“Oh my God … that’s me!” David Wenham stops in his tracks, eyes wide, as we walk past the hoardings around the construction site that used to be the Stables theatre in Darlinghurst. They’re decorated with giant production photos from the theatre’s illustrious past: a very young Cate Blanchett; the late Penny Cook; John Bell in full flight … and a 25-year-old Wenham violently squeezing fellow actor David Field’s head.
Wenham’s playing of a violent ex-con in The Boys launched his career. The play, based on the 1986 rape and murder of Anita Cobby, had audiences queueing around the block in 1991.
“This is so weird for me, so weird,” says the now 60-year-old actor, surveying the enormous hole where the theatre had stood since 1970. Wenham has been coming here since he was a teenager. A new building is slated to open in 2027.
Wenham remembers The Boys vividly. “We were very different actors back then,” he says. “We drank real beer on stage. We walked on stage with a slab of cans. We would psych ourselves into those characters every night. It was raw and it was dangerous, and the audience felt that. But I was young and I didn’t know how to cleanse myself of the anger at the end of the night.”
Wenham leaning against a poster featuring a picture of him starring in The Boys, the play based on the rape and murder of Anita Cobby which launched his career. Photograph: Blake Sharp-Wiggins/The Guardian
He smiles, exhales. “I’d never put myself in that headspace now, and I don’t really want to play characters like that ever again.”
It’s a heavy, humid late afternoon a few days after Mardi Gras. There’s thunder in the air and a police emergency playing out up the road in Potts Point. As we stroll, pedestrians push past towards Kings Cross station. He’s a “terrible jaywalker”, impatient at the lights.
On the other side, Uber Eats bikes wobble along the footpath. An elderly man walks his two greyhounds. Overhead, a flock of corellas is screeching and wheeling. Wenham pauses to watch them, hands in his pockets.
Wenham lives in Queensland now, with his partner Kate Agnew (also an actor) and their two daughters, but he lived in Kings Cross for 25 years. When he first arrived, fresh out of drama school, the Cross was still Sydney’s nightlife and underworld hub: bars and clubs stayed open late. Wenham and his actor colleagues would unwind over cheap beers, sometimes until dawn – or later.
In the redeveloped Kings Cross of 2026, the energy is very different, but some colourful characters are still around. Walking past the Wayside Chapel, a local does a double take. “G’day David!” he calls.
Wenham – who is an ambassador for the Wayside, the Uniting Church mission founded by Father Ted Noffs in 1964 – grins and raises a hand in greeting. A few minutes later another bloke slows down, squints and asks: “Were you in Lord of the Rings?”
“Yes,” Wenham says, nodding easily. “Yes, I was.”
The actor is involved with Wayside, a church initiative that helps people affected by homelessness. Photograph: Blake Sharp-Wiggins/The Guardian
The question – which he must have fielded hundreds of times over the past 20 years after his appearance in the trilogy – doesn’t seem to bother him. If anything he looks slightly amused by it, like a man who knows that no matter what, he will always be Faramir, the brother of Boromir and the second son of Denethor, the Steward of Gondor.
Or Diver Dan, from Seachange, maybe.
Wenham’s Wayside ambassadorship isn’t something he takes lightly. He stops to yarn with people milling around on the footpath. He laughs easily with them all.
Wenham’s been with the place through thick and thin. “When I came aboard Wayside was not in a good way,” he recalls. “The building nearly had a condemned notice put on it.”
It is a place, he says, that people can go to be listened to. “They’ll always find somebody there to listen – not to judge, not even to ‘help’, but just to listen to them. It’s special.”
We start walking down the hill deeper into Kings Cross. Wenham moves with the relaxed confidence of someone who still knows every corner of the neighbourhood. He seems happy to be back in his old stomping ground, which is good given he’s here for an extended stay. He’s now rehearsing a Sydney Theatre Company production, An Iliad, an adaptation of Homer’s Trojan war epic. Wenham plays a wandering poet, a witness to the conflict who has spent the millennia since telling the tale to anyone who will listen – in the vain hope that humanity might learn from it. “We are a stupid species. We really don’t learn,” he says.
Wenham is often approached because of his role as Faramir in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Photograph: Blake Sharp-Wiggins/The Guardian
Though An Iliad has its roots in ancient times, its references are tuned to the contemporary and the personal, explains Wenham. “It’s more about how we live our lives and little incidents and occasions that people can relate to; things that trigger anger or rage. We all think, when we look at wars around the world, that it wouldn’t be possible for us to be in that situation, or to be like that. But we all share exactly the same makeup; we all have the same trigger points for rage.”
Is that something he recognises in himself? “Without doubt,” Wenham says. “Yeah, I can be short-tempered, and I’m aware of it. I try to channel it into positive outcomes. Maybe it’s just me getting older. I think before I jump into situations. When I was younger, I used to just open my mouth and then think about it later.”
Wenham calls Brisbane home these days (“I’ve become a flag-waver for Brisbane”), but he’s a Marrickville boy at heart, the youngest of seven kids.
“We grew up in a little house on Illawarra Road, which – interestingly – I saw online the other day in an article about all the restaurants there. There were no restaurants when I grew up. But it was great. Ours was a very small house; I didn’t have a bedroom. I had a bed next to the dining room table.”
Wenham remembers a childhood powered largely by imagination. The back yard was only a few metres wide but he would invent entire worlds there, then disappear into the back lane with the neighbour’s kid to make up elaborate games. “I suppose that’s what acting is,” he says. “It’s just creating.”
The actor grew up in Marrickville, before it was known for its restaurant scene, and grew up in a house where he slept by the dining table. Photograph: Blake Sharp-Wiggins/The Guardian
He was a “naughty boy” at school, he adds. “I was a laughter junkie. I used to do impressions. I could do a very good Gough Whitlam.”
He was craving attention, he thinks. “As the last of seven kids, you’re always fighting for attention. One of the Brothers [he went to a Catholic school] told my parents that he couldn’t control the class because of me.”
It was suggested that young David might consider acting classes and learn some self-control. “My parents didn’t have much money at all, not for that kind of thing,” Wenham smiles. “But my birthday and Christmas presents were always tickets to the theatre. My dad used to go up to Sydney University when they had a book fair and buy all the play scripts for $1 or $2 each, and he took me to the Stables to see the Sunday matinee.”
Looking back, he realises how formative those trips were. “That theatre meant a lot to me,” he says. “It probably planted the seed.”
He says he’s delighted to be returning to the stage with An Iliad. “This is where I came from, this is what I do. Somebody once described me as a creature of the stage, and I’ll grab that, I want that.”
We’ve drifted back towards the corner of Victoria Street. Fat drops of rain are slapping the pavement. A clap of thunder rolls across the harbour. It seems like a good time to go our separate ways. Wenham pauses and looks back down the street towards the Cross, slings his backpack over his shoulder and jaywalks across the street like a true local.
An Iliad plays at the Sydney Theatre Company from 13 April to 14 June.