When you need a macho American, Hire and Aussie

I'm not one to just post up a whole news article, but enjoyed reading this one. I'm sure it's not true in all cases, but the limited examples he gives puts forward an interesting point.

Heath Ledger, Aussie actors and American machismo
THE untimely death of Heath Ledger has not only robbed the acting world of one of its most promising talents, it has also robbed Hollywood of one of its Australian stand-ins for American machismo.

Never mind the trade deficit, or even Barack Obama's "moral deficit"; Hollywood is suffering from a macho deficit, and it's having to turn to what many still perceive as a land of beer-swilling, sheep-shearing men in denim to find its cowboys and cads.

When Hollywood first flirted with all things Aussie in the 1980s, it was a bit of a po-mo joke. "Look at Crocodile Dundee with his big shiny knife and taste for lager, how quaint!" laughed cinema audiences. It's no joke today. At a time when American stars have been feminised, preened and plucked, it's Australia that is providing the muscle for the grittier acting jobs.

In recent years, the impressively brooding Ledger had joined Russell Crowe, Hugh Jackman and Eric Bana as a real bloke who could play gruff cowboys, lascivious bastards or any other role that required the leading man to have hair on his chest. In his breakthrough film 10 Things I Hate About You, a high-school spin on Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, Ledger looked like he had been shuttled in from another planet rather than merely another hemisphere.

Where the hairless, super-tanned jock was boringly arrogant and the geek with a crush was predictably nervous, Ledger's scruffy, unkempt and slurry-voiced Patrick Verona was a complex macho character: nasty to begin with, but later opened up by the love of a good woman. The director even allowed him to keep his Aussie accent, as if to accentuate this untidy, unruly character's exoticness amid the cardboard cut-out boys and girls of a typical high-school movie.

In later films, Ledger played American rather than Australian: his rugged down-under temperament meant he was frequently more convincing as a manly American than many of the prim and waxed US-born actors. He even played a cowboy better. In Brokeback Mountain, Ledger's tortured and mumbling Ennis Del Mar is far more believable than all-American Jake Gyllenhaal's Jack Twist. (In one scene in that film, Ledger and Gyllenhaal were required to leap naked off a cliff into a lake. Ledger did it, but Gyllenhaal was replaced by a stuntman because he is scared of heights. If you want an actor to take risks, look down under.)

In Todd Haynes's I'm Not There, in which six actors play characters based on Bob Dylan, Ledger's Robbie Clark is the most convincingly American: half James Dean, half Jack Kerouac. Among the rag bag of actors mimicking Dylan, Ledger best captures the swagger and sexism of the American male who has a 1950s mentality and is desperately trying to adapt to life in '60s America.

It is striking that Haynes employed an Australian woman, Cate Blanchett, to play the character most clearly and literally based on Dylan.

It seems even women from Australia are better than American men at playing American heroes.

Again and again, Hollywood looks to Australians to inject testosterone into a movie. Like Ledger, Crowe recently played a cowboy: Ben Wade in 3:10 to Yuma. If an American actor were to play Wade, a coach-robbing outlaw, he would first have to put on weight (and then give numerous interviews telling everyone how difficult it was to be fat) and then do some method-style research with menacing men who have been involved in hold-ups of one kind or another. Not Crowe: his jowls and his sense of menace are real, attributes of his Australian manhood.

Ridley Scott called on Crowe to play a hard, '70s drug-busting cop in his epic American Gangster. Young American actors seem interested in playing '70s crime-busters only for post-machismo laughs: think of the awful Starsky and Hutch remake. It took a full-bodied, croaky-voiced Australian to breathe life back into that old American character, the committed, flares-wearing cop, who was a staple of '70s TV shows and cinema.

And let us not forget Crowe's greatest cinematic moment, as General Maximus Decimus Meridius in Gladiator, a role many said was symbolic of the true American values of valour and loyalty over backstabbing corruption. Hollywood, if you need an American symbol, phone for an Australian.

Australian men are called on to play Hollywood's edgier superheroes, too. Jackman's fearsome Wolverine, huge, hirsute and with sideburns to die for, is a spiritual leader. Surrounded by young men and women who experience their superpowers as mental and physical afflictions (all played by young American actors, of course), Jackman's cocksure and principled Wolverine is the natural American leader, the steady-minded figurehead of this band of freaky rebels. It took Bana to play the Hulk, American pop culture's most obviously tortured macho soul.

Part shy scientist, part raging beast, Bana played out America's crisis of masculinity on cinema screens, bringing his notable acting skills and his innate Australian swagger to a role that required him to be both wimp and whack job.

In our PC, flaccid, image-obsessed times, many new American actors seem to lack the personality and resources to play hard American, crazed American, tortured American or heroic American. Instead, Oz is having to send its young men to American shores to depict American virtue and fury. Ledger did that better than most, displaying a more developed understanding of what it means to be Hollywood than many of his American contemporaries. His death is a great tragedy for his family and friends; it has also lowered Hollywood's bloke quota.
By Brendan O'Neill
January 30, 2008 09:40am
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23131304-5007146,00.html