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My first thought when I was leaving school was to not have a boring life. I wanted to find a way to express myself. My first job out of school, my first official job, was working for an insurance company, Commercial Union Insurance, inputting the details of policies—not off to a great start. It's funny, though, because I learned a lot in my short time there. In the summer before, I'd worked as a nightclub DJ, but I got fired because I was too nervous to talk on the microphone.

My parents, at a certain point in time, were caterers on film sets, and that's how I got my first job. I did an acting job when I was six and another when I was eight, but then I kind of forgot about it for a while. Later, I went on a school tour of a TV studio, where a show called The Young Doctors was being made. There was a bit-part actor, a guy called Roy Harris Jones, who had been on a couple of shows my parents had worked on. I liked him a lot and hadn't seen him for years, but there he was on that show. While the other kids were on their tour, he asked if I was there for an audition. I said no, as I hadn't done anything like that for ages. He then said, "Come on, let's go down the corridor and meet the casting director." So, I split away from the tour while the other kids continued, and I went down to meet the casting director. She had a minute, so she sat me down and talked to me. Two weeks later, I was back in that building, shooting a character on the TV show.

Coming out of school, I really thought I was going to go into music—that was my thing. If I was going to pursue anything, it would be music, but I was willing to accept any job that allowed me to entertain people.

The bottom line is, I love my job. I love working on films. Every single day that I'm walking towards the camera, I have a plan, and I know what I'm about to do.

When you know the job and how hard it is, you really have to have your reasons for being there. I'll read scripts and generally do the one that gets under my skin. It can have a great pedigree, a wonderful director, and a great cast, but if I read it and don't get personally attached, I just don't do it.

When it gets hard and difficult, it doesn't worry me because I chose to be here.

For me, walking out onto a rock-and-roll stage with a guitar in hand, where I don't know exactly what's going to happen that night because every audience takes things in a different direction, that's my reset.

Back in the day, everything was about just getting the shot. In 1992, I went to Los Angeles for the first time, but I'd already made a bunch of films in Australia and had been to the Cannes Film Festival. My first time traveling outside of Australia and New Zealand was in 1991. I was about 27 at the time. The year after, I went to LA and got an agent. I'd won several awards in Australia, and my films had been shown at different film festivals, so there was awareness of what I was doing in the industry. I got a phone call to meet Bernardo Bertolucci, the Italian director who won the Oscar for The Last Emperor—fantastic director. He also did Last Tango in Paris and a bunch of other films. I was really excited, thinking, "Wow, fantastic!" I got to Bernardo's house, and he's watching a football game—Italy versus Brazil. He's got a bunch of people over to watch the game. I thought we were having a meeting, but Italy didn't do very well; they got beaten by Brazil. I never had a conversation with Bernardo because, after the game, he just went off to his room or something to have a cry, I'm not sure. But I met his wife, whose name was Clare Peploe. She was a film director, and she said, "I encouraged Bernardo to invite you to the house because I know he wants to talk to you about something, but I want to talk to you as well." She gave me a script called “Miss Shumway Waves a Wand.” I was very much in the independent film world at the time, so that sounded like a good title for an independent film. I read it and liked the character, so I responded to it. Eventually, I ended up doing it, and Bridget Fonda was signed on as the female lead. That was cool; she was pretty happening at the time. I have a funny thing that goes on with my brain. If I'm reading something and there's a difficult moment, my brain just goes, "Hm, to be dealt with later. I'll worry about that when I have to." There was a scene where a spider would crawl into the mouth of the character I was playing. I was thinking, "I wonder how they're going to do that—CGI or something." Anyway, off we go on this adventure, shooting in Guatemala and Mexico. It's an extremely disorganized shoot. Nothing's right. At one point, for seven days, we lived on refried beans and rice in Guatemala because they hadn't made any arrangements with a catering company. That was the only thing they could get easily, so it was breakfast, lunch, and dinner—refried beans and rice. At the end of that week, one of the guys on the film crew found a cafe that sold some form of grilled meat, and we all went there, in the middle of this rainforest, and ate this meat. We realized later on it was more than likely we were eating the monkeys that were running around the trees because everybody got really sick. Really sick. Anyway, we eventually got back to Los Angeles, and we had a couple of weeks of shooting in LA. We went out to a place called Lancaster, I think it was, where there's an old film studio. I see on the call sheet that it's the spider scene. Cool. As I arrived at the studio, a producer comes out to meet me and says, "Russell, everything good?" I said, "Yeah, of course, we're shooting the spider scene today." He goes, "Yes, it's going to be great. Everything fine?" I said, "Yeah, cool, but how are we going to do this? Is this going to be CGI or whatever?" "Oh no, no, the tarantula man is here." "The fuck what? “The tarantula man's here? He showed a variety of creatures to the director, and she chose the largest. It's going to be a great day. Anyway, good luck with it.”

