By: Zoe Stagg
Photography: Tim Swallow
Richard Roxburgh can make himself disappear. In a world where being a “celebrity” has become a job and actors’ daily lives are as close as our Instagram feed, losing track of someone in a character is next to impossible anymore. Not for Roxburgh. His spell begins the second he’s cast. A pretty neat trick for someone who never thought he was going to make acting his career. “I imagined that acting would be a good hobby. I was the youngest of six kids who mostly went on to become scientists. It wasn’t like there was any clear guidelines to become an actor in my family, or indeed the town I grew up in, and the high school I went to.” From his first school performance as Willie Loman in “Death of a Salesman,” a turn he admits was probably “hilarious,” today Roxburgh dissolves time and place, as believable in a bowler as a barrister’s wig. From stage to blockbuster, he’s racked up credits from Moulin Rouge! to Mission Impossible 2 and played everything from Uncle Vanya to Count Dracula.
With a filmography as long as Roxburgh’s, chances are you’ve been binging on his work for years without even realizing. But lately it’s his work in the five seasons of the Australian TV show Rake, that has dropped him in a beautiful, all-consuming Netflix bundle, right in your lap. His is an understated impishness, the mix of deadpan and droll that is as much the national flavor of Australia as Vegemite. Well that, and those delicious, sun-earned crinkles that crisscross his chiseled face. In Rake, he takes all of that into Cleaver Greene the Sydney lawyer with all the magnetic charisma a self-destructive swagger on the edges of ethics can conjure. The character didn’t appear out of thin air. “There’s quite a bit of a younger version, a more haptic version of my life in Cleaver that I guess has to do with the time in my life when I wasn’t settled in my skin.” It’s just a loose interpretation, though. “I didn’t have the addictive demons that Cleaver has. It wasn’t like I was a gambling person or an alcoholic, but I certainly medicated with booze in my life, a lot. There have been times when there’s a passing resemblance in Cleaver, but he is also based in part on people in my life.” And it’s here the story gets good, and Roxburgh gets a run for his shape-shifting money. Cleaver is based in part on a student from his school days that wasn’t at all what he seemed. “We all kept him in beer and cider because he was fabulous company. At some point I realized he wasn’t actually even a student at the University. He used to hang around with us because we were intellectual equals, but he had this sort of hypnotic charismatic quality, but quite violently self-destructive.”
If that’s the genesis of the dangerous charm, the modern-day political circus is a nod to what comes next — entertainment and democracy collide. (Sound familiar?) “When we were filming our last season, our election night on Rake coincided with the actual election night in Australia. People were taking Instagram photos were they added in an additional box for Cleaver.” He recounts with a plummy chuckle that people were calling radio stations insisting that Cleaver was the candidate for them. To be fair, it might not be a crazy solution. While we’ve been obsessed with our own political drama here in the U.S., it’s just as upside-down Down Under with six new prime ministers revolving through in just over a decade. Adding to the turnover, is the recently up-ended rock of nasty racial politics advocated on the Senate, while another Senator was censured for sexist statements. The universe of Rake skirts the edge of satire, and when your character has been called “an ideal anti-hero for the Trump era,” maybe what we all need is just that; a perfectly imperfect firebrand who speaks his mind, consequences be damned.
When he’s not causing a ruckus in the fictional Australian Senate, Roxburgh is dad of three, to two boys and a baby girl, Roxburgh admits balancing time on the road with family time is hard. “We’ve had certain time limits, which I find difficult to linger and it’s around the 7-week mark.” For longer gigs, he’s had to get creative. “Working on Broadway put pressure on that because I was in New York by myself away from the family.” In the midst of his hit TV show, he also made his Broadway debut in “The Present,” based on Chekhov’s “Platonov.” “I flew my oldest boy over to New York my last two weeks. He was our little theatre mascot. We always have to find a way to make it work.” While his son loved the backstage life, there aren’t any plans to expand the family business just yet. “We just want them to be content in their skins. I think it is really key to learn the quality of hard work, and that it is important and part of the secret of life — if there is such a thing — is in the very matter of working hard in whatever it is that you do.”
From this role, he found his author’s voice, writing the kids’ adventure novel, “Artie and the Grime Wave,” where the hero could be the inclusion of the sport of “bungee-wedgie” or the world-changing invention, the “Fartex 120Y.” After two sons, the addition of his daughter gave balance to this snips-and-snails sensibility. “It made a sort of profound and unexpected difference. Just having the hormone balance corrected in the house is a wonderful thing. I really noticed that when the girls are away, honestly the testosterone was hair raising — the house became like a lair of werewolves.” In case you’re mourning the impending ending of Rake and need a Roxburgh fix, he also voices the audiobook. If the list of charming details about Roxburgh wasn’t already long enough, he wrote the book in his local library, a place he’s unabashedly enthusiastic about for its endless stream of people of all sorts, and its free solution to the Italian town square.
While he’s an Aussie by birth, Roxburgh is caught between the beaches of Sydney and those piazzas of Italy. “I’ve always been a closet Italian or closet Mediterranean although you would never know it if you looked at me.” He married Renaissance woman Silvia Colloca in Tuscany after the two of them starred in the dracula-thriller Van Helsing. Colloca is an opera-trained actress who just happens to excel in Italy’s other national art — food. With a celebrity chef in the house, is there a magic solution to keeping his big-screen-ready physique? “Italians are very crafty with their eating habits,” and then the big reveal! “They’re all about moderation.” Oh. Whatever the moderation is, it’s not low-carb. “You can’t open a sock drawer in this house without finding bucket of sour dough starter!”
Though he’s saying goodbye to Cleaver, a disentangling he calls “a strange process,” he’s looking to his next projects, a few he’s building from the ground up. Wherever he pops up next, count on it being your next obsession.
Forget disappearing, Roxburgh’s real trick is making rogues, irresistible. And that trick we’ll fall for, any time.
Photography: Tim Swallow @ The Kitchen Creative Management
Stylist: Brad Homes @ Vivien’s Creative
Groomer: Samantha P @ Vivien’s Creative
Producer: Chelsea Claydon @ The Kitchen Creative Management
Location: Hermit Bay, Australia
All clothing: Salvatore Ferragamo
