By: Fleur Bainger
Source: The Courier Mail
When Joel Jackson fused the laces of his mining boots around his wrist to form a crude Outback bracelet, he made a personal pledge.
“I said to myself, ‘You can’t take this off until you get a gig. Until you prove yourself, you can’t come back’.”
The boy from Karratha now has the bright lights and Hollywood red carpets in his sights. But not so long ago, he was floating between the North-West’s mine sites and landscaping jobs while strumming a guitar, waiting to see if anyone in the acting world would give him a chance. He didn’t have to wait long.
“The moment I got Deadline Gallipoli I pulled the bootlace off,” he says.
“It was like, that’s where you’ve come from, but you can just keep going.”
Scoring the lead role in the Sam Worthington telemovie is one hell of a way for Jackson to make his acting debut. And it’s not the only plum part he’s earned since graduating — though his second starring role couldn’t be more different. (More on that later.)
Deadline Gallipoli, which premieres Sunday night, shows the devastating Dardanelles campaign in a way we’ve never seen it: through the eyes of four war correspondents. Sticking closely to historical accounts, it reveals the fear and doubt beneath the feted Anzac larrikinism, the censorship of newsmen’s reports from the World War I front and their determination to get the truth out, helping to stop the pointless slaughter of the troops and leading to their eventual evacuation from Gallipoli.
Jackson plays Charles Bean, Australia’s official war correspondent. While Bean’s stories of the troops’ bad behaviour in Egypt initially sees him shunned, his bravery in the trenches while recording their stories wins him respect. Landing on the beach at Anzac Cove on April 25, 1915, Bean stays with them for the entire campaign.
“Once you’re in an actual trench … you really can’t get out. It’s like a maze”
Like most Australians, Jackson was familiar with the Anzac legend, but he says re-creating it so accurately was harrowing.
“When we were shooting scenes for Lone Pine or The Nek, where so many lives were lost, that was really tough,” he says, “because you just started to think about the enormity of it all.”
Sporting heavy woollen three-piece army suits and having to repeatedly shoot a vomit scene from different angles in fierce winds also proved challenging for the 23-year-old. Then there was the scary reality of the trenches.
“Once you’re in an actual trench … you really can’t get out. It’s like a maze,” he says.
The Anzac story is in Jackson’s blood. He was born in Albany, a place that became symbolic to some 30,000 troops because it was their final glimpse of Australia as they sailed to Egypt, 100 years ago.
As a little tacker, Jackson would attend the Dawn Service with his grandfather, John Rowe. Together, they’d leaf through Bean’s published war journals, which Rowe kept in his library.
“Pop’s an avid collector and researcher of the Anzacs, because his father was an Anzac, and his uncle,” Jackson says. “It’s a big deal, walking up Mount Clarence, watching Pop march with great-pop’s medals.”
When Jackson was 10, his family moved nearly 2000km north to Karratha after his father, Weston, was offered a job as the primary school principal.
During his North-West “adventure”, Jackson threw himself into football (later training with the WA Football League), soccer (going on to represent WA) and basketball.
He became head boy at Karratha Senior High School, joined a youth committee that encouraged kids to pursue tertiary education and, on graduating, won the town’s Walkington Award, a bursary to assist with future studies. The problem was, Jackson didn’t know what he wanted to do with himself.
A year-long Rotary exchange to Brazil at 17 didn’t get him any closer to a decision over his life vocation, but it did get him thinking about how he should lead his life. He returned home with a large circle and symbol tattooed under his left bicep.
“The symbol represents personal faith and conviction, truth, consciousness and power,” Jackson says, adding it has Hindu and Buddhist connections.
“I got it to remind myself that I am solely responsible for the life I lead. Through my thoughts, manifested into actions, I can control and shape my own life.”
His initial thought was to pursue a musical career. Having picked up a guitar at 14 he’d developed into quite the singer-songwriter, supporting big name acts such as Birds of Tokyo, Washington, Diesel and Ian Moss, who had been brought to Karratha by mining companies. So, after a year of working as a landscaper and labouring on local mine sites, he decided to travel to Perth to record an EP.
But then his mother, Lauren, happened to mention that acting schools were auditioning, and perhaps he should apply.
“I don’t know why (she suggested it),” he says.
“I really enjoyed watching films. When I was really young Mum worked in a cinema, and used to bring home paraphernalia from the movies.”
The fact that he’d never performed before — other than as a Red Dog extra — didn’t matter. The mining muso won highly sought-after spots at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) and the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts.
“I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing — I just went with instinct,” he says. “I just knew I was becoming someone else, using someone else’s words — just like singing a Dire Straits or Cat Stevens song.”
“You can see the imagery and hear the story behind it, and the subtext of what isn’t being said between the melody and words. That, to me, corresponded to written text.”
A month after being named Young Citizen of the Year on Australia Day 2011 in Karratha, he moved to Sydney to join NIDA.
“I went to NIDA and worked my butt off for three years,” he says. “But every year, as soon as school had finished, I’d be on a plane home and that afternoon I’d be working at Cape Lambert or out at Dampier Salt.”