The quiet contemplation that really fills you up for the thing you're about to do, and when you're coming straight off one film set pretty much onto another—I think I had a gap of about two or three weeks—it's not quite enough.

When I was getting a little bit of success, I could see things coming along, and I had a choice. I only had enough money to either buy a small apartment in the city or some land. My mom and dad weren't in a great place, and I hadn't spent much time with them in the previous decade because I'd been out trying to establish who I was, and I didn't really go home much. So instead of buying an apartment in the city, I decided to buy 100 acres in the bush, and my mom and dad could live there.

You tell stories like that to farmers, and they think you're an absolute idiot. I'm not really a farmer, but I got land.

Life's too short for the negatives, man. It's too short to have grudges or negative opinions. Just let all that go, you know what I mean? But in reality, he would have an opinion, but the public part of that was to just be positive.

In Cinderella Man, there's a moment towards the end of the movie where Braddock won the World Championship. I'm standing in the ring, walking towards my corner, and this little bald man walks towards me. I start laughing, bend forward, and kiss him on his head because he was walking towards me in the ring, saying, "Number 16, baby, number 16!" That's what he called me for the rest of his life. Whenever I saw him, he would introduce me to people as, "This is my friend Russell, number 16."

Did you think about having a fight? Oh, we had a few real ones. Yeah, like in the gym, there are real ones in the movie, mate. Really. You get to a certain point—5,500 or 6,000 choreographed moves—and you get to a certain point where you ask, "How do you accelerate this? How do you change the rhythm?" The fight with Troy, which I think is the last fight before the championship, that's 100% the two of us in the ring, beating the piss out of each other.

When you're playing somebody that's real, you have to respect them. You've got to put that effort in to honor them.

The moment I'm in the tunnel, I'm holding my breath. I'm like, "Get me the fuck out of here. Okay, we're on the other side." I don't like it. I'd rather be in a helicopter than in that fucking tunnel.

The relief when that movie was over was huge because you do tie yourself in knots a little bit when you're playing a character like that.

The thing about A Beautiful Mind is it has a device. The film begins, and you believe everything that's unfolding in front of you, and then there's that click when you realize, "Hold on a second, have I been watching him, or am I inside his head?"

It's a good gig, being able to work with super smart people. It's incredible—super creative people.

