3 weeks ago
4
Jason Clarke has entered his Con Air era. “Well, I prefer to see it as my Liam Neeson era,” the 56-year-old says, laughing.
Clarke – the tall, curly haired Australian actor who is often found giving scene-stealing performances in roles big and small (yep, he was that guy in Zero Dark Thirty) – stars in The Last Frontier, a 10-episode thriller in which he plays a US marshall chasing, shooting and tackling escaped prisoners across snowy Alaska.
The series gives Con Air vibes – similar to the 1997 film, the prisoners hijack a plane to escape – while Clarke, like Neeson, has entered his butt-kicking action mode at an age where the hits take a bit more time to prepare for.
“There’s no great plan,” Clarke says. “I’ve always wanted, since drama school, to do different genres, different roles and different experiences. And this was another one – it was a full-on, big action thriller … there’s a lot of physical action, which I liked as well. It forces me to maintain myself and look after myself, at my age, which is a good thing. And I’m not playing some dark, nasty character for eight months, and coming home to my family.”
Jason Clarke as US Marshall Frank Remnick in The Last Frontier.
Clarke is in Sydney as part of a family trip home. He lives with his French wife in Los Angeles and their two French-speaking young boys. Does that mean Clarke gets left out of conversations at home? “I can be,” he says, smiling. “I understand more than I speak. If they want to speak [French], they can, if they want to ignore papa, they can.”
Over the past 30-plus years, Clarke has done it all on screen. From his early starter roles on Blue Heelers and Home and Away, to the career builders such as Rabbit Proof Fence, Public Enemies and Brotherhood, and then the breakthroughs in Zero Dark Thirty and The Great Gatsby, and then the lead in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and Terminator Genisys. Oscar nominees and winners? Yeah, he’s starred in those, too: Oppenheimer and First Man, to name two.
It’s an almost perfect career trajectory, good work without the fuss – most stories about Clarke all feature the same line, that he’s happy not being famous, that it’s all about the work – and that is all true. He is one of those classic character actors that cause people to go, “Oh, him”, and while in The Sydney Morning Herald office last week, he caused a few quizzical double-takes of the “Where do I know him from?” variety.
Loading
Being back in Australia has caused a bit of a head spin. He remembers being a young actor and sitting on a bench at Milson’s Point, outside a casting office, nervously going over his lines. He remembers being cast in the TV movie, BlackJack, with Colin Friels, where Clarke turned up to set with his tie undone. “And the director just f---ing gave it to me, ‘You come to set ready.’ And that’s always stayed with me – you come to set ready.”
He currently has three high-profile projects across three different streamers – The Last Frontier on Apple TV, the film, A House of Dynamite, on Netflix and the true-crime series, Murdaugh: Death in the Family, on Disney+. Each role requires something different from him: physicality in Frontier, a cool demeanour in the face of nuclear disaster in Dynamite and a Southern patriarch with a killer instinct in Murdaugh, for which he packed on the weight, ending up at more than 100 kilograms with a substantial belly.
Patricia Arquette and Jason Clarke in Murdaugh: Death in the Family.
“It is rough,” he says. “And then it’s also like, there you are in Montreal with a plane and a helicopter [for The Last Frontier], and there you are in Atlanta [for Murdaugh]. And yes, it is a little uncomfortable. In Atlanta, it was difficult to live with [the weight] for so long and then try and take it off as part of the shoot. You’ve got a funny relationship with food and you end up hating it because you’re gonna force yourself to eat it, then you force yourself not to eat it. You’re getting around just angry.”
Is he happy now?
“I’m OK now, yeah,” he says, laughing. “I’ve still got a couple of kilograms to get back to what I was before I started putting it on. It is enjoyable, but it’s an intense business.”
Loading
Clarke grew up in South Australia and Queensland. A photo of him from his Townsville high school yearbook lists his interests as AFL (he doesn’t get to see much of it in LA, he says), studying law (which he did before swapping to drama in Sydney and then studying drama again at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne), and “enjoying a good social life and to eventually travel”.
