'It was insane': Callan Mulvey on being Drazic, the heartthrob of Heartbreak High

When I was around 12, my best friend and I took a train out to Parramatta Westfield one Saturday to see an in-store appearance by the cast of Heartbreak High.

Well, ostensibly we were there for the whole cast. But from the roar of the teenage crowd, which filled the lower floor of the suburban Sydney shopping centre and leaned precariously over glass balconies of the upper levels, it was clear who the main drawcard was.

Drazic – the rebellious misfit of the seminal teenage drama series – was a minor pop cultural phenomenon of late 1990s adolescent culture in Australia.

Played by the New Zealand-born actor Callan Mulvey, Bogdan Drazic (though he was, like Cher or Pele, only ever referred to by one name) blazed into the fifth season of the already beloved show, skating, smoking and clowning in class. Handsome and outspoken, he dressed like a punk rocker about to hit the Vans Warped circuit, and sported the era’s must-have alternative accessory: an eyebrow ring.

Initially positioned as schoolyard antagonist, Drazic quickly emerged as the show’s romantic anti-hero, who struggled to shake off a rough upbringing and hold together a lasting romance. In short, he was Heathcliffe on rollerblades, and he could draw a crowd.

“Oh my god I remember that,” Mulvey says when I confess – somewhat sheepishly – that I attended one of these shopping centre events two decades ago.

We are speaking over the phone – the thought of which might have induced a small cardiac arrest for my 12-year-old self. But I’m relieved to discover that Mulvey, now 44, holds a fairly generous view of the young fans who turned his and his castmates’ lives upside down.

“I remember another one that we did in Chadstone [mall] in Melbourne – and they were quite unprepared for how many people showed up,” he recalls.

“It got a bit hairy in there ... I remember us sprinting for a bookstore, and then we had to run down the back, and someone was like, ‘What’s the code? I don’t know the code!’ Everyone was freaking out, and people started coming in.

“We finally got the door open and bolted out into waiting cars. It was insane, but it was amazing too.”

Heartbreak High began as a spin-off to the popular 1993 romantic drama The Heartbreak Kid, which starred Claudia Karvan and Alex Dimitrades as a teacher and student who fall in love at a western suburbs Melbourne high school. The gritty depiction of the lives of second-generation migrant teenagers – and the romance itself, which is impossible to imagine being portrayed so sympathetically today – struck a chord. A year later, the television show hit screens.

Set in Sydney, Heartbreak High stood out from the tame, suburban Australian soap operas populated by Anglo families, or the depictions of Beverly Hills rich kids that dominated the small screen.

Shot on film and on location around inner and east Sydney, with a blaring soundtrack of the latest alternative music, it looked and sounded different to Neighbours and Home and Away, too. It dealt with issues like racism, drugs and domestic violence (even if sometimes a little contrived) which the soapies rarely touched.

It moved from Channel Ten to the ABC in 1997 – and in an era before internet streaming fractured pop culture, it had become after-school, appointment viewing. Mulvey was 22 and a relative acting novice when he first appeared midway through the show’s fifth season that same year.

He and other cast members have credited the show’s commitment to dramaturgy and extensive rehearsals – a major contrast to most rapidly-produced soapies in Australia – as being key to the quality of the show.

“The wonderful thing about Heartbreak was when we weren’t on set, we were up in the rehearsal room learning how to be more authentic, learning how to be more real,” he says. “It was so incredibly fortunate to have such a rigorous and disciplined focus on rehearsals.”

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But there were limits to how authentic an after-school show could be. A cheeky YouTube video documents “Every ‘Rack Off’ in Heartbreak High”; the show was famously unable to let even its most rebellious characters utter actual swear words.

“We were so frustrated at having to say ‘rack off’, or ‘you’re a moron’,” Mulvey says. “We were 20, 21 at the time, and playing 16, 17-year-olds, and we were always wanting to push it and make it as real as possible.”

Though the vernacular was distinctly Australian, the universal themes helped Heartbreak High become a hit overseas, particularly in Europe, where Dutch and French fans have dubbed or subtitled YouTube clips which are among the only ways to watch it now.

Indeed the internet is awash with nostalgia for Heartbreak High, and for Drazic in particular: in BuzzFeed articles, fan videos that document Drazic’s tortured relationship with Anita Scheppers (Lara Cox), and in the Betoota Advocate, which once lamented: “Majority Of Australian Women Born After 1980 Struggling To Find Anyone As Hot As Drazic”.

Mulvey finds the cut-through of his particular character hard to explain – and it was difficult to process at the time, too.

“I didn’t know how to cope with it at all because it was so in opposition to how I felt about myself, as an insecure young man,” he says. “It was flattering, it was amazing and incredible, but it just felt so undeserved.”

He became cautious about going out in public, avoiding places like malls, which would be full of high schoolers. Despite his clear affection for his time on the show, Mulvey says the intensity of the experience wore him out.

“After three years I didn’t love it as much, and I kind of wanted out of it altogether, which is what I did,” he says.

Mulvey left the show in 1999, moving to the north coast of New South Wales to focus on another passion: music. But he did rediscover a love of acting, and appeared in a series of film and TV roles over the next decades, including his understated and chilling performance as suburban crime lord Mark Moran in the 2008 mini-series Underbelly.

Most recently, he’s hit a seam of small roles in major Hollywood blockbusters, including 300: Rise of an Empire and Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice. But he is still approached by Heartbreak High fans all the time; just recently, he was recognised by a European woman while shooting on location for Mystery Road.

“She said she loved [Heartbreak High] and what it meant to her, and that’s just – that’s remarkable. It’s brilliant how this medium can do that.”

Far from being irritated that he’s still synonymous with a character he played 20 years ago (and still asked to talk about it in interviews like this one), Mulvey says, “it’s wonderful”.

“It’s a testament to everybody that was involved in that show at the time that it struck a chord,” he says emphatically.

“There are things from my childhood that really resonate with me and evoke different emotions and nostalgia, and I love those sort of things. I get it.”