Australian Actors in Hollywood

Why are Aussie actors so successful in Hollywood?

A warning to the tax obsessed: there will be shockingly little of it in this article. Instead, we’ll have quite a bit about globalisation generally, global business competition specifically, Australians in LA and Australian actors in particular. Still, if you’ve read my piece on Paul Hogan’s tax troubles, and if I tell you that we’ll again be rummaging through the messy drawers of the entertainment industry, you won’t be surprised to find that tax has of way of sneaking in just when you thought you had it beat.

So, why indeed are Australian actors so successful in Hollywood? The question is a tad misleading. Clearly, not all Aussie actors who cross the Pacific bound for the big time make it there. Most, in all probability, cruise the casting calls and end up with little to show. But an overwhelming number have landed juicy parts, enough to have Americans scrunching their brows in disbelief as more and more leading roles, on the small and big screen, have gone to actors from down under.

For the Yanks this is a vexing matter, because it’s not only our Aussie lads and girls, but also the Poms who end up with the plum parts where, after shedding their accents, which they do remarkably well, they play true blue Americans going about their dramatic business. The locals have come to lament, noticeably as of late, that this makes little sense. Why should we need to hire foreigners to act American, they fairly ask? Why can’t we grow this talent at home? What has happened in the hills of Appalachia and the corn covered plains of the Midwest that they no longer so readily supply American movies with its fresh faces?

As if to confirm these fears, Reuters posted a column early last year suggesting that an invasion of American superhero snatching was underway, with the majority of iconic action roles, from Batman to Superman through lesser musclemen like Hulk or Thor, going to Aussies or Brits, not forgetting the Canucks next door. The unspoken question: if no Yank is asked to polish his best British for the next Bond, why should cockneys and ockers pilfer the Marvel and DC Comics catalogues like trollers at a convention?

Fair enough, specially, as Reuters points out, when the huge difference in population numbers between the States and its competitors should point in the other direction. Truly, how does a country like Australia with only slightly more souls than all of greater Los Angeles, not to mention fourteen times less people than the US at large, get to become dominant at the top tier of a winner take all game like the acting business?

It’s not (just) about looks!

Without taking a whit away from, say, the ice melting gaze of a Naomi Watts, or the winning good looks of Aussie actors generally, it’s pretty obvious from the outset that the key to the Australian achievement lies only secondarily in how attractive they are. We’re talking actors here, not swimsuit models.

Sure, Aussies in LA have been steadfast in cultivating a healthy, appealing glow where Yanks have too often been tempted by the lure of the plastic surgeon’s office, with fast but dubious result. But that’s not it either: if you’re just looking for fresh faces built from a compound of English, Celt, Scandinavian, and Mediterranean genes America manufactures plenty of those from sea to shining sea.

Besides, if it was only about sheer physical sexiness, we could expect the Brazilians and the Russians to overrun the lots of the Hollywood studios the same way they’ve conquered the runways of the Fashion industry. But then models are hardly required to speak are they? Aye, there’s the rub. That knockout from Kiev can get away with a bright ooh and a languid moan for a perfume ad. She won’t be asked to read actual lines anytime soon unless, as it so happens, she’s playing a girl freshly landed from the Ukraine.

Get that accent right!

And even then she may lose the part to Nicole Kidman who, as it turns out, was cast as a Russian mail order bride in 2001’s Birthday Girl. But that lacklustre flick, and an absolutely gorgeous Nicole, should not detract from the point I’m trying to make, which is that Australian actors are awfully good at accents, especially American ones. It must have something to do with the hours after hours of Hollywood TV shows consumed by the average Aussie over the last fifty years or so.

Getting the accent right is the first part of the same market equation that has allowed, Swedish pop bands to get global recognition where, say, French groups only gained traction with the beret wearing set. Likewise, French actors, however undeniable their talent, have more often been contained within French accented parts unless, as with the irrepressible Vincent Cassel, they were called to play, surprise, Russians. Cassel did just that in both the aforementioned Birthday Girl and also in 2007’s Eastern Promises which featured, surprise again, Naomi Watts. A perfect circle.

Not that Aussies should fall asleep on their laurels. The world changes fast, English is now to the global market what Latin was to the Roman Empire, and your little niece in Nice is bound to grow up learning to speak it along with her native tongue. Soon she could be like Marion Cottilard, very cute, very French, and more and more given to playing non-French characters, as Marion did in this winter’s Batman sequel.

Work hard, be humble, and look smart!

Did you ever wonder why so many roles that require the actor to project an acerbic wit, a commanding intelligence, or a stately bearing, not to say a layer of class go to non-Yanks? It’s an unpublicized opinion among many American casting agents, essentially the gatekeepers of the Hollywood studios, that American actors often fall short in those departments. Unsurprisingly, these kinds of parts go to actors from elsewhere, notably Australians. Need someone for that Henry James movie adaptation? Want someone to play Virginia Woolf? Nicole Kidman, her again, did both.