“That’s part of the reason I wanted to be an actor,” he says. “To just get out. That was where I thought the point of life was to just go and make the most of this thing you’ve been given. And that’s how I choose my roles, still. It’s a gut thing. Ultimately, it’s ‘do I want to do this?’”
The Last Frontier sees Clarke take another step forward in his career: he is not only No.1 on the call sheet as the lead actor, he’s also, for the first time, an executive producer.
Kyle Chandler and Jason Clarke in Zero Dark Thirty.
“It helped me find the character,” he says. “In a way, Frank [Remnick, his character] is the same thing. It’s up to me to take care of everybody else and to make sure that all my other actors are happy, that the crew is happy, that I’m not taking up all the time on the day, that I’m getting my takes done.
“I like that responsibility. I did show up every day knowing my stuff, being able to execute it and move on and not drag the chain and find the positives. And it’s a big thing when you’re doing these things for so long because you have to let go of a whole bunch of things. Can we do another 10 takes? Yes. Is it going to get any better? Maybe. But if we have enough to move on, let’s just, let’s keep the ball rolling.”
How does he feel things have changed since he started acting, compared with what they are now? The opportunities for actors are huge, but a lot more is also asked of them.
“In a way, it hasn’t changed for me,” he says. “The business has changed, but my process is still the same, and it always was. It hasn’t altered what I do. And I’m still a voice, movement, text-based, actor. The press has changed and media has changed. It [your work] goes everywhere now a lot quicker.
Theresa Cutknife, Jason Clarke, Haley Bennett, Dallas Goldtooth and Martin Roach in The Last Frontier.
“The streamers, they’ve all got this metric and numbers and everything coming in. You listen to that, or you don’t, there’s this feedback, and whether something’s working or not, that’s instantaneous. You’re aware of that. So I’ve made a very conscious decision to stay off social media because there’s only so much noise I can handle.
“And it’s the same thing with numbers [viewing figures]. It is what it is, you know. You’re constantly being judged, and it’s a funny relationship that you have with it, and you can’t control it. Sometimes I go back and something, something will hurt and something, something will make you feel good. And you go, ‘Well, does that matter to me? Why do I do this?’”
So why does he do it?
“Because I love it,” he says “I make a living out of it. Don’t, get me wrong, this is a job. And I come from a very working-class background, you know, where you have to put food on the table, the basics of just that. And then there’s also, I do love it … it’s a very obsessive compulsive business, and you just have to learn to control that and turn it on and off as you can, and use it as well when it’s required.”
Loading
While this does make Clarke sound serious, he’s delightful company. Not too keen on having his photo taken, but a complete softie when talking about his two boys. And while he still retains his Australian accent, despite rarely having cause to use it on screen these days, any notion his is just a regular life evaporates when he casually mentions that Jeremy Strong – yes, Succession’s Jeremy Strong, an old friend of Clarke – introduced him to Bruce Springsteen the other day.
Hang on, what?
“I knew Jeremy when no one would employ him,” Clarke says. “He had a very small role on Zero Dark Thirty, and then I tried to get him on Chappaquiddick with me, and they wouldn’t. And I said, ‘You guys are missing out. I’m telling you, this guy’s gonna bring it.’ I got Elizabeth Debicki a small role on Everest, and there she is [winning awards for playing Princess Diana on The Crown].
“I like seeing good people, the whole cream rising to the top thing. That’s what I reflect back on now, that you go, ‘Hang on. I am part of this circus, I’m inside the door’.”
So what did he say to Bruce?
“His music’s just touched me at so many parts of my life,” Clarke says. “And you don’t [want to] overwhelm him. But he knew me. Bruce Springsteen knew me! And you go, ‘Man, I didn’t know …’ He’s just lovely. I thanked him. I really did’.”
The Last Frontier is now streaming on Apple TV.
Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.
