenaya Lake, Yosemite National Park (Photographer: Steve Montalto/HighMountain Images. Kellie Flanagan private collection).

Adam: What’s next?
Kellie: I have been a stay-home Mom for almost 17 years and have had a bunch of part time jobs, mostly in the areas of entertainment, but not all. For a brief few weeks, I was a waitress in a tea shop my sister-in-law owned here in the mountains. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but only lasted three weeks. That’s twice I haven’t made it as a waitress, so that means I wouldn’t be a very good actress, right?

Inside my head I am constantly writing. For a long time before this, I was a writer who didn’t write. I have a half-finished memoir about the time from around 1966-1976 so it covers the television years and also, what I think are more interesting, transitional years of teen angst and coming of age.

A little more than two years ago, I started working for Sierra News Online, and it has been an amazing experience. I had no clue about journalism, had never tried it or studied it.

Since I began working for SNO I’ve probably written many hundreds if not a thousand little stories. Some are very tiny and others hold some weight. Mostly I enjoy writing the human interest pieces and people respond very well to those. So we are trying to structure things so I can do more of that. The website is a very interesting place to be, it has grown exponentially since I began and it’s fascinating in terms of the business end of things.

It’s my goal to publish at least one book, though I have a few in me, and I am working ever-modestly toward that goal. Send help!

 

The Ghost & Mrs. Muir can be purchased through Madman Entertainment’s website, as well as online and in-store at several DVD outlets. Kellie is on Facebook and I’m sure she would love it for you to drop past there. She also has her blog where she writes about life, past and present, as well as posting photos of her passions (such as repurposed furniture), and her menagerie of cats and dogs and chickens and things (I’ve been inspired in my phrasing of that from The Muppets Take Manhattan, I’m sure of it). Besides stories of her own life, Kellie writes on the blog and Facebook page of her experiences of telling the stories of others. As she mentioned in the interview, Kellie worked on the series Civil War Journal. It was there that she produced or scripted programs on Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, the unsung heroes of that battle, the Battle of Fredericksburg, the “boy generals” of the Civil War, the prison camps, and many other subjects. Her work in production, producing, writing and directing has also involved documentary treatments of Mata Hari and John Wilkes Booth, and even country music stars. Oh yes, she did tell his heart, his achy breaky… Perhaps what I like most about Kellie’s Internet presence is her insights on being a writer, sometimes sharing the insights of others. I love this quote of Mignon McLaughlin that Kellie posted: “There’s only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that’s a writer sitting down to write”. Now where’s my Evian (who am I kidding, it’s tap). You can also find Kellie at Sierra News Online.

Top photo of Kellie by Roxy Kobashi.

The World at Large

Adz HunterThe first day of a new job can be hard for anyone. Employee ID photo, stationery orders, and finding just the right parking space. Now imagine being hired as a hit man and you’re about to carry out your first job. Two men sitting in a car late at night; the one in the driver’s seat fidgets nervously as the other sips from an oversized takeaway cup. Sensing the gravitas of what’s about to happen and the driver’s mounting dread, the man in the passenger seat throws the cup into the back seat and says to his pal, “Do you want a cuddle?” As the driver breaks down in his friend’s arms, he lets it all out. “I’ve never even held a gun before. I use to be a vegetarian”. The other reassuringly nods, “I know, I know – you still can be”.

Adz Hunter wrote the new short film 2 Birds and a Wrench, and co-stars with his friend and frequent collaborator, Roger Woods. Adz (I’m glad he goes by “Adz” now – Adam & Adam just wouldn’t work well in an interview scenario) is perhaps best known in Australia for playing twins Cameron (the good one) and Robert (the not so good one) Robinson on TV series Neighbours from 2006-07. He then headed over to the UK where projects included the offbeat stage play The Pork Crunch, which he wrote, as well at A Wedding Most Strange where one man faces the prospect of having too many potential suitors. While based in L.A., he developed a web series, Fresh Off the Plane about expats sharing an apartment. His character Caleb, a novelist, can’t read you anything he’s written, though; he hasn’t “got that far yet”.

Adz also travels a lot and writes about it. Recent adventures he’s put to paper (or Internet – what’s that, the Cloud?) included a night in Koh Kong on the Thailand/Cambodia border. It rained for most of the time he was there, but it doesn’t bother the locals, “If this was London there would be fights at the bus stop, babies would be crying and you would probably get a walking stick in the ribs at some point”. I remember the feeling when I was in Singapore and they’d be the afternoon downpour. Okay, I wasn’t roughing it around Asia like Adz, but I did have to get to Uniqlo before it closed. He’s equally at home taking a weekend away in the West Midlands of England, trying the brews at the All Nations Inn, “The Dabley Ale made me weak. At the knees. Then in the head after I had two”. Listening to Adz gives me wanderlust. I think it’ll do the same for you.

