Actor Joel Tobeck explores the nature of evil in a rare return to the stage and talks to Joanna Wane about confronting his own demons.
A decade ago, Joel Tobeck must have been the envy of every struggling Kiwi actor trying to make it offshore. In 2010, his television credits included Hawaii Five-O and a recurring role in the hit series Sons of Anarchy.
The following year, he was back in the US for another tour of duty, breaking down on the phone to his wife, Yvette, and telling her all he wanted to do was come home. Daniel, the youngest of their three children, was just 3 years old.
"That was the first time I'd gone to America dry and I was on the verge of tossing it all in," says Tobeck, who spent months between gigs sleeping on his friend's office couch and killing time in his gloomy apartment on Ventura Boulevard during the day. "It was a period of unease for me and I took that with me to LA.
"Nowadays we can talk about [anxiety] a bit more and there are more avenues for people to deal with it. I used to cover it by drinking. I was a great drunk. I was fun! But it had got to a point where I realised that wasn't serving me and I don't drink anymore."
On screen, Tobeck is a commanding presence, with a shimmering intensity and fluid physicality that reflects his early training as a dancer. (Full disclosure: I once had a photo of him hanging from a lanyard in my bedroom, dressed in full drag as Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Show. Lord, the man looked good in eyeliner and a corset.)
Sam Neill saw something special in the young actor the first time they worked together, on a Gaylene Preston movie, Perfect Strangers, in 2004. He took Tobeck under his wing — later bringing him on board for Little Fish, alongside Cate Blanchett and Hugo Weaving.
He considers Tobeck "one of our very best", though Australians like to claim him as their own. "He's also a very decent bloke, And funny. In addition, he sings well. Now that I think of it. I'm getting a bit jealous. Gawd he's good."
Michelle Langstone, who's about to film a third series of One Lane Bridge with Tobeck, admits she still gets nervous before shooting a scene with him. "I have to bring my A game." Langstone was 21 and fresh out of drama school when she played a bit part on Street Legal as his "slightly skanky bit on the side. I was terrified and fascinated because he'd just flip a switch and be in this actually quite repulsive character," she says. "He just made it seem so effortless, which is probably testament to the amount of work he puts away behind the scenes. I remember thinking, 'Oh God, that's acting, and there's a real grace in that.'"
Yet despite his track record as one of our most successful actors internationally, you'll rarely see Tobeck in the social pages or plastered all over the women's magazines.
Perversely, for someone in a profession that's all about being centre stage, he simply doesn't like all the attention. As a teenager, cast alongside Martin Henderson in kidult thriller series The Strangers, he was mortified when schoolkids recognised him from the telly.
Langstone, who's written about her own struggles with anxiety, says Tobeck is a warm, gentle person who values his privacy. A brilliant guitar player, he can also be "really goofy" on set and his obsession with Prince is legendary.
"I think he's someone who feels things acutely, as all the good actors do, and holds those feelings closely so they're readily available to him in his work," she says. "There are so many parts of him he will never show and I'd hazard a guess to say Joel knows that's the way to vanish into a character. You submerge into the role with him. That's where the real power is."
In 2006, Tobeck slipped down the line, keeping a safe distance between himself and the Auckland celebrity scene. He likes the relative anonymity of life in Cambridge, where they are close to his in-laws so Yvette has some family support during his long absences from home. And here's another thing most people don't know about him: in his downtime, he works as a builder (or as a s*** kicker, as his boss calls it).
"One day, my best mate down here said if you ever need a job between acting gigs, come and swing a hammer. I was useless! Eight years later, I'm a lot better than I used to be. I was screeding concrete yesterday."
Last year, he turned 50. It's a time for self-reflection and he talks openly about the cost of pursuing a career at the expense of time with his family, and the pressures of working in an industry where there's such a fine line between rejection and success.
Tobeck thinks it's good for young actors to know even veterans like him still struggle with insecurity sometimes, and says facing those challenges have helped clarify what is truly important in his life.
"An actor friend said to me recently, 'I don't think you get enough compliments about your work, because we assume you already know.' I said, 'If you knew how anxious and how much self doubt I have on occasion you wouldn't be saying that.'
"If you're not working, you feel you're not good enough ... That's the battle. That's why I go building, because I'm doing something positive and it makes that time between gigs go faster. All I'm thinking about is doing the job properly, not how my hair is or whether someone likes my [acting] work. You're just thinking about this moment. And as I get older, I'm getting better at seeing beyond my emotions."
In his experience, Australian actors are better at taking negative feedback in their stride and don't seem to feel such a need to be "liked". Is that a Kiwi thing, then? Maybe, he says. Young actors can get bogged down with that. Then again, the reality is there are limited opportunities here and they need the work.
That crisis of confidence back in 2011 was a turning point for Tobeck, who stuck it out, stayed off the drink, and did a gig in Florida on crime-drama TV series The Glades. He knocked it out of the park.
Since then, he's had a string of other high-profile roles in New Zealand and Australia, and has signed on with new management in the US. He'd love to work there again but says next time he'd do it differently. "I'd go for short bursts. I don't want to wait around there for six months at a time like I used to.
"I remember sitting in that dark apartment one day and realising I could be a jobbing actor there for the next 25 years and I would have missed out on 25 years of my life at home with the family. Or I could take that risk, keep at it and hopefully make that huge step to the next level. I'm just not that ambitious. And I have friends on big shows over there who work 18 to 19 hours a day and never see their family anyway."
