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Exclusive Q&A: Ryan Kwanten of 'True Blood' and 'Red Hill'

REDNESS IN THE WESTERN SKY
If you’re familiar with the work of RYAN KWANTEN, it’s almost definitely because of his role as swampland sex machine Jason Stackhouse on HBO’s ridiculously popular vampire series, True Blood. What often gets lost in the high-powered estrogen fog that follows Stackhouse’s Southern drawl, heartthrob abs and frequently bare ass is that Kwanten is actually Australian. He recently went home to shoot Red Hill, an Aborigine revenge tale told as a modern-day Western. In it, Kwanten plays Shane Cooper, an accident-prone city cop on his first day as the new officer in a rural backwater where just about everything goes wrong. The film opens on Nov. 5.

 

What initially drew you to the script for Red Hill?
I’m an unbelievably huge fan of the Western genre, which is what the film is at its heart and soul. Beyond that, it was a chance to play a character that was the hero, but unlike Clint Eastwood or John Wayne or the iconic figures of the past. This is a guy who is full of faults. In fact, the first time we see him, he’s forgotten his gun, which is, like, rule number one in the cop handbook. But by the end of the film, he turns himself into the Eastwood or John Wayne of the past. It’s almost like the prequel to, say, High Plains Drifter.

On the surface, the character of Shane Cooper seems about as far as you could get from Jason Stackhouse, your True Blood character. Was that appealing as well?
Oh, I love playing Jason for six months of the year, but when I’m not working on the show, nothing could be more uninspiring than going off and shooting a film that’s exactly like True Blood or a character that’s exactly like Jason Stackhouse. I pride myself on making choices that are outside of the box and are gonna provide the greatest challenge. In that way, you set yourself up for great rewards. There’s no great achievement that was ever the result of something that was easy.

Plus, you get to keep your clothes on for the entire movie.
Yeah. That just happened to be an added bonus, I guess.

Did you also want to give your fans a glimpse of your true self and where you’re from by doing an Australian film?
Again, that just happened to be a beautiful byproduct of this project. More than anything, it was the story, and in conversations with [director] Patrick [Hughes], realizing how much he loved that genre and how much he had worked to get to this point. He had mortgaged his house to make this film. He was in a tough predicament, so to go in there as this two-man force and make this film happen was a really proud moment. And the fact that it was back in my homeland and was the first time I’d worked there in eight years—and the first time I’d done an Australian character in seven years—was a nice sense of liberation. I’d been so used to hearing the word “action!” and then going into a version of an American accent, you know? But it also made it that much harder for me to find the character, because if I’m doing an accent, I can fandangle a character out of it.

Did you feel more pressure to perform because the director had mortgaged his house to make the film?
Oh, absolutely. You have a real sense of ownership with it and a sense of, “Fuck, we’ve gotta make this work.” When it’s 3 in the morning and we’re shooting in subzero temperatures and all we wanna do is go to bed, it’s almost like that scene in The Terminator where Schwarzenegger gets killed and he has to find that sort of ultimate power to come back. That’s what we had to find every night. And the odds were very firmly stacked against us, shooting a film like this, that it would even see the light of day. For it to premiere at Berlin four months ago and get sold the next day is testament that it’s a story people wanna see.

Did you do any special preparation beforehand?
One of my friends back in Australia is a Sydney cop, so I’d already had several long conversations with him, and I’d already done quite a few films where I’d played a cowboy, so I didn’t need much training on that side of things. In some areas, it was almost un-training myself. In the scene where I’m riding the horse for the first time, my character is supposed to be this city cop, it’s his first day in the country, and his workmates have thrown him on this horse as a joke. So I thought it would be funny if he was trying to ride a horse like he was trying to drive a bus, where he’s got the reins up above his eyes and he’s trying to steer it back and forth. But other than that, it was just delving into the character’s psyche. The thing of playing a character like this is that nothing can prepare you for the day that he has. I mean, this has got to be the worst day in the history of policing. All hell has come to this little town on this one day. We had our premier in L.A. last night, and one of the nicest compliments I got was from a woman who’d been a cop for something like three decades. She came up to me and said I did a fantastic job in terms of actually harnessing the qualities of being a cop.

Knowing how to ride a horse and then having to do it badly on camera seems like it might actually be more difficult than learning to ride a horse in the first place.
[Laughs.] Yeah, you could put it like that. And believe me, it was tough. I had to take the ego out of the equation because there were a lot of cowboys we had as the stunt guys who were watching. They didn’t know the story, so they were just thinking that I was a terrible rider of a horse.

You used to do some boxing when you were younger. That kind of physical training must come in handy for these kinds of films.
I think it can’t but help. I’ve had a very adventurous life, and I’ve never really had any acting experience outside of being onset. I’ve never done an acting workshop, never had a dialect coach, never went to acting school—so all of my training has nothing to do with acting whatsoever. So I consider things like boxing and all the ridiculous things that have happened to me in my life, I can pool them together and use them in characters. The boxing side of things definitely helped me in terms of its masochistic nature, the discipline it provides, the strategy you have to have, and the tenacity you need to get up every time you get knocked down.

Do you miss getting in the ring at all?
[Laughs.] I still do. I’m not supposed to say that, but yeah.

What about the Aborigine revenge aspect of the film—is that something new for Australian moviegoers, or just us Yanks?
Oh, it’s unbelievably different. In fact, Tom E. Lewis, the guy who plays the Jimmy Conway character, said he’d been waiting for a film like this to represent his people for a long, long time. This is a really good calling card to help people understand their plight.

And obviously there are a lot of parallels there with the Native Americans here in the States.
Absolutely. In fact, I think there’s a very universal understanding to that.

You had a scene with a panther. Was that real?
Well, the panther was real, but he was shot in L.A. I shot my scene in Australia, and in fact my eye-line for the panther was Patrick, our director, who was on all fours climbing across the back of the camera. I had to try to maintain a straight face and stay in character while he was doing that. Two days before that, the panther we were gonna use—which we were gonna fly in from New Zealand—had eaten his trainer. That was apparently the only working panther outside of that panther in L.A., which we shot as we were wrapping up the principal photography. Although having said that, I’ve had more than my fair share of being onset with a real panther in the last season of True Blood.

Did anyone on the set blink an eye at the fact that your onscreen wife’s name is Alice Cooper?
[Laughs.] Yeah. What happened was, we’d fallen in love with the name at that point. There was definitely a point where we could have changed it, but then it just became a funny thing to sort of reference. But yeah, that was thought about, for sure.

Last but not least, what have you been listening to lately?
Oh, man… This is like the best question of the day for me. I’ve been listening to a bunch of great Aussie stuff recently, like Angus and Julia Stone. They’re sort of similar to Iron & Wine meets, like, Feist. Florence + The Machine is another one—I think they’re doing some really interesting stuff. I just heard the new Kings Of Leon; that was cool. You know, I have literally no musical talent whatsoever. In fact, one of my brothers plays 16 instruments, so he stole every ounce of musical talent in the family. But I make up for it with my absolute lust and love for music.

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