In rehearsals as Marius during the Les Miserables International Tour in Singapore in 1996

Where did your passion for acting and performing start, and what took you on the path to making it a reality?

I was born and raised in London before moving to Australia at the age of 10. My dad was an amateur actor and a member of the Questors Theatre in Ealing, West London. I have very vivid memories of going to rehearsals with him on weekends. One day in particular, I must have been between three and five years of age, I remember watching a rehearsal and thinking to myself, “I can do that, and that’s what I’m going to do with my life.” I didn’t start going to acting classes or anything, I just knew that I was going to be an actor. But I thought I was going to be discovered walking down the street. It wasn’t until I was in my early twenties and had spent a year doing a “normal” job that I realized if I didn’t do something about it, it wasn’t going to happen. That’s when I auditioned for drama school.

After graduating, your career in Australia began in where you'd studied, Music Theater. In stage productions of Romeo and Juliet, Joseph & The Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat and West Side Story to name a few. But you also broke into television during this time, a notable guest role on "Neighbours" amongst this. How did you find making the cross between performing to a live audience and performing with cameras to viewers on TV?

To begin with, my on-screen performances were a little lacking in “subtlety”! But I guess I was lucky in that I had some good directors who advised me to “pull it back” and say the lines as though I were chatting to someone at home. It’s a little embarrassing to watch now but I can see a marked and rapid improvement in my TV performances in those early days.

Next came the chance to take it all abroad, starting with South Pacific which took you to Asia. This was followed by the 'other' long-running character of your career to date, Marius in tours of Les Miserables stretching across Asia, South Africa, Scandinavia and London's West End. You must have a great affection for the character and story to take on the role so many times?

Les Miserables is one of the greatest novels I’ve ever read (I’ve read it twice.) On top of that, it’s been adapted into one of the greatest musicals of all time in my opinion. The original production especially is, I think, a work of genius. To tell that story and sing those songs in that production is a pretty unbeatable experience. When we did the Scandinavian Concert Tour, the first show was to 28 thousand people in a football stadium in Copenhagen. It was pretty awesome! Interestingly, Jane Hewland hates musicals!

The 1997 West End run of Les Miserables saw you return to the UK on a more permanent basis. Only a year later the role of Luis Amor Rodriguez came along for Dream Team. Can you recall how your audition went for it?

I remember it very well. My first audition, I actually read some of Fletch’s script but with an Australian accent. (Terry Kiely was already on screen in the show at that stage.) Then they gave me a script for the callback that was one of the best I’ve ever read. I had to be Eastern European (basically Russian!) and was in a bar trying to pick up a girl by pretending I didn’t speak very good English, going for the sympathy vote. Then she went to the toilet and a fellow player came over and suddenly I was speaking fluent English to him. It was a great scene and obviously they liked what I did with it. I got the job but they were originally thinking I would be Croatian. You may remember Luis didn’t show up until episode ten of the second series because I was busy with another job until that point. I started making friends with as many Croatian people as I could because I didn’t know a Croatian accent from a hole in the ground. Then two weeks before I was due to start filming, Argentina put England out of the World Cup and the next day I got the call to say I would be playing an Argentinean. I hung up the phone and immediately called the Argentinean Embassy in London because I didn’t know Argentinean any more than I knew Croatian. They put me in touch with a woman who taught Spanish. She came to my house that weekend and recorded all of my lines onto a Dictaphone (this was 1998) and I basically copied her way of speaking until I’d got the accent worked out. Dream Team then employed her as a kind of script editor for Luis’s dialogue, which was nice.

How easy was it to keep the Argentinean accent flowing for the full two years you played the character? Today, with more than ten years passed, can you still perform the South American accent?

Eventually it became less about the accent and more about who Luis was and his way of speaking. It became a very helpful tool for getting into character. I was very diligent about not letting the accent become cod and have Luis become a caricature so I still met with my Spanish teacher every weekend. As a result, I think I’ll still be able to do the accent when I’m on my deathbed!

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Dream Team: Luis signs for Harchester

Season 2 Episode 6 (TX: 06/10/1998)

Luis and the Landlady!

Season 2 Episode 24 (TX: 19/11/1998)