It seems that American actors now regularly loose out to Aussies and Brits when angling for those literary roles that once Meryl Streep made very much her own, whether it was Sophie in Styron’s Sophie’s Choice or the French lieutenant’s woman in the movie adaption of John Fowles’s novel. Why is that? Well, a common complaint is that the Yanks are lazy prima donnas who want to make it big and famous quick, demand the star treatment now rather than later, and are poorly trained on top of it. Aussie actors, on the other hand, are known to “check their ego at the door”.

In fact, Streep herself went through theater at Vassar and capped it with an MFA from the prestigious Yale School of Drama. It was only after years in arduous stage productions, hamming it in such grueling standards as Measure for Measure and The Taming of the Shrew, that she obtained small but defining roles in Julia and The Deer Hunter. According to many casting agents in LA, this flexibility to play in both classics and popular fare conferred by their training, not to mention a willingness to start small and work hard is just what distinguishes Australian actors. A relaxed attitude helps too.

It should come as no surprise that many of the Australian actors whose names now headline movie posters, be it Watts, Mel Gibson, Geoffrey Rush, Hugo Weaving, Cate Blanchett, Kidman, or Hugh Jackman, all cut their teeth in the theater before making the transition to film. In fact, those without formal training – Russell Crowe, Eric Bana, and Simon Baker – are the strict exception to the rule. So, brush up your Shakespeare!

It didn’t happen in one day!

The apparent deluge of Australian actors in Hollywood, a fresh batch landing on the California shores anytime a movie bolstered by Aussie actors makes a splash, is a recent phenomenon. And, no doubt, a natural and self reinforcing mechanism is at work. It goes something like this: a casting director in Hollywood has a positive experience working with an actor from down under, becomes receptive to the next Aussie coming out of the Home and Away soap-opera factory, or one fresh from one of the critically acclaimed Australian movies, then spreads the word to others in the field, and so on.

This did not happen overnight. It has been a slow build up which began, if you had to date it, in 1980. Even toddlers in America remember that year as marking the release of George Miller’s epochal Mad Max. The dystopian punk thriller made in 1979 for peanuts was released in the US in March 1980 where it went on to gross near $9 million. By 1982 it had grossed close to $100 million worldwide, which is to say more than 330 times what it was made for. What few will recall, and is especially apt given all this talk about accents, is that the voices of the film’s Australian actors, including Mel’s, were dubbed in hilarious Americanese for the US release.

Mad Max was followed by Gallipoli; both pinned Mel Gibson’s star firmly on the global map. Then, in the mid-eighties, the granddaddy of them all appeared: Crocodile Dundee. Hogan’s film is still Australia’s biggest earner by far. Later in the decade, Dead Calm was huge for Nicole Kidman. In the quickly globalising 90s, Russell Crowe’s Romper Stomper, Jane Campion’s searing The Piano, and the very funny Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert all garnered serious critical approval for both Australian movies and Australian actors. The last two were also big box office successes.

All these films, even those that did not make a tonne of bucks but got good press, made it to the eyeballs of the all important casting agents. Few know that Kidman, surfing the waves made by Dead Calm, was considered for the role that eventually went to Demi Moore in the mega hit Ghost. While the audiences for some obscure little flick out of Perth may be small on a global scale, you can trust that casting agents in LA are eyeing them. Heck, that’s their job.

The next generation has made roads of the paths carved by pioneers like Gibson and Kidman. Along the way, they’ve been much aided by the explosion in communication technologies. Dispatching videotapes across the pacific has long been common, even if in the end it’s still the contacts on the ground that matter most, which explains why there are so many Aussies in LA.

So what about actors and taxes?

Right, nearly forgot about that. We’ll keep it short and sweet. Basically, the young Australian actor who’s off to LA for a few months intent on hitting the casting agencies, or maybe on the lookout for a good agent, remains an Australian resident for tax purposes. He therefore pays tax at the Australian rate for whatever US income he may have gained while acting, say, in a small theatre production in Venice Beach. Chances are he will already have had taxes withheld by his American producer and will need to apply for a foreign income tax offset when he gets down to lodging his taxes so as to avoid double taxation in Australia. You can get more detail about that here.

Things get quite a bit more complicated if his stays in Los Angeles get drawn out, or if he buys property in the hills intent to join the permanent Aussies in LA contingent. Under these conditions, he may or may not qualify as an Australian resident any longer, in which case he would solely be responsible to the IRS for any income tax owed, only paying Australian tax on any assets he may still own down under.

The issue of residency is thorny. In fact, it is very much at the core of Paul Hogan’s endless wrangle with the ATO. An Australian actor bound for LA with the hopes of a budding career there may well want to consult a tax agent before he boards the plane for the long haul.

Photo via Ben Sutherland on Flickr.