Ryan Kwanten : Vanity Fair

As portrayed by the 33-year-old Australian actor Ryan Kwanten,True Blood’s Jason Stackhouse is likeable because, like so many of us, he has no clue how to translate his good intentions into reality. (Unfortunately for the people of Bon Temps, Louisiana, the aspiring cop’s chief intention is to make sure the place isn’t overrun by vampires, werewolves, and panthers.) Now, in Red Hill, opening this week, Kwanten plays an actual member of the Australian police force whose new assignment brings him face-to-face with a deranged killer. VF Daily met with Kwanten, who couldn’t be more different from Jason Stackhouse. Apart from not being a vampire, Kwanten knows how to get things done—and what he has on his mind now is a major career in Hollywood.

In Season 3 of True Blood, Jason Stackhouse wants to be a cop. In Red Hill, your character, Shane Cooper, is a cop. Have you been a law-abiding citizen for your entire life?

No. I was a little shit growing up. Rebellious. It was beyond the usual teen angst, and I really don’t know why. There was no rhyme or reason or motives in my aggression. But I got it out of my system around 21 and have been a very happy boy since. I like to let all my drama out on-screen.

How do you approach capturing a character in 90 minutes versus capturing a character for a television series?

The beauty of True Blood is that Alan Ball and his expert team of writers have allowed the character to breathe over the course of multiple seasons, and I now have a sense of ownership. But beyond that, as an audience member, you become invested in the character. With an hour and a half, I know the ending of Red Hill, but I don’t know where Jason’s going to end up. There’s certain liberties you have to abide by, but there’s freedom attached to that, too.

Red Hill plays off questions of being a stranger in a strange town—that feeling of being the odd person out at a party.

It’s just taking that and elevating it about a thousand and putting other people’s lives at stake and it’s probably capturing that feeling too.

And there’s also a revenge element that’s being tapped into.

Shane’s not really a purveyor of revenge, it’s more Jimmy Conway [played by Tom E. Lewis]. Shane’s a more by-the-book, analytical, and cerebral cop. He’s trying to bring his city approach to being a cop to the country, not realizing it’s a different skill set. One of the most intriguing things about playing this character, is that he’s set up to be the hero but he’s fallible—he’s full of faults. The first time we see him, he’s forgotten his gun on the first day of the job. I far more enjoy playing characters with faults than the Superman-type characters where you feel like no matter what force is put up against them, no matter what posse is put up against them, they can defeat it.

True Blood has this campy, dark aesthetic but Red Hill is just plain dark.

We took pride in shooting it on 35-mm film. Capturing the aesthetic of the beautiful [Australian] landscape, we felt the 35 mm lent itself to the old-school Western. I think high definition would’ve added too much of a crispness to it.

What draws you to the visual aspects of filmmaking?

I have very lengthy discussions with any potential project and film director about all that stuff. I want to know what D.P. [director of photography] they’re using, the lighting schemes, what they’re shooting on, the lenses they’re using. I know enough about the filmmaking craft to talk about it; it’s beneficial for them to know how much I know, but it’s also beneficial for me to know how I’m going to be shot. I just love the business. If you look at what Tom E. Lewis did, with the character of Jimmy Conway—he had one line, but he said more throughout the entire film than any other character. That shows the power of the eyes and the power of filmmaking.

I think it’s hard to create suspense these days. Especially when we’re given so much information at such a rapid rate.

People think they want sensory overload—all their senses have to be firing at every single second. That forces the film director to be cutting every four seconds to have an explosion just for shock value. If audiences are so in tune with seeing that, then there’s an immunity that kicks in. So if you give them something like Red Hill, where you don’t cut every four seconds, you’re adding suspense by not giving them what they want. They’re naturally sort of leaning in. The more you choose to hold onto one shot, the more they’re going to lean in, because they’re telling themselves this should be a cut point and it doesn’t happen.

I remember seeing There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men and thinking they were suspenseful in ways I hadn’t seen in a long time.

Because it went beyond just a loud noise. A loud noise is not suspenseful. It’s shocking. It bursts your eardrums for a second, and then you’re back into the story.

There is a scene where Shane Cooper goes out of town to inspect a horse that had his stomach ripped open by a panther. And the story in the film says that a traveling circus came to Australia at one point, where these panthers got loose. Did something like that actually happen?

There are quite a few Web sites that are dedicated to panther spotting. And apparently the farmers collectively agree that there are panthers out there. It’s sort of like our version of the Loch Ness Monster.

Because of Jason Stackhouse’s Southern roots, do most people assume you’re from the South?

Yes.

How do you get authenticity down like that?

I haven’t had any actual training, aside from on-set experience. I’ve never had an acting coach, a dialect coach, or an acting workshop. Any form of formal training. So I use my life experience to get into characters. I take great pride in creating characters like Jason. He couldn’t be more polar opposite to who I am, but that’s what’s intriguing to me. As analytical as I may be about certain things, I switch off that part of my brain. Now, I jump off that cliff without even thinking. Jason has that no-will-power mentality. It’s a true sense of liberation to play a character like that.

I know you didn’t plan for a career in acting. Does that notion give you a sense of confidence where you’d think, “Oh, if this doesn’t work out, who cares, I never intended to act anyways.”

I was holding back like that for a few years, but that had to do with the jobs I was getting. They weren’t that meaty. I’d say the line and that’s exactly what I mean, in these shitty little things I was doing. It was purely just to get my foot in the door and make enough money to live. Now that I have that money to live, I can make choices on how they creatively challenge me. It was an industry that kept poking me from the outside. Seven years ago, I moved here [Hollywood], totally penniless. I got a call from this lady who wasn’t representing me at the time, but she’s my manager now. She said, “You might want to think about sticking around.” I said, “I have no money, I’m heading back to Australia.” She said, “You are going to regret this decision.” I went back upstairs into the hotel room, packed up my bag, and sat there and started thinking that I had to do something. So I went downstairs and asked the manager of the hotel to speak to the owner. An hour later, I had a meeting with the owner and he’s really pissed off about this desolate, almost homeless-looking guy asking for a meeting with him. I said, “Look, I’ve stayed at the hotel for the last three nights. I’ve paid. I don’t have any more money. But what I’m going to offer you is this: you’re going to let me stay at the hotel for free, for three months. You can put me in the store room, you can put me on the stairs, I don’t care. I just need a place to put my minimal luggage. At the end of that three months, I’m going to pay you back every red cent and I’m going to recommend the hotel every single time after that. He said sure. And that was the start of something.