 

Adam: How did you get into acting?
Adz: I wanted to perform quite early from probably 10 or 11 years old when I was attending primary school and was interested as to why movie actors were so convincing when they didn’t even have qualifications in real life to be a doctor or a lawyer etc. It stemmed from a love of storytelling that I got from reading comic books as a kid (I’m still a big Batman fan), and wanting to truly be someone else.

Adam: I really liked one of your early short films that was made in Queensland; the sweet-natured Brace Yourself. It makes you realise that anyone can get past having to get braces as a young adult so long as they have an accordion, a fedora (or similar) and some choice dance moves.
Adz: Brace Yourself was my first paid gig out of acting school. The braces were made from a mould exactly as if I was fitted to have them. I was lucky enough to never have braces growing up but now know what a mouth full of metal is like. I remember in the kissing scene they became a little problematic; which to the credit of the writer it was what they were looking for. We shot half of it at an apartment block on the Gold Coast and the rest in a Salsa club on Caxton St in Brisbane. Our accommodation was an expensive hotel so I was under the impression that this was the high life of an actor, and much more of it was to come! If only I knew…

Adam: I had a lot of friends who moved to Melbourne or Sydney after high school or (as you did to Melbourne at 21) university. Friends of mine found those cities to be a bit more welcoming than others since so many people who settle there are from somewhere else. Did you find that?
Adz: I think if you spend 21 years in the same city or state, then a move somewhere new is a normal progression. Brisbane was a cool place to grow up, but I grew out of it quite quickly. You want to find your feet as an adult. I did most of my ‘growing up’ in Melbourne and I’ll always look back fondly on those years. Besides, Melbourne’s cooler climate and thriving arts scene at the time was really inviting for me.

Adam: Twins or similar-looking relatives have a long history on television, particularly where one of them has more nefarious motives than the other! How did you approach playing Rob and Cam Robinson in Neighbours, and avoid making them caricatured dichotomies of each other?
Adz: On a soap it’s quite difficult to create two different personas when you have limited time and fairly simple storylines. The Neighbours guys are the pros at fast turnaround TV, because it takes some skill to produce television that quick! Despite creating two invariably different characters, at the end of the day they are still twins. Cameron was killed off fairly quickly, so I didn’t get a lot of time for any proper in-depth character motivations. Most of the screen time went to Robert who I played as sinister and as unsavoury as possible. Like a really bad wine you expected to be fantastic, Robert leaves a bad taste in most people’s mouths.

Cam tries to prove he's innocent.
Cam tries to prove he’s innocent in Neighbours.

Adam: Did having a role in one of their most popular imported series help you get other work when you moved to the UK in 2009?
Adz: In a way it did, but by the time I had made the move to the UK it was over-ripe. I had been off air for three years and although I still got recognised, work didn’t come knocking. I had to go to it.

Adam: Tell me about writing The Pork Crunch. When did you start doing this? Was writing something that you always thought you would do?
Adz: I had been writing in my own time years before The Pork Crunch was finished.  I started it as a scene for a showcase night for agents with an actor I’d barely met named Roger Woods. He kindly accepted to perform a script that involved a drugs heist and clubbing a toddler to death on stage. Most found it disturbing, but we thought it was hilarious. Dark, un-pc jokes an old flatmate and I used to ping around the living room and a passion for drum and bass music filled in the rest. Like most writers I was too scared to show anyone my work for fear of being critiqued. Thankfully The Pork Crunch was a project that came quite naturally as I couldn’t write it quick enough and it had a rehearsed reading in 2010 before being staged at the Pleasance Theatre in 2011.

Adam: When I wrote my first journal articles, I was terrified of putting them out into the world for scrutiny. Did you feel this with The Pork Crunch as the production started to take shape?
Adz: Of course. It made no difference how it was received; it was the fact that every word on that page is yours. I even had trouble learning my own lines because it was a very new way of working. Once the show was up, I was ready for anything and I knew any scrutiny was a blessing. Luckily for us, we were well received thanks to Simon Greiff’s ship steering and Roger Woods’ balls. If it wasn’t for those two (or three) we wouldn’t have had a show.

Adam: While in the UK you appeared in a wonderfully-inventive advertisement for Ford Fiesta. Where did you travel to film this?
Adz: That advertisement was a global campaign for Ford, and more of a luxurious couple of months shooting on location in Iceland, Spain, South Africa and Italy than anything. It was weird. Lots of fast-paced montages, like a video clip, and no talking required. It’s the penultimate commercial actors dream. You are paid very handsomely to turn up to set every day, get dressed and drive a car through mountains and rainforests. Then you get to go out to dinner every night. Unfortunately those gigs only come along once in a lifetime. So I’ve done mine. Tick!

