On Playing For Keeps he captains the Southern Jets, but for Jackson Gallagher, life is much different to kicking the footy. I recently caught up with the actor, as the popular television series gets set to return to Channel TEN.
In Playing For Keeps you play Connor Marrello, captain of the Southern Jets. What did you draw on to create the character?
Initially I was a little unsure about the character, because the football world is very foreign to me. I didn’t grow up playing football, and it’s far removed from my experiences. I was a bit anxious about that, so I spent time watching football captains, meeting players, looking at interviews and lots of football itself. I even joined a football club to try and get a feel for the culture. The more I worked on the character and show, I realised Connor’s a football player but also a young man at a point in his life, which I can relate too. It’s that transition where you start to grow from your twenties into your thirties, and the identity politics around that. So I sort of humanized it.
What’s in store for Connor this season?
Last season we saw his engagement and relationship coming to an end, and his affair became known to his fiancée and coach, so his world off field really imploded. This season we see him getting a bit older and headed towards the end of his career, so he starts wondering about life after footy. It’s a really interesting question, as I’ve spoken to a lot of guys who used to play the game. Footy can become your life. You live and breathe it and then in your late twenties or thirties the career comes to an end. Who the fuck are you outside of that? So we see Connor at a point where he’s starting to ask that question.
Tell us about how the cast trains together?
There’s a desire to really bring authenticity to our team dynamic, so we have a group of guys, employed as extras, but all part of our team. We all have training sessions with ex-AFL player Russell Robertson, who takes us through it all like an AFL team. It’s great and really bonds the guys, not just the lead actors but the extras too. They really feel a part of the team, which they are. It all helps to create an authentic feeling on set.
Jackson Gallagher as Connor Marrello in Playing For Keeps
You’ve had a few acting gigs including Home and Away, but you’ve also worked as a stills photographer for the ABC. Can you tell us about that?
Yes, there are two things I draw parallels with in storytelling. It’s either in front of the camera where I walk in the shoes of the character from the page, or it’s meeting people and capturing their story through still imagery. These two things have kind of grown side by side for me. I had a job on a film and the stills photographer working on set was someone whose work I was aware of, so when I met him I had a bit of a fan-boy moment! I acknowledged how I really appreciated a film he’d shot and we struck up a friendship. After I’d finished that film, I thought, “What’s my next job? “What the fuck do I do with my life? Then he gave me a call offering me a job and I started a stint working as a stills photographer. Also when I had finished school, I moved to New York and had a photography mentor there, and old master who’s now in his nineties. I studied acting on and off there as well.
“Mardi Gras has such a wild loving energy. There is nothing quite like it!”
You’ve also taken some great images at the Mardi Gras.
I went to Mardi Gras one year as part of the Reach Out float, and was shooting photographs and video capturing the parade. The parade is an incredible experience both to participate in and to shoot. It has such a wild loving energy. There is nothing quite like it! Reach Out is a fantastic organization that helps remove stigmas surrounding mental health. They provide invaluable support for young people going through tough times.
Jackson Gallagher as Southern Jets captain Connor Marrello in Playing For Keeps
On Please Like Me you played the gay character Kyle, and you’re also playing a gay character in the third season of Glitch!
Yes, I play a character called Raff. He’s a milliner and a very fluid kind of person. Sometimes he presents effeminate energies and sometimes more masculine, but he’s not really defined by boundaries. He has a romance with the character Charlie (Sean Keenan) and it’s a really beautiful love story. It’s a wonderful connection between two characters from different eras, but who have also experienced prejudice from those different eras in history.
How do you feel about the issue some have with straight actors playing a gay role?
I don’t think we are defined by our sexuality, so therefore I don’t think characters are defined by their sexuality. For me, I don’t want to play Jackson Gallagher, I want to play people who are experiencing the world in a way that I’m not experiencing it, which informs how I live my own life. I feel very fortunate that I get to play characters that are living a different life to me.
If you were gay, who would be your man crush?
Robert Mapplethorpe. He was strikingly beautiful and a creative force to be reckoned with!
Jackson Gallagher (Connor Marrello) with Jeremy Lindsay Taylor (Brian Rickards) in a scene from Playing For Keeps
What about your music diva?
I’d love to sit down and absorb some conversation with Patti Smith. It would be great to sit and listen to her talk about her life. She’s certainly lived. In fact, I love her writing more than her music. But I’ll also say Jake Shears from Scissor Sisters.
What song gets you onto the dance floor?
Shooting Stars by Bag Raiders!
You also filmed a new movie coming up called The Wheel. What was it like working on that?
Yeah, The Wheel is about the not to distant future of nanotechnology, and running experiments on prisoners to reshape them and make super humans. But again, it’s all about playing stuff that’s far removed from yourself, and the experiences and things you learn in the process. I got to work with a team of Japanese ninjas and a UFC fighter who trained me in six weeks to become a lean, mean fighting machine, and it was fucking hard! It broke me, and the character I play in the film gets broken, and rebuilt.
“I don’t think we are defined by our sexuality, therefore I don’t think characters are defined by their sexuality.”
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
Wake up and ask yourself if you’re happy, and if you’re not, what can you do to change that.
Have you ever had an onset wardrobe malfunction?
It wasn’t necessarily my malfunction, but I was in a movie, which was quite dark, and the scene was my mother and her boyfriend in the bathtub, and I walk in and proceed to kill them by electrocution. The woman playing my mother was wearing a merkin, which is a wig for your pubes, and after their moment of dying in the bath, the director yells cut, there’s an eerie silence and the merkin floats to the surface!
Are you briefs, fitted boxers or freeballs?
I try not to live too much of a routine life, so I mix it up!
Playing For Keeps returns 16 October on Network TEN
Interviewing Jackson Gallagher
