DOG-TIRED from digging trenches all day, Paul Mercurio walked into his Melbourne home last year and found a fax from Fox in Los Angeles. Fox was putting together a three-pack DVD of Baz Luhrmann's "red curtain" movies -- Strictly Ballroom, Romeo+Juliet and Moulin Rouge -- and as a bonus wanted to include a DVD with behind-the-scenes footage from the making of the three movies.
At the 11th hour someone had realised that Mercurio's Strictly Ballroom contract required him to authorise the use of any images of him. Could he sign the release form and send it back please?
The 40-year-old pondered the 10 years since his lead role in Strictly Ballroom catapulted him to international fame. All the promotional work he had done, all the times he had agreed to his image being used free of charge to sell this product or for that charity event. He also pondered his dire financial situation, wondering how, as primary breadwinner with $200 left in the bank, he was going to feed his wife and three daughters.
"I was digging ditches at the time and I said: `Listen guys, no,"' Mercurio recalls. "`If you're supposed to negotiate with me, then I would like a fee. You're doing this to sell your DVD, it's a business proposition for you, how about paying me for [it]?"'
Fox, he says, replied that Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor had agreed without asking for a fee. He will not say how much he asked for other than that it was a significant amount. Presumably it was not commercially viable for Fox. Mercurio thought of the flat fee he got for performing in Strictly Ballroom, his first acting gig after a successful career in dance, then of the likelihood that Kidman and McGregor would be on a percentage of gross takings for Moulin Rouge. "I said: `They're on points, I'm not. If you want to use me, you have to negotiate with me,"' he says. "They said, well we're not going to pay you a fee ... So, to cut a long story short, instead of paying me a fee they [blurred] my image on the DVD."
Precocious antics or the principled stand of an actor sick of being on the dud side of the negotiating table? Perhaps a bit of both. But this incident provides a poignant insight into the life of a man who has defied the cliche of actors working shit jobs, then making it big. Mercurio made it big, then got the shit jobs.
Not straight away, mind you. When Strictly Ballroom burst on to the big screen in a hail of sequins, bolero jackets and big hairdos, it made stars out of Mercurio, his co-star Tara Morice and a little-known director called Baz Luhrmann. For nearly a year after its launch at the 1992 Cannes film festival, the trio travelled the world promoting what was to become the first in a string of quirky Australian hit movies including Muriel's Wedding and Priscilla Queen of the Desert. Mercurio was nominated for an AFI gong and in 1993 won the Mo award for dance performer of the year.
Hollywood came knocking and he answered the call, starring in a blockbuster by Pretty Woman director Garry Marshall. With Mercurio, Dan Aykroyd, Rosie O'Donnell and Dana Delany in the line-up, Exit to Eden was a sure-fire hit. Except it wasn't. Mercurio can still recall The Australian's film critic David Stratton, who asked plaintively on The Movie Show: "Why, why, why, Paul?"
That 1993 flop was followed by a string of Hollywood movies you've probably never heard of -- Back of Beyond, Red Ribbon Blues, The Dark Planet and The First 9 1/2 Weeks -- and parts in some Australian ones you might have: Cosi, Welcome to Woop Woop, Kick and Sydney: Story of a City.
In the six years after Strictly Ballroom, Mercurio spent roughly half his time in the US making movies and half in Australia. He started his own dance company, Australian Choreographic Ensemble, which ran for a few years, subsidised in part by his film earnings, but died in the mid-1990s after government funding was cut.
By 1999 he faced a crucial choice: to sell the Sydney beachside home bought with his Strictly Ballroom proceeds and move the family to LA for a serious crack at international fame and fortune, or stay based in Australia and try to make it work from here. Mercurio chose the latter.
"I went to LA and my wife flew over, we had a good look," he says. "It was a risk because I would have had to sell my house and live on that money in America for a year and hope things worked out. If they didn't, we'd have been coming back to Australia with nothing. I wasn't prepared to take that risk or put my family through it."
So Mercurio remained here, selling the house anyway and moving the family to Mittagong in regional NSW. The former star dancer and choreographer with Graeme Murphy's Sydney Dance Company had, by then, had a gutful of show-biz falsity. "I shied away from all that licking-bums type of stuff," he says. "I was never very good at it in Sydney. I could work the room all right, but I just got tired of it. So I guess in a way I hid away a bit."
It was the start of a difficult few years for Mercurio. Acting gigs were harder to come by in Australia than they'd been in the US; just getting through the casting agent's door and into an audition was nigh impossible. He got the odd spot on TV dramas such as Water Rats, Medivac, Blue Heelers and All Saints, and a presenter's role on the Nine Network's 2002 health show body+soul. But the Next Big Break was elusive.