Adam: One of the projects I wanted you to tell me a little about was the very unusual (in the good sense of that word) film, A Wedding Most Strange.
Adz: AWMS came from a meeting set up by my British agent with director Trevor Garlick while I was having meetings with agents in Los Angeles. Trevor said he had a script he wanted me to look at, the role of a gay guy who’d been in love with his best friend for many years who returns as a guest at his wedding. At first I declined to do it. I didn’t really get into the script, and there was a chance I’d be parodying any lead character’s gay best friend in every movie ever made. What changed my mind was that if I did something like this now, enjoy it, and continue to diversify the roles I play, I’d be happy. AWMS ended up being a hell load of fun to shoot (despite the freezing Devon weather) and I still have good friends from that shoot today.

Adam: Some of what you write could be described as awkward-based humour, like Fresh Off the Plane, a web series inspired by your experiences of moving to Los Angeles. You also co-starred as Caleb, an aspiring novelist who describes his genre as “technically romance”. What was shooting this like?
Adz: Shooting Fresh was interesting, though I wrote a screenplay that was used as a content base for actors to play with, a majority of what you see as an end product was improvised. A web series is a medium for the YouTube generation to get instant feedback and views in a short period of time. I mixed my observations of cultural differences I would see daily, and the hugely popular genre of awkward humour and decided I could write a series of short episodes that audiences could tune into every week.

Adam: You got some small parts on some big projects while living in L.A.: a Shakespearean actor in Liz & Dick, the dark comedy Wolfpack of Reseda, and a role in ABC- TV’s Mistresses. What was it like living and working in L.A.?
Adz: I get this question a lot, and my answer never changes. L.A. is a tough, tough city to live in. Even for those actors doing well, it’s taken them all many years to get anywhere. I could count on one hand how many actors I know personally who have landed in L.A., walked off the tarmac and straight onto a set. The rest you’ll find in a cue at Sunset Gower Studios at 5pm on a Thursday taking a cheque for $50 for being a part of the audience for The Price Is Right. I was fortunate to get those roles and others out of sheer luck and personal belief – not talent. If you are talented it helps. If you know A LOT of people and have relentless energy/determination 7 days a week for 52 weeks a year, the gods may be good to you.

Adam: Ultimately, you decided to “take a momentary step back from the tinsel and the lights because after a while I was beginning to think I had bi-polar”. You now split your time between the UK and L.A. When I was visiting L.A., I got the impression that living and working there could also breed a bit of paranoia.
Adz: Paranoia is a light term. It was like everything and everyone was on show. Constantly. It’s exhausting. I got back to England and all I did was dig up the garden for two weeks. I found the underbelly of America quite quickly. I like to see genuine and honest people. Los Angeles hit its peak in the 1960s due to a plethora of studios and movies making a lot of money and has been the world’s English movie making capital ever since. But every dog has its day, and I think Los Angeles is going through a huge period of change now. There is a lot less being made there than what there used to be as it’s too expensive. Some would say it’s an overhyped and sensationalised atmosphere that has a reputation for ruining careers. Not making them. So I plan to go back some day. Ha!

Adam: You also write articles and a blog. In one of your blog posts you discussed three things that you think a young actor (18-30) must do: travel, fall in love, and break up with a person you fall deeply in love with. I’ll ask you about the travel. Besides living in several places, when did you start to travel?
Adz: I guess acting and the biz is always where the heart is for me, so I’ll tie anything into that that is of equal passion – which is travel. Travel teaches you a lot about yourself. What you are like in a high pressured situation out of your comfort zone for example. I’m a sucker for punishment and I’ll always have to be taught something three times before I’ll learn. But I have a thirst for what is new and different, so my curiosity is fed by travelling to incredible and untouched places. I never get enough of what the world has to offer. I didn’t even leave Australia for the first until I was 25. I was a late bloomer compared to my friends but once it started, the bug got a hold of me.

Adam: Travel writer (and actor) Andrew McCarthy said travel for him was not vacation or for work, but to “go off into the world and you make yourself vulnerable into the world”. Andrew found that when he did this “the world meets you”. What does travel mean to you?
Adz: Andrew’s right. Travel is true freedom. Travel should be exciting, dangerous and euphoric at the same time. We are lucky we live in a world where most people can’t get to every corner of it before they die. There is always something new to explore and someone new to meet. I just got back from my first time in the Pacific, to the island nation of Samoa, and I’m constantly reminded of how vast this earth really is. Samoa was my 36th international stop. Then I met someone who had more uppity than me to go places, and any future planning now ceases to involve painting the house but more like an hour on Skyscanner and a credit card.

