‘What a great and holy thing’: Roxburgh on what the world needs right now

2 months ago 6

Richard Roxburgh has good manners. I say that not as an “all manners, no substance” slight but rather, in the “he was clearly raised to be a decent human” way. He apologises for being five minutes late to our lunch in Palm Beach, a short drive from his home on Sydney’s northern beaches. (Isn’t that when everyone’s late – when the destination is only five minutes away?)

He insists photographer Max sit down and eat some of the food on our share plates – because there’s definitely too much for the two of us. And he uses the silver service skills he learnt working at Canberra’s Bacchus Tavern to get some leeks with crispy egg and capers onto our plates. His skills have possibly deteriorated over the intervening decades, and leeks are slippery buggers, but five stars for the attempt. It was better than the time he served kebab to then RSL president William Keys, back in his Tavern days: “You had to stand back, knowing it was gonna come off fast. And it did, with a splash. It was bad.”

Most importantly, though, Roxburgh looks you in the eyes when he’s talking to you. That sounds like a small thing but have you noticed how many people don’t do it? And how captivating it is when they do? Roxburgh, with his clear blue eyes, is that person.

We’re lunching at The Corner, a restaurant/grocery store combo that Sam Kane, ex Bert’s Bar & Brasserie, opened only five weeks earlier. It’s a gloriously sunny day and the restaurant is all white tablecloths and open louvres. I can’t help thinking how good it is that this counts as a workday. I sense Roxburgh feels similarly as he agrees that, why yes, chardonnay is called for.

The delicious roast chicken teamed with crispy dutch cream potatoes at The Corner in Palm Beach.

“One glass of wine is a fair thing on a Friday,” he says. Plus it’s Halloween, and he’ll be taking his eight-year-old daughter Luna and her mates around the neighbourhood for their “collective dental cavities” later.

Roxburgh talks a lot about family: wife Silvia Colloca, the Italian opera singer and actor turned cookbook personality whom he met on the set of the 2004 film Van Helsing, and their three children, Luna plus older brothers Raphael, 18, and Miro, 15. Luna wants to work in a nail salon or be an astronaut when she grows up – “I said, can you see a middle ground in there somewhere?” – while Raph has an entrepreneurial streak, and Miro looks to have the performing gene. They all speak Italian as well as English, and try to visit Italy each year. “There was a time when my oldest boy, Raphie, asked Silvi not to talk to him in Italian when they were out in public,” Roxburgh says with mock grimace. “Devastating.”

Some actors don’t want their kids following in their footsteps, worried about the unsteady life they’d be signing up for. Roxburgh, the youngest of six children raised in Albury-Wodonga by an accountant father and homemaker mother, is not one of them. “My advice is to go where you find the sunlight,” he says. “It won’t always be joyful but for the most part, if you think ‘great’ when you do that thing, that’s a good life.”

Roxburgh found his sunlight playing Willy Loman in a school production of Death of a Salesman, but studied economics at the Australian National University before switching to the National Institute of Dramatic Art. Was his economics degree useful in working out how to turn his love of acting into a viable career? “No, if I’m being brutally honest,” he says with a laugh. “It was a continuously revolving door of economic models, which bore various degrees of relevance to the real world – that is, not much.”

Sam Kane comes out from the kitchen to say hello – not to a famous actor but to a mate. Kane’s wife is costume and set designer Alice Babidge, whom Roxburgh knows well from his nearly four-decade career spanning theatre, film and TV. After a bit of chat about Kane and Babidge’s very active toddler – Roxburgh commiserates, his oldest son “ran all the way to LA” on a plane trip when he was little – we decide to leave the ordering in Kane’s hands. Thus, over a leisurely couple of hours, dishes of yellowfin tuna crudo, bread and butter, said leeks, and a delicious roast chicken with crispy Dutch cream potatoes and a garlicky radicchio salad, roll out.

Roxburgh and Cate Blanchett in Uncle Vanya in 2010.

Roxburgh has recently signed on to star in Art, the Yasmina Reza play about three friends who fall out over their views on an all-white painting. It will open in Sydney in February before touring to Brisbane, Melbourne and Adelaide. Art premiered in Paris in 1994, became a hit on the West End and Broadway and opened in Australia in the early 2000s.