I was talking to my mom—my father had just recently passed away—and I said, "Why don't you come with us?" Initially, she said that because she'd only ever been to Rome with my dad, she didn't want to come because she thought it would just make her sad, you know, because that city connected her to him. I said to her, "Mom, listen to what you're saying. This is a place that connects you to my father. You have to come." So she came along, and we were doing all the normal family stuff together—touristy stuff like the Spanish Steps, Fontana di Trevi. I took the kids to see the old office at the Colosseum—the old office, just normal family stuff. Then I got this call from a guy at the Vatican, and this is all based on that movie, right? "Heard you're in town with your family, would you like to come and walk through the Vatican Museum and the Sistine Chapel by yourselves, without any tourists?" Wow. Now, I've done the tourist thing—thousands of new special friends and you in the Sistine Chapel in natural light. I've done that. So the idea that we could walk in there by ourselves? Absolutely. So I took my mom, and because it was such a big walk, she's in a wheelchair. So I'm pushing her around, and at every corner, we get to something of immense beauty. I can see her remembering when she was there with my dad and what he said or a friendship he made or whatever. You know, he was a bit of a chatty fellow, my old man. He used to make friends very easily. So we went through that, and I could see it affecting her. Then they took us into the Sistine Chapel. It's unbelievable, man. I'll do it exactly the way I do it on stage for you, man, because it's a funny moment. This guy comes up and says, "Russell, for you today, I will turn on the lights of the Pope." I said, "Sorry, what?" He goes, "Well, the Pope likes to come to the chapel to meditate. He likes to see all the beautiful colors, so we put in some lights." And he turns on these lights. That ceiling is amazing in natural light. When it's got like 16 spotlights on it, man, you can see the real color—the light blue of the sky, the reds. With that much light on it, you can almost feel like you can see the paint strokes. So you're there under Michelangelo's genius in the light, and I said to the guy, "That was amazing. Why did you do that?" And he goes, "Russell, please, massimo, you are the eighth king of Rome."

I have this sort of thing with a lot of art—how do you go about looking at a rock, grabbing a chisel and a hammer, and getting to that? What the hell?

It has been an incredible relationship I've had with that country [Italy], just based on a film.

A guy called Bruce, who had been my brother's biology teacher in high school, but who had become a friend of one of my uncles, came to see the show and came backstage. At that point, he was the technical director for the National Institute of Dramatic Art. He said, "So what's your plan?" I said, "Well, I've got the money in the bank. I'm auditioning in October or whatever it was." And he goes, "What? You're going to go to drama school?" I said, "Yeah, you know, I want to." He goes, "I walked into this theater tonight, and as I was walking in, there's a banner that says the name of the show. Above the name of the show is your name. It's too late for you to go to drama school. You already do what you're supposed to learn at drama school. The only thing you'll pick up is bad habits." So in one conversation, this dream I'd harbored for about four or five years just disappeared. But it was absolutely the right advice for me to receive at that time. It would have probably been a big waste of my time to go to drama school.

Every major mathematician, every major scientist—they all smoke. There is something in that nicotine opening neural pathways that they might not have access to normally.

When you haven't had a cigarette for a while, and you get a craving, that's all you have to deal with at that moment. It's not like other things that might get deeper, harder, and more difficult. It's only ever going to be that craving, so you just have to walk past it.

The only way we can have a gear change is if we just do it for real.

It's funny because all of that training comes into play later in my life. I always say to people it's actually my musical theater background and dance routines that make my fight sequences so sharp. It's like working with a rhythm. When you're working with a camera and it's trying to catch something, if you have that rhythm, you can display the stuff you want the camera to capture and the audience to see.

What I'm trying to do is make the adjustments without relying on Olympic-level physical preparation. I'm just trying to bring it down purely through diet. The fact that I've been losing weight while on a tour like this, where you don't have consistency in exercise or the food available to you—2:00 in the morning after you finish the gig is pretty hairy—is amazing. I've never been on a tour with a band in my life and lost weight. You go on tour, you gain weight; that's what happens. So it's pretty—I'm really looking forward to being back on the farm where I can be consistent and add a little consistent exercise to it.

When I got to a point with my Achilles that was affecting everything I was doing, they set me up. I did full blood injections, platelet-rich injections, all that stuff. Then you're banging yourself with painkillers because it's such a heavy hit when you do that sort of thing, particularly with the Achilles. Moon boot and all that, you know. It just wasn't working, man. I was doing the rehab exercises and everything, and I could feel that the rehab exercises were re-damaging the area—they weren't making it better. So I said to the guy I was working with, "I got to stop because every time I see you, I limp the next day." But if I don't do the exercises, after a certain amount of time, the limp gets less. So I had to come up with some other way of doing it. He said I was crazy at the time. Then I started going out with a girl who loves playing tennis. I used to like playing tennis when I was younger. So cool, let's play tennis. Our romance is based on the fact that the first time I played tennis, I couldn't beat her. "Okay, I'll keep you around and play you enough times till I work out how to grind you into the dirt, young lady." But here's the thing with tennis: it's short bursts of running. It's not constant like 10ks on a treadmill or out on the road. It's just short bursts of running, and then you've got a minute to gather yourself together—you have a break between games, and then another burst of running. I seem to have rehabbed my Achilles by playing tennis. Wow, that would be the last thing I would suggest.

