Hi I’m Simon Miraudo and today I’m talking to the star of Holding the Man, Ryan Corr.
Hi.
Ryan, thanks for joining us.
Thanks for having me.
Tell me, first of all, how did you get introduced to Holding the Man?
Well, I was at the same drama school as Tim actually ended up in, and when I was there in first year
Holding the Man, the play, was going on at Griffin Theatre Company.
But the effect of the book and realising how far it’s reach was and how much it meant to so many people,
was really felt then.
It was being talked about in my drama school. The teachers were using it as an example of
really great writing and as a window into talking about this time in Australian history,
and world history really, when AIDS and HIV came down and there really wasn’t anything
we could do about it.
It was a very different case to what it is now.
So that was my first introduction to the story. Jump seven years later, when Neil Armfield
was making the film, and Tommy Murphy who’d written the play was also writing the screenplay,
I was old enough to play Tim then, and because I knew the importance of the story
I sort of said to my agent, “I’d really like to go and get this. It falls in line with what I believe in.”
So that’s when I got my hands on the book. Before the first audition and read it back
to front and cried my eyes out.
When we were going through he film, that was of course what I could go back to all the time and draw from.
If I wanted to know what was inside Tim’s head, it was sort of there on paper.
Well, there’s a few difficulties with this part or I can imagine for an actor approaching it.
First of all, it’s a real person; it’s a real story. He has a family, he has a legacy
that you have to kind of honour.
It’s also a beloved character from a beloved book. So you have that fanbase that you need
to respect as well.
And you’re also playing him from the age of sixteen to when he’s a full grown man.
So, there are a lot of obstacles for a performer.
Can you talk a bit about how you kind of approach those and if you had any hesitation once you
finally secured this role?
It was difficult not to feel the pressure, just because this book meant so much to so many people.
And you’re exactly right, the responsibility became different
to any other film I’d done.
It was really a case of “if the family gave us their blessing” or at the end, we came
some way to represent the memory of who these boys were. That was first and foremost.
That was paramount. Once we’d done that, and we eventually got the family’s blessing
and Nick and Anna and Tim’s mother came up and said, “Thank you, you found Tim’s essence.”
And Craig, came so amazing at finding John’s. So that was sort of like hands
off from there, which is kind of unique, you know? It often depends what happens in box office or how
commercially successful the film is. It was a different set of priorities for this film.
Hurry please, I’ve got dinner on.
Tell your friends not to call at dinner time.
I can call back.
Why? Your dinner.
No, it’s okay. We’re having casserole.
Chops. We just had chops and mash potato.
You describe them as boys, and at the start of the film and the book, they are absolutely that.
They are teenagers. They’re 16 years old.
Now, you’re a NIDA graduate as was Tim, and in the film, we see you doing some fairly
interesting type of acting method classes. I’m curious how you take those skills and how you
transform into a 16 year old. You’re not going back too far, only about a decade.
What do you do to act 16? I’m sure the wigs helped, but what else?
Right, well first of all, you fit a school uniform very, very differently.
There were kids, we could justify, there were kids when I was 17 that were fully grown men then.
Having a bit of stubble or looking a bit more adult I guess was okay. But for me it was a thought process.
I thought at 17 I was on top of it. I knew exactly who I was. The reality was I was still finding out.
The wigs helped a lot. Often we’d be shooting three decades in a day.
We’d know where we were by the wigs. So we’d put the long one
on and go, “Okay, we’re seventeen again.”
You’ve also got Geoffrey Rush, Anthony LaPaglia, Guy Pearce, Kerry Fox, all these great…
Some small fry actors.
Some kids that are really just looking for that break.
But I was kind of curious, what kind of acting lessons do you learn when you’re working
with these legends. People who’ve had 20, 30 years more in the industry.
Yeah, all different. All different. It was very important we learnt from all of them
because we worked with them at different stages of the film.
But overwhelmingly, that their process was very similar to us.
Having Geoffrey Rush come up to us at the start of a scene and sort of: “What do you
think about… I was thinking about doing this, for this scene.”
I’m like, “You’re actually asking me?”
But how welcoming and how warm that is, and it’s all about the work and creating these scenes
as real and as detailed and buoyant as possible. And knowing that these actors
– these great actors – who we’d idolised and seen coming up in our careers, that their
process was the same as ours and that it’s all aimed to get the best material possible.
It’s taken two decades for Holding the Man to get made. Why so long? And why now?
I think it’s amazing that it’s happened now. Kylie Dufresne, who’s the producer,
sat down with me at the start of it and said, this story had its own momentum.
Tommy’s had the script for about 10 years. Look, I think for numerous amounts of reasons.
In this culture and in this country, it may not have been ready to be made.
But Kylie talked about it having its own momentum; telling them when it wanted to be made.
The fact that we’ve now landed completely coincidentally and serendipitously in a place that there’s
a national debate about marriage equality is not lost on us, it’s kind of wonderful.
But that’s almost a bonus.
Stop it. Keep going.
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