‘I’m just one of those actors who turns up’: Australian actor and writer William McInnes reminisces about his career and family during a walk in Somers on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula. Photograph: Penny Stephens/The GuardianThe Newsreader actor and author on terrible performances, the passing of time and why life is too much fun to disappear up your own backside
by Tim Byrne“You do find yourself, at a certain age, looking back,” William McInnes says almost wistfully, gazing out at the clearing skies over Victoria’s Western Port Bay. We will go for a walk along its shoreline eventually – despite his moon boot, the result of a decidedly undramatic accident on the set of upcoming NCIS: Sydney. But for now we’re happily ensconced in his local general store in the Mornington Peninsula town of Somers.
The final episode of season two of The Newsreader – where McInnes plays Lindsay Cunningham, the hulking and splenetic head of the newsroom – has just screened on ABC. It’s a show that trades in a certain kind of nostalgia, its cyclorama-like parade through historical events and obsession with 1980s period detail bordering on the fetishistic. But for McInnes, who lived through the times and remembers them clearly, the retrospection is both fascinating and kind of surreal.
“It’s always tempting to look back with rose-coloured glasses,” he says. The production’s central set, built in a heritage-listed factory in the inner-western Melbourne suburb of Brooklyn, was filled by the designers with magazines and newspapers of the period. “Wandering around that room, you feel the past tapping you on the shoulder. I remember my father talking about a certain incident and suddenly here’s the article about it in the Australian.”
It was also sobering, flipping through old editions of TV Week or Women’s Weekly. “Articles about our next big star, and you’d think, ‘Who’s that?’ That guy’s probably washing cars or selling houses now. And there’s Mel Gibson with the headline ‘I Don’t Want to be a Burnt Out Hulk’. And I’d think, sorry Mel.” He laughs ruefully. “It makes you realise how brief everything is.”
There is something Dickensian about McInnes, and not just because it’s so easy to imagine him rounding on a street urchin with stentorian disdain. He’s polyphonic – characters burst out of him at regular intervals, accents flying – but also wonderfully centred.
He’s never thought much about his career, about his process in building a character or a trajectory of roles. Even when asked if he prefers stage or screen work, he seems disinterested, as if thinking about it for the first time.
“I’m just one of those actors who turns up,” he explains. “I’m a certain type and I think that’s helped me.”
‘I don’t want to sound like a K-Mart Dylan Thomas, but you think about time passing and your heart breaks’William McInnesLike a lot of Australian actors, McInnes has little tolerance for the puffery of acting; he won’t even be drawn on the suggestion he might have any talent. “There were a lot of people more talented than me, who worked harder and took it more seriously, who didn’t get a look in.”
McInnes studied at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts when it was run by founding dean Geoff Gibbs. “Wonderful bloke. He gave me the best advice I’ve ever had: life’s too much fun to disappear up your own backside.” It was a time of great fun and experimentation, where students could dive into Chekhov and Miller, Edward Albee and Tennessee Williams, even if their subsequent careers never saw them progress past bit roles on Neighbours. “Take the work seriously, but never take yourself seriously.”
It’s a philosophy that seems to animate everything he does now. When his son Clem came to stay during Covid, they amused themselves by unearthing old clips of McInnes’s early television performances. “He’d find footage of me on Rafferty’s Rules and we’d watch them together. And I was terrible!”
This family tradition of taking the piss was drilled into McInnes from a young age, where “we were always taught to look outside the circuitry of ourselves”. His parents were great with a withering quip, good-natured but deflating for the ego. “Mum saw me in a production of Pride and Prejudice, and she said afterwards, ‘You looked like a block of commission flats.’”
Once we get moving, lumbering towards the beach track and on to the “Koala walk” which hugs the coast, McInnes opens up about his connection to Somers, about the things that tether him to place. He first started coming here with his late wife – film-maker Sarah Watt, who died of breast cancer in 2011 – as an escape from the bustling pressures at their West Footscray home. “I remember in my little bucket of memories, the drive down here. The kids are excited, Sarah’s excited, I’m excited.
“This place is very like Redcliffe [on Moreton Bay in Queensland, where McInnes was raised]. The house reminds me a lot of my childhood home, the coast of course but also the trees and dirt tracks.”
We round the yacht club and head on to the beach itself, just as the sun’s warmth hits its peak. The bay is a kind of mottled green and perfectly still. “I write about Redcliffe in my new book, Yeah, Nah! I had this teacher at school who taught us Romantic poetry. He loved Wordsworth’s I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, about a man who’s walking and sees something beautiful [a crowd, a host, of golden daffodils]. But he doesn’t appreciate it until it’s gone. And that is so true in life.”
McInnes is almost as prolific a writer as he is an actor, his fiction and works of memoir leaning on his talent as a raconteur. Yeah, Nah! deals with our collective love of language, the strange idioms and slang particular to Australians. But it’s also about people, about the family and friends who delight in – and sometimes torture – the vernacular.
“When I write these books, it’s a bit hard, actually. You’ve had these people in your life and you miss them so much. Both my parents are dead, and my wife. The things the kids said, and now they’re grown up. I don’t want to sound like a K-Mart Dylan Thomas, but you think about time passing and your heart breaks a little bit.”
As the wind starts to whip up the briny air, we come to an old petrified tree, fallen years before and now sticking out of the sand. It seems somehow both fragile and monumental. “I’ve got a photo of this tree back at the house. My youngest is draped over it, about four or five. It seemed so big back then.”
Yeah, Nah! by William McInnes is out now through Hachette
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