My eldest son went to university to do an arts degree but didn't find it challenging. Without any discussion, he flipped his degree and is now doing Latin and ancient Greek. Whoa. I'm like, that's a big change, and he's like, "Well, I just worked out how to make the education system work for me." I'm like, "Wow, he's so impressive." I remember the first time he said a word, and now he has the intellectual capacity to realize that this is a moment in his life to grab what he can in terms of his education. He's looked at Latin and Greek and thought, "If I can nail Latin and Greek, every language is available to me." So, it's just—you know, it's impressive to sit back and be amazed by your kids at that level.

I remember being extremely idealistic in my teen years and very politically focused, and then I just got to a point where I realized everyone's a bullshit artist. There wasn't one of those guys I could really say I'd follow into battle, so I stopped worrying about politics.

Politics is the art of the possible, so it's not really connected to anything. It's like, "What can we get away with? What can we tell you we're going to do and then never do?"

There are probably hundreds of potentially incredible presidents in this country, but they're too smart to walk that way.

We've got a situation in Australia where politicians are suing people for what they say is a loss of their reputation because someone might have commented on social media or something and said, "X person is X." Now, certain politicians have worked out, "Oh, I can make money out of this." So they're using their privileged position to destroy somebody's life who might have called them a name on social media.

I try not to see us at our worst. There's always something I can find that gives me a little hope with people. But it's funny because, to me, it felt like the beginning of the future. We were now connected, and information exchange was open. I thought this was going to lead to great changes, but the changes haven't been so great.

I'm a little worried about America in the next little while. I haven't been here for five years, man. In 2019, I finished "Loudest Voice" and went home, and then COVID hit. I had an incredible experience where I said to my boys, "You're cool in the city with your mom, but I might go up to the bush and be with my parents because they're old and everything's going to change for them." I ended up—I've owned my place in the bush since '96, but 2020 was the first time I'd seen all four seasons of the same year at the farm. Then my dad died in March 2021. Often, you talk to people, and they say, "I wish I had one more dinner, one more hug, one more conversation." When I looked at it, because it was a surprise when he died—I wasn't expecting it; he was 85, but he seemed to be quite healthy—in reality, I got a whole year of having dinner pretty much every night with my mom and dad, asking him a million questions. Not because I thought he was about to pass away, but just because we had the time together. I took him on a few adventures. I was digging a huge dam on my place to try and make it drought-proof, so I now have a 70-megaliter lake in the middle of my place, which gives me enough water to feed the cattle for seven years, something like that. One day, I took him out to show him what was basically a hole in the ground at the time, about a football-field-sized hole in the ground. I took him out there in a buggy, and the clouds came over, and it started pissing down with rain. So I've got an 83-year-old man who doesn't move too fast, and I've got to put him back in the buggy and drive. By the time we got halfway back to the house, it was absolutely torrential rain. We were getting covered, and I was so worried, thinking, "Oh my God, I'm going to make him sick." I got him back to the house, and I said, "I'm so sorry about that." He said, "Are you kidding? That's the most fun I've had in years." These people, referring to my mother and the others there to help him out, he said, "These people don't let me do anything." So we just had little moments like that where we got to share some stuff.

Here's the thing with America—you've got to remember that it is the beacon of freedom for everybody in the world. It's a huge responsibility. If people are looking for something to change in their life, something positive, the vast majority will look towards America and say, "Well, that's the beacon. I want to live like that, where people can say what's on their mind, and people can have differing opinions. People can be of all different races, religions, or whatever, and still be in the same community." It's so important that America remains healthy into the future for everyone, not just for Americans.

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