Not that he's short of work. In a few months, he flies south to shoot a third season of One Lane Bridge in Queenstown. Right now, he's heading into rehearsals for A Stab in the Dark, a Pinter-esque psychological thriller by local theatre company Nightsong that will premiere at the Auckland Arts Festival in March.
Signing Tobeck for the lead role — actually, two lead roles — was a major coup for creative partners Ben Crowder and Carl Bland, who have lured him back for his second stage show in the past 20 years.
The central question posed by the play, which incorporates puppetry and film projections, is whether evil is an inherent part of human nature. David Fane appears as the biblical figure of Noah, tasked with salvaging humanity after God decides to wash away the sins of mankind with an apocalyptic flood. Alison Bruce, Tobeck's wife in One Lane Bridge, is also in the cast.
Tobeck, who plays dual characters — one of whom is a cold-blooded murderer — is in almost every scene. Crowder says the audience will be kept off-kilter, constantly questioning what they believed to be true.
He's delighted to have Tobeck on board, after pursuing him unsuccessfully for previous projects, and says the weight of the show falls firmly on his shoulders. "We're in an era at the moment where everything is quite black and white. With Joel, he can do dark and light, and is also skilled enough to colour the grey in-between."
Tobeck admits he found the prospect daunting when he first read the script, but has learnt to feed on the nerves he always suffers from backstage. "It keeps it real for me and I've learnt to trust myself," he says. "As you get older and more experienced, you get very good at the tricks, but people see right through that. My biggest worry when I work is that my peers will go, 'I don't believe it.' I can pull out all my acting chops, but it has to be genuine."
Like all actors who make a living based on the way they look, Tobeck is often defined by his face — the distinctively angular jaw and what a fellow writer once described as his "patented blue steel glare" — but mapped on his body is a whole life story.
The tā moko swirling over his left arm by tattoo artist Inia Taylor was done for his mother, actor Liddy Holloway, after she was diagnosed with cancer. Birds woven into the design symbolise flight, representing the travel involved in his work, while its Pacific references keep him anchored to home. "Because I have to be away so often, I told Inia I wanted to take New Zealand with me."
The bottom half of the koru design was completed when Tobeck and his wife discovered she was pregnant with their second child. Hannah, who's now 15, bears a striking resemblance to the grandmother she never met. Holloway died in 2004.
It's a bittersweet reminder for Tobeck, the youngest of Holloway's three children and the only one to follow her footsteps into acting. He first appeared on stage with her in a Mercury Theatre production at the age of 5. "Girl" in Tibetan and "boy" in Hindi, representing his own three children, is written in script on his chest.
On his other arm, there's a tattoo of Prince with his date of death, another seminal influence whose absence still has the power to move him to tears. A second design shows a young Tobeck himself playing guitar in Splitter, one of his old bands. Jimi Hendrix, his other guitar hero, might be next.
"You know how you get one tattoo and then you want another one and another one ..." he says. "But I have to be a bit discreet where I put them. Covering them all up is a two-hour makeup job." When he was strung up naked for a scene in the TV series Westside, the only visible body art was a couple of strategically placed whip marks on his buttocks.
Typically cast as a cop or a villain rather than a romantic lead, Tobeck likes the whiff of danger playing bad guys (or at least good guys with baggage). His nuanced portrayal of Robin Bain in the recent dramatisation of Black Hands was a reminder, though, of the true extent of his range.
Despite his early start as a teenage pin-up boy, it took Tobeck a while to find his feet in acting. In the late 80s and early 90s, he spent five years at Auckland's bFM student radio station, learning how to do voiceovers and cornering a regular slot on Marcus Lush's breakfast show as the weatherman.
After missing out on drama school, he studied contemporary dance alongside the likes of Neil Ieremia, who went on to found Black Grace, and had the legendary Douglas Wright as a tutor. "I got okay but I was never going to be a wonderful dancer." He even had a go at stand-up comedy.
His breakthrough came in the late 90s when he starred alongside Danielle Cormack in Topless Women Talk About Their Lives, and landed recurring roles as Strife (the god of mischief) and Deimos (the god of terror) in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, which still has a cult following.
Now, he mentors young actors, teaching classes (via Zoom during lockdown) through the Actors' Program and Peter Feeney's Actors Lab Studio. He'd like to try his hand at directing and recently started writing a play. "Acting was what the universe gave me," he says. "The thing I was supposed to see through."
In Cambridge, the family live on a small lifestyle block, with a vegetable garden and fruit trees. He still plays occasionally at the football club, where he's treated good-naturedly as a local celebrity.
In his younger days, people used to mistake him for musician Shayne Carter, but Tobeck reckons he was never that cool. Endearingly, he still gets a little starstruck around Carter. "I've said a couple of stupid things in front of him, which he's reminded me of, but I think we're over that now."
Music has remained a true passion, although his tastes have mellowed; he once played support with Darcy Clay's band for Blur. These days, you're more likely to find him writing country songs or reggae.
He's put out a few demos but hasn't been brave enough yet to try the ballads on his wife. "She's not very soppy," he says, with a wry smile. "And it can get a little self-indulgent."
A Stab in the Dark is on at Auckland's Q Theatre from March 11-14. For the full Auckland Arts Festival programme visit aaf.co.nz
Thanks to the Gaslight Theatre in Cambridge, where Mike Scott's photographs of Joel Tobeck were shot.
