Since winning the President of the Jury Special Award at Cannes this year, Australian real-life crime film Snowtown has been heralded by critics the world over. OnlyForKoolKids caught up with its star, Daniel Henshall, on his recent visit to Brighton.
In the flesh, Daniel Henshall is one of the nicest people you could hope to encounter. Snowtown, in which he makes his feature film debut, has just left most of the audience in Brighton’s Duke Of Yorks cinema stunned and speechless, but Henshall is still smiling and chatty, keen to share an experience that has already gained him global critical acclaim.
On screen, he plays the sort of man who you hope you’ll never ever come across in your lifetime, and as he sits in front of me, post-screening, the difference between the two is stark. Snowtown is based in part on Debi Marshall’s book Killing For Pleasure, an in-depth analysis of Australia’s infamous ‘Bodies in the Barrels’ murders that claimed 12 lives across the 1990s. Henshall plays John Bunting, the man identified as being principally responsible for the slayings, several of which were preceded by the horrendous torture of his victims.
To Henshall’s horror, his mother still saw aspects of her son in his portrayal of Bunting. “When my mum saw the film for the first time the other day she was like, ‘I know that guy’. It scared the shit out of me,” he reveals. “She qualified that by saying that she knew bits of him [Bunting] in the film, but she said to me ‘it’s nice to talk to you now’, as she thought I gotten so into the character at the time.”
For the role Henshall gained 20 kilos, kept his hair hair unkempt and his beard uneven, appearing every bit the working class South Australian that Bunting is. Today his hair is short and neatly cut beneath a fashionable cap, his moustache and beard are both precisely trimmed and physically he is slim and healthy in appearance.
One thing that Henshall and his character on-screen do share are Henshall’s cherubic features. It is a combination of these and his instantly likeable demeanour that make it possible to see why he was given the part (and why his mother had been slightly confused when watching Snowtown), for John Bunting was not the stereotypical loner serial killer, but an affable, sociable man who ingratiated himself with the community he lived (and killed) in. So ingratiated, in fact, that Bunting was able to convince six other locals to help him carry out what he sold to them as the cleansing of the area of predatory homosexuals and paedophiles.
As Henshall explains, the film’s depiction of Bunting as a paternal “knight in shining armour” was deliberate. “The way I saw it was that here’s a man who thinks he’s loving these people, who gets off on protecting these people through killing,” he says. “I found that idea was quite easy to connect to – I have family, I have people I care for. He (John) doesn’t do it in a way that I agree with, of course, but there is that commonality.”
In addition to putting on weight, Henshall, who is from Sydney, spent three months before the cameras rolled living in the same economically depressed suburbs of Adelaide where all but one of the killings took place, and which also provide the backdrop for most of Snowtown. “I lived in the area and got to experience it and become part of the community, so I was immersed in that world for 12 weeks before shooting.”
It also gave him the chance to get to know the rest of the cast, all first time actors from the suburbs, including Lucas Pittaway, who plays Jamie Vlassakis, the son of the family that Bunting ‘adopts’. It is the development of the relationship between Bunting and Vlassakis, who gradually becomes complicit in the murders, that forms the film’s powerful emotional core.
Having just witnessed Snowtown, which, although featuring very few moments of actual violence, is incredibly intense from start to finish (and has reportedly caused walkouts at several screenings), I wonder if the six-week shoot had any profound effect on Henshall? At first, he says not. “I was ok. Any time we felt disturbed with what we were doing on set, it was such a tight gang that we formed on it with the amazing crew and cast, we would talk about it and debrief in the moment or afterwards go and have a few beers and discuss it.”
But just as his mother had noticed, taking on the mantle of Australia’s most reviled serial killer did take its toll. “A friend of mine talked to me during the filming process and then talked to me three months later, and he said it’s nice to actually talk to me now, as I at the time I had been projecting what I was doing. I had no idea I was so much in it. It took me about six months, to be honest.”
As Henshall observes, Pittaway (who he quite accurately describes as looking like the lovechild of James Franco and Heath Ledger) bares much of the brunt of the film’s anger, playing the victim of acts of paedophilia and incest and of Bunting’s malevolent fathering. “Lucas went through the wringer for those six weeks,” he reveals. “We were facillitating that performance as well, we brought that out of him. He went through the absolute fucking wringer, but he was fine. I looked at him and I was fine, and I thought ‘you’re going through something a lot worse than I am’.”
While Henshall says that getting into the mindset of the twisted pater familias that Bunting is gradually revealed to be was not as difficult as might be imagined, once again he makes it clear he didn’t emerge the other side completely unscathed. “In the film I’m the guy with all the power, and I think everyone can agree that you feel confident when you feel like you are in power, and I got to access that time and time again. It was only difficult when we relived actual events, so the torture scene was the hardest scene in the film because it was the first time we physicallised an actual event. That was really really depressing because we were doing it so closely.”
Given the nature of what we have just been discussing, when Henshall tells me what his next project will be I half suspect he is pulling my leg: “I’m doing a romantic comedy called Any Questions For Ben? It’s coming out in Australia in January and it’s made by the same director and production team behind The Castle and The Dish [two Australian films that have also had success further afield]. I play a lycra-wearing, amateur triathlete lawyer.”
The laughter that ensues is almost cathartic. As I leave the Duke Of Yorks I look back over my shoulder to see Henshall standing outside the foyer, beer in hand, talking amiably with his PR rep and other filmgoers, and it is still hard to reconcile this image with the power of his performance in Snowtown. Perhaps the idea of a romantic comedy was manna from heaven in the aftermath of making such any incredibly powerful study of sociopathic inhumanity; a chance to cleanse and extract his soul from the dark place the film takes us all to. One thing’s for sure: Henshall has already avoided the thing that many actors fear most – the awful reality of being typecast.
