“Maybe I’m a damaged man. I think we’re all damaged in some ways,” says Aaron Pedersen. “When I was younger I never thought I had any way of breaking through the hardships.”
It’s a stark admission of vulnerability from the 47-year-old Arrernte-Arabana actor, but perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising. If one thing defines Pedersen’s work, it’s gravitas. He has a seemingly natural, intrinsic ability to project both great strength and great sorrow.
“I grew up in a number of homes and I grew up without a lot of structure,” he says. “I understand now that damage is part of the journey. Heartbreak. Loss. Gain.”
That journey has inevitably been gradual. No artist wakes up one day and is suddenly brilliant, but the 2013 feature film Mystery Road represented something of a turning point in Pedersen’s artistic oeuvre. Director Ivan Sen’s outback neo-noir marked Pedersen’s transition from a talented performer to one of the greatest Australian actors of his generation.
After it, Pedersen (whose early work includes TV’s Water Rats and The Secret Life of Us) started operating on a higher level. In the last half decade he has delivered several extraordinary performances including in the musical Spear, the campsite thriller Killing Ground, Mystery Road’s sequel Goldstone (also directed by Sen) and the series’ six-part television spin-off (directed by Rachel Perkins). He is currently on Australian screens in a supporting role in the new series of Jack Irish.
Responding to my thoughts on his post-Mystery Road second wind, Pedersen says: “That probably has a lot to do with Ivan. He approached me very differently to any other director. With Mystery Road he had absolute confidence in me. He said: ‘Don’t rush it, Aaron. Take your time. Breathe.’
“Ivan’s structure of film-making feels old school. Actors have to have conversations not just with dialogue but with silences. I got a lot out of that. Also, acting can only get better with life. That’s the beautiful thing about it. Life is a great teacher.”
I share with Pedersen another of my theories about Australian cinema: that the history of film-making in this country contains three great alpha male actors. The first was Chips Rafferty (a star in the 1940s, 50s and 60s) who stood for old-fashioned, possibly a little cliche, values: a hard day’s labour, a fair go, the Anzac spirit. The second was Jack Thompson, the virile, hard-drinking “man’s man” who was a seismic force throughout Australian cinema’s renaissance in the 70s.
The third is Pedersen. He brings something largely absent in the work of Rafferty and Thompson: a painfully damaged masculinity, projecting strength and vulnerability in equal measure.
“I always remind myself that my audience is human,” he says. “Therefore we have to be human, play human, reveal the humanness of who we are. Audiences gravitate towards that.”
Pedersen reflected on his difficult youth in the 2006 SBS documentary My Brother Vinnie. He and his seven siblings spent their childhood in commission housing and foster homes, under the protection of the child welfare system. They had an alcoholic mother and grew up around violence. One of Pedersen’s earliest memories is of crying and screaming while he watched his mother being violently assaulted.
The actor says his younger brother Vinnie, who has cerebral palsy, is his greatest inspiration. Vinnie gave Pedersen duty of care, coming to live with him in Sydney after their grandmother died in 1997.
Pedersen is the ambassador for National Carers Week. He says he “was a carer before I started acting” and that “my real job – the real reason I am here – is first and foremost to be a carer. That will never change.”
Vinnie is his number one teacher: “For impulses, for being in the moment, for living life as it is, for turning life into something magic. Vinnie is my shadow and I am his. I love him massively and I honour him in many ways.”
Pedersen’s performance in Spear – the 2015 full-length feature debut of acclaimed Bangarra Dance Theatre director Stephen Page – might not be one of his most famous roles, but it is one of his most affecting. The actor is a whirlwind of emotion as the distraught and homeless “Suicide Man”, who struggles to reconcile his Indigenous heritage with contemporary western society.
Shortly before he took on the role, one of Pedersen’s brothers took his own life.
“That’s how real it is. That’s how close it is to reality. It’s like a constant open wound you can’t heal,” Pedersen says.
“We filmed my scenes twice, as a wide shot and as a close-up. I said to Stephen: ‘I don’t really want to be going over this with you, brother. I don’t want to do it any more than twice. I don’t want to intellectualise it. I don’t want to break it down.’ It was close to both of us. Very, very close.”
Discussing the film’s core theme – the challenge Indigenous Australians face in reconciling their ancient history with the western world – Pedersen says: “I am five generations from being a full-blown warrior in this nation. It’s not too long ago. Was I born 200 years too late or 200 years too early? I’m not sure. I’ve always believed in a sense of the land and an understanding of my people.
“I’ve always believed, when I walk into a room or do my work, that I’ve got all the men, all those ancestors past, standing right behind me. A million men are here with me right now in this room. They are with me now during this interview.
“That’s how I think men should always think, always carry themselves. They should never feel like they are walking down a street alone. I’ve always felt that I have a world of warriors right behind me, hovering at my shoulders.”
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