KEY POINTS:
Tattooed on the inside of Ian Roberts' right arm is a question he ponders every day, 'what is it to be a man'?
It's not his only tattoo - his arms are large enough to accommodate a mural - but it's perhaps the most appropriate because he challenged
Australians on the very tenet of what it meant to be a man when he stepped out of the closet in 1994.
Here was one of the most fearsome rugby league players in the game and one who, in 2005, was recognised among the top 25 New South Wales players of all time, admitting he was gay.
"It f***ed with everyone's mind," Roberts remembers with a grin in the lobby of his hotel. "It didn't make sense to some people because, at that stage of my career, I had earned a reputation as a bit of a brawler but I had no problems saying I liked men.
"This is not what gay people are," he mimics. "This is not what a man is supposed to be. I'm like, 'yes it is. I'm gay. I'm as gay as it gets. You don't get any gayer than me'. Sexually, women do nothing for me. Never have. I have been with loads of women, more women than men, but it wasn't about me questioning what it is to be gay, it was other people. It was like, f***, you deal with it. It's not my fault. I'm gay."
And that, in essence, sums up Ian Roberts. He will forever be known as Ian Roberts, the gay rugby league player. Most days people still come up to him and blurt that out - as if he didn't know it himself.
These days, he's trying to fashion another reputation, as an actor. He lives in Hollywood but finished filming in Auckland on Tuesday for a movie called Second Chance, which also starred Shannen Doherty of Beverley Hills 90210 and Charmed fame.
Appropriately enough given his league reputation, Roberts plays a thug called Frederick in the movie. He was supposed to be killed off at the end, courtesy of an iron rod being rammed into his midriff, but Roberts managed to convince the director to change the script, on the off-chance there might be a sequel - like the film's title, get a second chance.
Roberts' most famous role was as Riley, one of Lex Luthor's evil henchmen in Superman Returns, and he also appeared in Little Fish alongside Cate Blanchett.
He always plays the thug, largely because of his 1.96m muscle-bound frame, and moved to Los Angeles 12 months ago where there is more of a market for thug roles than in Sydney. Even at 41, he still looks like he could handle 80 minutes of NRL football.
"I'm never going to play Romeo, as much as I'd like to," he says. "Nine times out of 10 I'm going to be the darker character because of my size. I just have to accept my lot in life."
Roberts accepted his lot years ago, even if others didn't.
In his early days with Souths, he tried to conceal the fact he was gay by flaunting a catalogue of girlfriends but he soon dispensed with the facade because it made him immensely unhappy.
From the time he joined Manly in 1990, his sexuality was one of rugby league's worst-kept secrets.
His team-mates knew. The rugby league media knew. But the public didn't.
"Every time I went to an interview, I always thought, 'someone is going to ask me today'," he says. "By 1990, I didn't care if it came out. But I didn't think I needed to be openly gay. I don't mean flamboyantly gay, but open about it. It didn't mean me f... ing around with handbags.
"In 1994 Blue magazine happened - the first gay magazine. It was the first edition and I thought it would happen then but even the guy who interviewed me didn't ask if I was gay. He knew. All the way through the interview, I hinted, but he didn't ask me. I thought, 'well I'm not going to f***ing spell it out for you unless you have the balls to say it'. He didn't write it but you only have to read the interview to see I was telling everyone I was gay."
Ironically, it was a women's magazine that 'exposed' the secret. Roberts knew about it, he was being paid for his part in the story about his boy-friend Shane, but he regrets the "bitchy, gay" way it was presented. After all that time, he hadn't got to announce his sexuality on his terms.
Over the next 12 months, Roberts became the talk of rugby league. He featured in a number of magazines, newspapers and television programmes while other players publicly supported his stance.
Blokey TV show The Footy Show poked fun at Roberts but hosts Paul Vautin, Peter Sterling and Steve Roach also appeared in a poster campaign against homophobia.
Despite this, however, Roberts is one of the few professional sportsmen to admit he's gay. To this day, sport remains one of the last bastions of homophobia but he hides any disappointment about that.
"If 10 per cent of the population is gay, then 10 per cent of rugby league is gay," he says. "I know that for a fact. It was strange, because people wanted me to start outing people. It's not for me to tell people how to live their lives.
