Interview with Gary Sweet
Gary Sweet’s first film role – in a John Lamond slasher film called Nightmares is not one that “has a big asterisk next to it on my resume” says Sweet with a huge laugh. “I was diabolical.” The role came just before a stint on The Sullivans which Sweet says was more of a dare than a planned career move. “I used to play football for Glenelg in South Australia, and we were on local television at that stage. Me and a few mates were always trying to outdo each other, so I thought if I could get on national television, I would win. I went to an audition with Crawford Productions at the end of my final year at Uni, and they called me and said they had a role for me for about three weeks. It lasted two and half years.”
Sweet says that the time at Crawford’s was critically important. “The only thing going for me at that stage was that I knew I couldn’t act. My father always said if you don’t know something, ask. So I asked a lot of questions, watched and listened and learned the trade - the technical side of the profession. I also had some very good character actors around me to help.” There’s no denying that Sweet must have been a good student: his career has barely given him a rest since, and he has worked in theatre, television and cinema.
“I don’t have a preference,” he says. “I just like a part that I feel I can do something with and that I haven’t done before. The difficulty here in Australia is that when people see you do something they like, the next three or four scripts are all the same. They want you to replicate the performance. For the first ten years of my acting career I reckon I fought every war from The Boer War to Vietnam – I was always playing soldiers.”
It took Sweet a long time to get a role as a bad guy. He’d been Don Bradman in Bodyline, nice guys in guest roles on The Flying Doctors and A County Practice, and the man on the right side of the law in cop shows like Cody and Police Rescue. It wasn’t until 1995 - when Michael Jenkins cast him as the hit-man Christopher Dale Flannery in the brilliant and controversial Blue Murder - that Sweet crossed the line. “It was the first baddie that I’d played and I got some good crits for it” says Sweet. “The point is, you’re an actor, and if you get the opportunity to play different roles, you can display different facets of your character. For me, there are two types of actor. There are personality actors – like Jack Nicholson - who give you what you know, and there are chameleons – like Russell Crowe or John Malkovich, who can do anything. That’s what I aspire to. To try and be different in each role that I do.”
A quick glance at recent parts confirms his ambition. Over the past few years, Sweet has taken parts as varied as Duncan in Geoffrey Wright’s Macbeth, the thoughtful teacher Mr. Darcy in 2:37 (which also starred his son Frank), and an American Soldier named Haney in the upcoming mini-series The Pacific, produced by Tom Hanks, Stephen Spielberg and many of the same crew from Band of Brothers. “I’ve never worked on something as majestic as Pacific”, says Sweet. “The actual size of the production, the number of people involved, the time it took, and the intensity of it was truly spectacular. It was also the first time I played an American. My character comes from Little Rock, Arkansas – so I listened to Bill Clinton speeches to get the accent right.”
Audiences may have to wait a while before The Pacific hits the screens, but in the meantime he’s just completed the lead role in a political thriller called The Tumbler, in which he plays a safecracker searching for British gold buried on an abandoned British military base after World War. “I really liked the idea of the film,” says Sweet, “and the fact that the style and content of the movie was different. It’s a political thriller with a really gutsy script.”
When Sweet looks back over his career, he still sees his role as Don Bradman in Bodyline as a professional turning point, one that took him far away from his memory of his first film Nightmares. “I never realised the importance of securing that part at the time – I was just hopeful of getting the part on the naive basis that I had played a bit of cricket when I was younger. But you know, if I’m at the cricket and things aren’t going too well for Australia, people still ask me to jump the fence and put the pads on.”
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