Jackson would top up his money reserves during holiday breaks so he could focus solely on acting during the semester. After graduating from NIDA in 2013, he again returned to the metalwork factories and engineering workshops of Karratha.
Then, his first script arrived: a single scene in Deadline Gallipoli. He was required to read it to camera in order to be considered for a role.
“I got Mum to read it with me, and Dad to operate the camera,” says Jackson. “Dad didn’t have a tripod so we got an old crayfish pot, a stepladder, a couple of trays and heaps of tea towels to make it soft so the camera didn’t move. Dad didn’t even know he could record video on his camera, and Mum was asking if she should sound like an 18-year-old boy.”
Clearly, it’s not what goes on behind the scenes that matters. Three months later in Sydney, he was called into the casting room. He was screen-tested for at least five different characters over weeks of visits. One day, a producer pulled him aside.
“He said, ‘We all really like you, we just don’t know where to put you … Let’s try you out for Charles Bean’.”
The final audition was opposite Worthington, who plays war correspondent Phillip Schuler, and is an executive producer of the two-part series. Jackson gave it his all.
“I thought, ‘Here’s my chance. I’ve got to take this home. I can’t lose this opportunity’,” he recalls.
The pair hit it off, thanks in part to Worthington’s WA roots and similar background as a brickie and construction worker.
“I went up and chatted to him about our similarities, just took it back down to earth. We got along really well,” Jackson says.
Two weeks later, he had the leading role.
“It was a relief, but also a moment where I thought every sacrifice, every hard, extra hour at the desk paid off,” he says.
Worthington recognised his protégé’s talent.
“Joel was a great find,” he says. “I have been given many opportunities myself in this industry and Joel had just stepped out of drama school and I saw his passion and integrity and I wanted to help champion that.”
Over an 11-week shoot in South Australia, Jackson joined Worthington and a host of other acting greats. He bonded with Charles Dean, who loved that he’d never seen an episode of Game of Thrones; shot scenes in which his lean, 190cm frame towered over Bryan Brown; and had deep, cerebral conversations about acting with Hugh Dancy, who had also landed his first lead at 23 with the TV movie David Copperfield.
“It was wonderful to sit down between takes and talk to these guys,” Jackson says. “They were just as inquisitive about me as I was them. They were all going, ‘So, is this your first thing?’.”
One of his few laments is that his character never interacts with women, which meant he didn’t share any scenes with female stars Rachel Griffiths, Anna Torv or Jessica de Gouw. “Bean never talked to one woman,” he says.
Jackson’s interpretation of Bean presents the writer as a socially uncomfortable, verbally awkward and physically stiff man. He walks with a robotic gait, is painfully serious though honourably earnest, and intellectual to the point of being unable to connect with others.
In researching Bean, the actor says he saw a dedicated, ambitious man who was determined to be recognised for his work, fiercely intent on getting a front-page story.
“So come hell or high water, friendships or no friendships, he was going to make it. He was very competitive. He was blindsided,” Jackson says. “Then he is pushed to move outside the peripheries and see the devastation, see the men dying for no reason, see the lack of leadership, see these horrible things and recognise that if he found his passion, the Diggers would accept him.”
Jackson says he shares Bean’s defining traits of drive and dedication, but his study of the late journalist, who went on to help create the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, has also inspired him to become more selfless.
“Bean spent his whole life remembering, and keeping the memory and the sacrifice of the Anzacs (alive). That diligence to give more of yourself to the memory of someone who gave everything — we’ve all got bigger callings than ourselves in life,” he says.
Jackson also has a desire to make a difference. He names actor and political activist Sean Penn as one of his idols, and is keen to follow the vocal American’s lead.
“If I build enough of a profile I can be an ambassador,” he says. “It’s important that we don’t overstep our mark, but we have a voice and people do listen to us. We have the potential to be more than a celebrity — we can use it for the greater good.”
For now, Jackson wants to tell important stories through his acting, and while his next major role might appear more frivolous than fundamental, it is anything but.
The boy from Karratha will take on the flamboyant boy from Oz, Peter Allen. Departing from the Hugh Jackman showman portrayal, Jackson says the new Channel 7 biopic delves into Allen’s dark and devastating upbringing.
“His dad shot himself when he was 14 years old, then he had to go and help his mum clean the blood and brains off the wall,” he says. “On the same day as he sat his final exam, he went and buried his father in the afternoon.”
Jackson plays the celebrated Australian performer between the ages of 17 and 48, resulting in “heaps of make-up, heaps of hair”. He taught himself to tap-dance and tried to learn piano as part of the role.
“I danced in a shed in Sydney for an hour and a half each day, teaching myself the basics,” he says.
He’s supported on screen by industry legends Rebecca Gibney and Sigrid Thornton.
Filming for Peter Allen: Not the Boy Next Door finished in mid-March and while Jackson has several irons in the fire, he remains tight-lipped about where he might be headed next. That said, Worthington’s already put in a good word to his international contacts and Jackson has found a Los Angeles-based agency to represent him in the US.
Relocating there is a definite possibility, especially if he’s lured by “great scripts with intriguing characters”, he says.
One thing’s for sure, there’ll be no returning to the mines: Jackson has shed the steel-capped boots and high-vis clobber for good.