"I'm not this gay missionary or crusader. It's small steps. If nothing else, my nieces and nephews have no problem with gay people and they are the next generation. I'm not here to change the world, rather, I have accepted my lot in life."
Soon after the truth was known, Roberts became a different person and a different player. For years, he had lived in fear and with an unremitting anger that often erupted on the rugby league field. In 1991 he famously laid into Garry Jack and the Balmain fullback sued. They settled out of court in 1999.
"Being gay had a lot to do with [the anger]," he explains. "That and because I couldn't read and write very well.
"Rugby league was a way for me to channel that anger into something positive... I wouldn't have been as good a player without it.
"By 1993 it got to a point where I was dealing with a lot of s**t, waiting for the question [about my sexuality] to be popped. It was f***ing with my head. It was like, 'why isn't someone asking me?' In 93 it got to a point that if I had killed someone on the field it wouldn't have bothered me.
"In 1997 when I went to the Cowboys, that was the first time I actually enjoyed playing footy. I was an open book and everyone knew about me, so it was the greatest relief. Even though they were the most unsuccessful team I played for, I enjoyed it so much more. I enjoyed the moment more. It was like being in theatre."
IAN ROBERTS has his car to thank for launching his acting career. About 12 months after retiring from rugby league at the end of the 1998 season, Roberts was trudging to a garage after his car had broken down.
In between cussing under his breath - he cusses a lot - he noticed he was passing the National Institute of Dramatic Arts (NIDA) in Sydney and found himself drawn in through the main doors.
"I had always had a love of theatre from a young age," he says.
"I just thought I would duck in to see if someone could point me in the right direction."
That someone was Kevin Jackson, a NIDA teacher, who gave him one-on-one acting tuition until he was accepted for the three-year course.
Roberts had been running a memorabilia business but had become tired of it so threw himself into acting.
It wasn't an easy transition, however, for someone used to the regimentation of professional sport.
"It took me 12 months to let go. We did things like being seaweed for four hours. We used to do those things every Thursday. Going to NIDA was the most incredible experience of my life.
"It sounds a bit corny, but it was the first time I had felt growth in myself. It was the joy of learning again. I learned how to read and write, and even just owning up to the fact I couldn't read was massive. For me it wasn't about whether it would happen [once I left NIDA] because it had already happened."
Along with the two films he's appeared in, and another two still to be released, Roberts has featured in television police dramas Blue Heelers and White Collar Blue and a number of theatre productions.
He also finished second in Australia's version of Dancing With The Stars in 2005 when he had "the most incredible non-sexual monogamous love affair" with dance partner Natalie Lowe.
Like a lot of actors, Roberts' future is an uncertain one. He has enough money in the bank that he won't have to take up waiting tables any time soon but he has little idea what and when his next role will be. There is, of course, one role for which he would be perfect.
"I've just been approached about a movie based on my life," he says.
It's not the first time he's been approached and last year he was profiled in Australian Story, a weekly biography of famous Australians broadcast by the ABC.
Much of the story centred around the life of Arron Light, a street prostitute who was murdered in 1997 just before he was due to give evidence against a paedophile syndicate. Roberts and Light had become friends when Light was in hospital as a child and he later lived with Roberts before he disappeared.
The pain is still fresh and Roberts blames himself for Light's murder, believing he abandoned the teenager in his time of need.
"That boy died because I was more worried people would think I was a paedophile rather than his friend," he says.
"That's the reason that boy died, and that's why I'm acting.
"I want Arron's story to be told, he deserves it. And that's the story of my life, as a gay man.
"That's all I want to do because my whole world changed when this thing happened with Arron."
Roberts looks at another of his tattoos. Not the one of Arron engraved on his right arm between the names of his former and current boyfriends, but another on the inside of his left bicep about world starvation.
"Everything is so f***ed up," he exclaims. "It makes headlines when I say I'm gay but 24,000 people die of starvation every day.
"There are bigger things happening in the world than me being gay."
That might be true, but coming out in a macho, macho world is no small matter.
In doing so, he found out what it meant to be a man.