"It was that whole thing of there not being work for a dancer in Australian TV, which frustrated the crap out of me because I'm an actor -- I can dance if you want me to, but don't stick me in the dancer box," he says. "The other side of it was because there was no work, whatever money I had was spent keeping our heads above water, which meant I couldn't get back to LA for auditions there. I haven't been back to LA on the audition circuit for three to four years." A casting agent, who does not want to be named, concedes Mercurio, to a certain extent, has been put in the dancer's box, but says his limited acting experience had as much to do with [his lack of roles] as anything. Put bluntly, the agent says, he wasn't the best actor in the world nor did he have the broadest range. And he was not alone in finding it hard to break through.
"I have nothing against him but once guys get beyond their mid-30s the roles shrink dramatically," the agent says. "All the stories are young stories. Most of the roles on TV are doctors, cops or lawyers and I don't see him really playing any of those. The characters I see him playing in many ways relate back to what he does best, which is dance. It's not about him being good or bad, it's just that it's a hugely competitive world. For every role there are 30 actors who could play the part."
Between acting jobs, Mercurio started labouring, did some dance teaching and had a stint cooking in a local Mittagong restaurant. More recently his family moved to Melbourne, where he took a job selling second-hand computers. A humbling experience for any actor, let alone one who keeps getting recognised.
"People will come up to me and go: `God, you look like Paul Mercurio', and they don't think it's me because they think I'm in some mansion somewhere making movies," he says. "You go to an opening, you get out of the limousine and walk up the red carpet and you're in a nice suit, and people go `Wow, he must be rich and famous.' That's the magic part of the movie stuff. The reality is, I was probably up at seven the next day digging a ditch for a plumber mate. I would much prefer to have been up at seven doing my own TV show or doing a movie but there [are] a lot of actors in Australia and not a lot of work."
Robert O'Neill, co-owner of NotebooksRUs in Melbourne's St Kilda where Mercurio worked earlier this year, takes his hat off to his former employee. "People recognised him. You'd see them walking in and whispering to each other ... The ones who were more excited to see him were the ones who would part with their dollars more often. [But] I don't think he liked trading on it. He probably did find it embarrassing, but he certainly didn't show that to me or to anyone else."
Meanwhile Mercurio's personal life was thrown into turmoil during this period with the suicide of his younger brother Michael. Then, last year, his friend and co-star in the movie Kick, Bangarra Dance Theatre's Russell Page, killed himself. Former Australian Ballet dancer Andrea Mercurio says the deaths affected her husband deeply: "It's a pocket of sadness he carries around with him." She credits his "spiritual optimism" and the family unit as the things that have got him through the past few years.
It's an observation with which his best mate, AB principal dancer Stephen Heathcote, agrees. "The amazing thing about Paul is he sticks with it, he has that faith that no matter how low he gets, that things will get better," Heathcote says. So there is no bitterness? "Paul has suffered great disappointment and events over the [past] few years [that] have caused profound sadness, but the words bitterness and Paul Mercurio do not go together," he says. "He is enormously aware of how much damage [that] would create."
One of the ways Mercurio deals with these events is by writing about them on the website www. paulmercurio.net, set up years ago by a fan. "I put some poems up there that I wrote," he says. "One lady wrote back and thanked me for it because she had lost someone to suicide and was struggling with why, and said my poem helped her come to terms with it and understand it. I'm so proud and humbled and glad I could touch people in that way and help them." Mercurio's is, in many ways, the story of every actor who rightly or wrongly becomes defined as hot or not by the choices they make. Capitalising on success such as Strictly Ballroom must happen very quickly, yet so much of it comes down to chance and luck. Starring in Marshall's next film after Pretty Woman would have seemed a pretty good choice on paper, yet it turned out not to be.
Mercurio is philosophical about whether he has made good or bad choices in the past decade. "No regrets. Whoever it was who said I'd rather die with disappointment than regret, I've done well with that," he laughs. "There are certainly things I'm disappointed about but there's no point in saying: `I wonder.' You make a choice based on the information at hand and how you feel about it at the time."
Like many actors, however, he can point to the one that got away: a role in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, which he rejected because he didn't want to reinforce the stereotype that all male dancers are gay. He admits that, flush with choice and being told he was destined for great things, he knocked back movies that perhaps he should have taken.