It’s having something of a renaissance right now, with a production running on Broadway featuring Bobby Cannavale (Mr Rose Byrne to Australians), James Corden and Neil Patrick Harris. Roxburgh will star in the Australian production alongside Damon Herriman and Ryan Corr.

As is the case for his friend Cate Blanchett, watching Roxburgh on stage gives you a close-up on his talent. The cheekiness and charisma, the lightness of touch were on full display during the years Blanchett and husband Andrew Upton ran the Sydney Theatre Company, during which Roxburgh starred in its productions of Waiting for Godot, Uncle Vanya and The Present, the latter two alongside Blanchett, in both their Sydney and New York iterations. “I love being on stage with Cate because you’re constantly called to account,” Roxburgh says. “There’s no false note. It’s audacious and often quite anarchic, from one night to the next. That doesn’t mean it goes completely off-piste in a sensationalist or deliberately showy way, but there’s a wildness to it. We spark off each other, always have.”

I ask how he decides what to sign up to these days. He’s had an unusually varied career, acting in Hollywood movies like Mission: Impossible 2, including some directed by Australians (Moulin Rouge!, Elvis, Hacksaw Ridge), as well as across multiple Australian films and TV shows, and the theatre, both STC and Company B Belvoir.

Richard Roxburgh as Bob Hawke, Roger Rogerson and Peter Greste.

Some of it is practical – he doesn’t say yes to things that will take him away for months at a time at this stage in his children’s lives. Some is to do with the writing, cast, director. (The latter might help explain his appearance in a recent ad for Ray White real estate, directed by Nash Edgerton. Such commercial spins can be bang on – see Daniel Craig’s turn in a 2022 Belvedere Vodka ad, directed by Taika Waititi – but others, like this one, just seem incongruent. “We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” Roxburgh says amiably when I bring it up. He notes that Edgerton is an “excellent director” and that he “thought it would be fun”, then deftly changes the subject.)

Signing on for Art, a 90-minute comedy, was about his sense of what the world needs right now. “One of the things I’ve been grieving for quite a long time now is laughter,” Roxburgh says as we tuck into our leeks and crudo. “It’s such a precious and beautiful thing in a theatre, to hear people roaring with laughter. My god, what a great and holy thing. That’s kind of been lost. We need it like a public service, like medicine.” The play explores how relationships can fracture, which also seems timely. “It’s about people who go into their trenches, fall into their silos, over a controversy. They struggle to find a middle ground where they can even talk about it. Can you think of anything more 2025 than that?”

As our chicken and potatoes arrive (little golden orbs neither of us can stop eating), we move onto Blue Murder, the acclaimed ABC TV series in which Roxburgh played crooked NSW cop Roger Rogerson, which premiered 30 years ago. Roxburgh has played other real life characters too, including pollies Bob Hawke and Joh Bjelke-Petersen, and journalist Peter Greste, but Rogerson, being a cop who got people killed, was the most nerve-wracking. Did he ever hear from him? “Not personally, but I heard enough. To be honest, I think he quite liked all the publicity. And he passed a message on to me to say, ‘well done, but I was never a smoker’.”

The receipt for lunch at The Corner, Palm Beach.

If Blue Murder was career-defining so too was Rake, which ran on Australian TV from 2010 to 2018, starring Roxburgh as the lovably roguish barrister Cleaver Greene. He adored these years: “It was like a family, and I was creatively involved. To get back together regularly with a great bunch of friends is pretty rare in this job.”

Richard Roxburgh in Rake, one of his favourite roles.

Kane returns and cajoles us into ordering a coffee granita with mascarpone and yuzu peel to finish, an excellent suggestion. We talk about what makes someone sizzle on screen. Roxburgh has acted with all kinds, mostly good and humble, some boorish and puffed up, others quite mad. And here’s the interesting thing. “Sometimes the mad ones are the most riveting on screen – because crazy is riveting.”

I ask if there are any roles he’s still dying to do. “I’m sure I’ve got a King Lear in there somewhere,” he says. And Willy Loman, who he’d love to play again, this time “at a slightly more appropriate age”.

Roxburgh is now 63, the same age as that fictional character. Any producers reading this? I’d pay to see it.

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