When actor Richard Roxburgh and his wife Silvia Colloca moved to Sydney’s northern beaches, they worried they might not see their friends any more. The affluent area’s nickname “the insular peninsula” is accepted as more descriptive than derisive, even by locals. “But what we found is, they’ll come up and then they’ll stay,” Roxburgh says. “Because why wouldn’t you?”
He doesn’t explain. Actors know when to let the scene talk – and Newport Beach on a cloudless summer morning is talking fast. The brightness knob is spun eye-wateringly high; the saturation one, too. Past the iridescent green tips of Norfolk pine fronds is the navy and white ocean and terracotta-tinged sand. It’s different to the silvery sand of the eastern suburbs’ beaches, where the couple lived before moving north 15 years ago.
“It’s less infested with humanity here,” says Roxburgh. “Sleepier.”
Much of Roxburgh’s charisma on stage and screen is his dry, wry voice. He has the command and poised elocution of a theatre actor but unique to him are vowels that arch into an insolent drawl, and a slightly bunged-on cultivation that made the idiotic tempests of his most-loved character, barrister Cleaver Greene, so bloody funny on the ABC TV series, Rake. Loquacious even mid-brawl or binge, some of Cleaver’s broadsides over the show’s five seasons go down as all-time extracts of Australian comedy gold.
Comedy, he feels, is a social necessity. “It makes what we do very worthwhile as actors.”
“What interested me post-Rake is that I thought more funny bones material would come my way and I’d spend my life more geared towards that,” Roxburgh says. “I did love it so much and I felt very at home there.” Yet since Rake finished in 2018 he’s done Fires (about the black summer), Bali 2002 (about the Bali bombing) and a new drama series, Prosper, playing the troubled leader of an evangelical church. “It’s all been very, very dark and it does make me wonder where Australia is at with its storytelling,” says Roxburgh. “Not to say it’s a bad thing but it’s of interest to me that we tell such dark stories in this country.”
Newport Beach ends in a cliff dripping with moss. The rocks beneath are shoes-off terrain. “It was my six-year-old daughter,” Roxburgh says, pointing to the blue and pink polish splotched on his toenails. He and Colloca have two teenage sons, too. The couple met on the set of the vampire movie, Van Helsing, when Roxburgh was playing Count Dracula. He later told Mia Freedman that Colloca – playing one of Dracula’s three wives – had introduced herself saying: “Hello Richard, I’m your Italian wife.” His “strong inkling” that her words were prophetic proved right; they married in 2004.
Italian-born Colloca is an actor, opera singer and cookbook author so life is “pretty crazy”, says Roxburgh. Although his theatre credits are long and lauded – he most recently played Prospero in Sydney Theatre Company’s 2022 production of The Tempest – he’s had to “step back” from its demands. “Running three kids’ lives with the various taxi services and everything else proves complex,” he says. “Silvia is very busy, I’m very busy … but everybody has stupid lives now, don’t we?”
Crazy got crazier in 2022 when the family’s 1970s era home sprung a leak that “buckled the kitchen roof”, Roxburgh says. “Silvia was filming a cooking show afterwards and if you panned right I was standing on the kitchen counter erecting a kind of brace for the roof,” he says. “It stayed until we moved out, my brace. I was quite proud of it.”
Walking with Roxburgh is harder than anticipated. Heading up some weatherboard steps to the bush track that leads to Bilgola Beach, I’m puffed both because it’s steep and because he keeps making me laugh. This time, it’s the puffed-up way he’s paused on every contour of the words “my brace” that acts as a standalone sketch of dodgy domestic handiwork and, somehow, also, a jab at the fragile male ego too.
The year that followed involved moving to a temporary home in Avalon, renovating the home in Bungan Beach, “endless conversations about tapware and hinges” and a realisation that while creating environments “is kind of my thing … that’s what we do in theatre and film”, the thrill of home renovation wanes. “Our electrician couldn’t fathom why we didn’t want downlights everywhere,” he says.
He pauses. “But I don’t know, Kate. Do people want to hear about people’s renovations?”
“This is Australia!” I remind him.
“Right,” he says. “Of course they do.”
When Prosper airs, Roxburgh won’t be watching. He doesn’t watch his films either. “Honestly, the last day that you leave set, your job’s done. You’d be either berating yourself or basking in your own glory and neither are particularly useful.” His character, Cal Quinn, is a born-again Christian who founded a church that’s amassed many thousands of followers, unaware that their charismatic leader is masking a private crisis of faith. “It was a fascinating stretch,” says Roxburgh. “Everything about him is so entirely different from me in my life, my parenting style, everything.”
As the fastest growing Christian denomination on earth, the evangelical movement is “important to interrogate”, says Roxburgh. “It’s big in Australia, it’s big in Queensland and it’s moving really quickly. I understand the desire for a sense of something beyond, something to make sense of what we go through here. I completely understand the desire for community. Churches like these can make you feel like you’re all pulling on the same rope at the same time, which must feel great.”
The community aspect “is powerful and beautiful”, he says. “Which is why so many people are badly hurt when it falls short, which it so often does, especially in movements which are very charged and led by charismatic, powerful individuals. As we’ve seen historically, the revelations start coming out. So much of [the Pentecostal movement] is geared in line with the American capitalist experiment, this ‘go for it, get rich, God wants you in abundance’ thing.”
While Roxburgh says “It wouldn’t answer my questions, and it wouldn’t help me,” he thinks our modern fixations are falling short too. “This kind of stupid life we occupy on social media I don’t think is healthy for the human spirit, the human soul, whatever that is.”
Ocean swimming, however, is a wonderful daily salve. “I quite like it cold,” he says. “I grew up on the Murray River, which had snow melt that was bitterly cold, even on a baking hot day. If you’ve had a shit day, or if there’s a lot going on in your life, swimming is very, very good.”
Prosper is streaming on Stan now
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