| Steve Bisley was just
sitting there minding his own business, smoking a
cigarette in the morning sun while he waited for someone
to bring him his scrambled eggs. The bloke in the suit suddenly appeared in front of him. He wasn't happy. "I got done by the water rats, mate," he snarled. "I'm goin' to court now." Bisley, cool as a cucumber, watches him walk up the street. "I get that all the time," he shrugs. Name another actor working today whose career flashpoints coincide with some of the defining moments in recent Australian film and television history. Chart them - 'Mad Max', 'The Big Steal', 'Police Rescue', 'Frontline', 'GP', 'Water Rats' - and you chart the career of an actor who has helped shape the Australian cultural landscape. His habit of playing police officers is starting to look like a fetish ("I couldn't tell you the number of speeding tickets it's got me out of") but Bisley can do it all. Sceptical? In a cast teeming with Poles, Bisley won an AFI award for his portrayal of a Polish immigrant in 1983's 'Silver City'. But few films have had the impact of 'Mad Max'. Better films have come out of Australia, and others have made more money. But its freewheeling pessimism was a long cold glass of water in a desert of worthy costume dramas that was suffocating the local film industry. Bisley played a cop Goose and Mel Gibson, a NIDA graduate the same year as Bisley, played Max. "I love the Goose," he says. "I get the Goose every day. Everywhere in the world. "We were in Paris this year, up at the Moet et Chandon chateau for two days and there were some Belgians there one day for lunch ... one guy kept saying, 'You are from Mad Max? Yah?' " Gibson is now a bona fide heavy hitter on the world stage, an Oscar winner worth millions of dollars, whose celebrity brought him a guest voice spot on 'The Simpsons'. Bisley, on the other hand, managed to get an extra day off written into his 'Water Rats' contract this time round. It's all a toss of the coin. "I agree with that notion of the right place at the right time in a way," Bisley says. "But I think the thing with Gibbo you've got to understand is he always was an American so the fact of going home, especially going there with a film like that, I mean that's the only way to go to Hollywood - with a successful film. And 'Mad Max', a kind of B-grade genre movie was the sort of thing Americans dig." Gibbo? One wonders how often Mel Gibson gets called Gibbo these days. But he and Bisley go way back. Gibson's very first film a quarter of a century ago was 'Summer City', alongside a young, tanned Steve Bisley. Television took Bisley to middle Australia. 'Water Rats', going into its fifth season, is lucky to have him. Among a miscellaneous cast of former models and soap demi-stars, Bisley, the NIDA old boy, could phone his performance in. You play a cop once, Bisley points out, then everyone wants you to play a cop. "I had a producer say to me once, 'I want you to do exactly what you did in Mad Max'," he says, rolling his eyes. Don't ask what his response was. Now, 20 years after Mad Max, Bisley is making the trip to Hollywood for the first time. "I've got some people to see," he says coyly. How Bisley and Hollywood will take to each other is anyone's guess. "Los Angeles itself is an absolute toilet," he says. "And a lot of American stuff is absolute shit. But the other night I went to see American Beauty. It's got to be one of the best films I've ever seen ... it's unbelievable." Years ago, Bisley won an AFI award for his comic turn as a cross-dressing car salesman in 'The Big Steal'. It was a rare comic outing for Bisley; too rare, as he now laments. "It was a fabulous character - everyone has a car salesman story - and that was my idea to make him a cross-dresser, because I wanted it to go a little bit away from the broad notion that people have of car salesmen. "Because of the success of the film - and it was very successful - if it had been in the States, I would've had l5 comedy scripts offered to me the next day after the Awards. |
"That's the time, if I've ever thought, Christ, I
wish I'd done it in America, that's the time. by Dianne Butler |