Adz Hunter

Adam: In another blog post you wrote about how an actor should go with (at least initially) the particular type that they might be given, such as playing repeated “baddies”. You wrote, “Actors struggle being told exactly what they look like at times because they have an idea in their head of the types of roles that they want to play” I wonder if ironically, given how a career in front of the camera makes it all about ‘you’, that some performers also lack self-awareness. That is, self-focus or even rumination doesn’t mean insight?
Adz: Actors need to have an acute sense of themselves and the way they are perceived. We study ourselves in order to become other people. No point in trying to figure out somebody else if you don’t understand yourself first. Actors also do a lot of hiding. They’re masters at it. A lack of self-awareness can only come about if a person believes in their own hype. Play the game. Not the hype. The entertainment industry is a narcissistic business and a way of dealing with it is to continue telling the stories that compelled an audience to listen to you in the first place.

Adam: You must have the face of a “baddie”, because you’re starring in two short-films where you play someone on the wrong side of the law, The Olive Branch Job and your own 2 Birds and a Wrench.
Adz: I get typecast in a way, which isn’t so bad. The darker roles are more interesting and when you have eyebrows like Jack Nicholson and cheekbones that would kick most meth addicts off the street you tend to run with it. Hence the blog I wrote that outlines rolling with what god gave you – it could make you a lot of money. Plus I like playing a bastard. Bastards are complex, they’re troubled, flawed. Iago was a bastard. So was Richard III.

Adam: Tell me about your latest writing effort, the short-film 2 Birds and a Wrench, which you co-produced and co-star with Roger Woods.
Adz: 2 Birds and a Wrench is the second creative venture with Roger Woods. I wrote something that we both wanted to make that fulfilled a desire we both love – dark comedy. I wasn’t interested in writing a film with a message, but something that appealed to us and our audience. I have a wicked, at times sadistic sense of humour that Roger feeds off. We thought about making a movie where two first time hit men signed up for the wrong job and bludgeon their way through the ordeal and come out unlikely winners. We threw many different ideas around but still kept coming back to this one. We fundraised, held auditions, got an incredible director and a stellar cast, and shot a movie we are very proud of. When we were accepted in Portsmouth International Film Festival with three nominations, at least we didn’t feel like a bunch of losers throwing our money down the toilet. Film-making is an ultra-sensitive beast and red flags two very important things that we are constantly reminded of – money and patience. It was no doubt going to be difficult and shooting the entire movie at night proved a challenge but upon completion there was a wonderful sense of achievement.

With Roger Woods.
With Roger Woods.

2 Birds and a Wrench is currently doing the festival circuit, so visit its Twitter page to see where you can catch it. And do keep up with Mr. Hunter (that’s a term of endearment, he didn’t make me call him that), himself, on his Twitter page. Stop on by Adz’ blog. Fresh Off the Plane is available on YouTube.

Top photo: Andy McColl.

Back to the Island

Back in May, I published an article here asking some good people the following question: What three items would you want to have with you if you were stuck on a desert island?

Since that post, two more responses came from some hard-working people and I’d like to share them. The answers prove that no man or woman is an island.

Yvette Freeman (Photo: APB Speakers International)
Yvette Freeman (Photo: APB Speakers International)
Dylan Neal (Photo: IMDb)
Dylan Neal (Photo: IMDb)

Yvette Freeman is currently appearing on Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black. She plays Irma, one of the “Golden Girls”, an inmate who hasn’t seen life outside a prison – much less an island – in a long time. Yvette said that, “Besides things to support living, I would love books by Maya Angelou, music by Rodgers and Hammerstein, and someone to love”.

For Dylan Neal, being on an island would be somewhat familiar. He is currently playing Jack Griffith, editor of a newspaper in the coastal town portrayed in Hallmark’s Cedar Cove. Dylan thought that “If family can’t join – survival guide, hand crank radio, and a knife”.

I’ve been thinking about what I would want. Like Mark Deklin, who said in the previous post that he’d like “a bottomless jar of peanut butter and/or box of pizza”, I would probably go with a never-ending bottle of a base spirit. I love wine, but I don’t like drinking it out in the sun. Plus, I figure the island would have lots of fruit trees from which to make cocktails. Then I’d like some ancient history to read. Perhaps Herodotus’ The Histories or Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. The first piece of writing I won an award for drew on the notion of a Pyrrhic victory, something I learnt about in Ancient History class. Wow, 17 and I thought I knew everything. Finally, there’d have to be someone to share it with. Gilligan had The Skipper, Brooke Shields had Christopher Atkins, and Auntie Mame had Vera Charles. The last two weren’t on an island, but they did know how to turn water into Gin Rickeys.