"I was offered this axe-murderer role in New Zealand. I thought: "Why do I want to promote that sort of thing?" Films are great but I think we do have a moral obligation to be careful about what we are putting out there," he says.
"I wonder if I have changed? I don't know because I'm now in a different position. I don't question the moral stance ... but I question whether [knocking back those films] was a smart career move ultimately. If someone came to me now and said we want you to play an axe-murderer, I really don't know what I'd do."
Luckily for Mercurio, someone came to ask him to play a much gentler role, that of Ethan in The Full Monty, the stage musical based on the 1997 hit film, which opens in Melbourne on New Year's Eve.
That someone was David Atkins, Sydney Olympic ceremonies and musicals whiz and Monty producer. Mercurio's personality and sense of humour fit nicely with the role, Atkins says, and he could dance and act (and, it turns out, sing). He believes Mercurio's hard years have helped him empathise with a character who turns to stripping after being retrenched -- and have also helped make him a better actor.
"Paul, in many ways, played himself in Strictly Ballroom and prior to that had a lot of success with dance," Atkins says. "He had to learn how to act in front of everyone, which is a hard thing to do. The good thing is he did. I've seen a couple of things where I've been taken aback by how good an actor he's become. In some ways you have to look at it fatalistically." It is tempting to say Monty represents a turning point in Mercurio's fortunes, but the last thing he wants is to be hexed by the proclamation that his Next Big Break has landed.
"I love the idea that it could be my next big break but do you know how many times I've heard that?" he laughs. "I have to do things because they make me feel good and make me feel like I'm making a difference in the world. If making a difference to my career is a by-product of that, then that's terrific, but it's not why I'm doing it."
Still, at the risk of jinxing him, things do appear to be looking up. Mercurio has spent the past five months working in Canada as movement consultant on Alex Proyas's new film I Robot, starring Will Smith. He is full of plans to start a beer cafe in Melbourne and, if its Broadway and West End success is any indication, Monty will have a good three-month run in Melbourne before transferring to Sydney for an equally long stint.
He might not want to say it out loud but Mercurio can sense the change. "I am happy. I can feel it in my bones, I can feel it in the spring in my step, I can feel it in my more confident approach to each day and to life in general," he wrote on his website last month.
"It's weird because over the [past] few years I have meditated, read and written in attempts to purge my unhappiness ... It was tough and I don't think I actually succeeded in the way I wanted.
"I don't know why I feel surprised at how easy it feels to be happy ... [it] feels like I have just had a wonderful full body massage and all my anxiety has been rubbed away never to return.
"It also feels like it is going to last for a while."
At the 11th hour someone had realised that Mercurio's Strictly Ballroom contract required him to authorise the use of any images of him. Could he sign the release form and send it back please?
The 40-year-old pondered the 10 years since his lead role in Strictly Ballroom catapulted him to international fame. All the promotional work he had done, all the times he had agreed to his image being used free of charge to sell this product or for that charity event. He also pondered his dire financial situation, wondering how, as primary breadwinner with $200 left in the bank, he was going to feed his wife and three daughters.
"I was digging ditches at the time and I said: `Listen guys, no,"' Mercurio recalls. "`If you're supposed to negotiate with me, then I would like a fee. You're doing this to sell your DVD, it's a business proposition for you, how about paying me for [it]?"'
Fox, he says, replied that Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor had agreed without asking for a fee. He will not say how much he asked for other than that it was a significant amount. Presumably it was not commercially viable for Fox. Mercurio thought of the flat fee he got for performing in Strictly Ballroom, his first acting gig after a successful career in dance, then of the likelihood that Kidman and McGregor would be on a percentage of gross takings for Moulin Rouge. "I said: `They're on points, I'm not. If you want to use me, you have to negotiate with me,"' he says. "They said, well we're not going to pay you a fee ... So, to cut a long story short, instead of paying me a fee they [blurred] my image on the DVD."
Precocious antics or the principled stand of an actor sick of being on the dud side of the negotiating table? Perhaps a bit of both. But this incident provides a poignant insight into the life of a man who has defied the cliche of actors working shit jobs, then making it big. Mercurio made it big, then got the shit jobs.
Not straight away, mind you. When Strictly Ballroom burst on to the big screen in a hail of sequins, bolero jackets and big hairdos, it made stars out of Mercurio, his co-star Tara Morice and a little-known director called Baz Luhrmann. For nearly a year after its launch at the 1992 Cannes film festival, the trio travelled the world promoting what was to become the first in a string of quirky Australian hit movies including Muriel's Wedding and Priscilla Queen of the Desert. Mercurio was nominated for an AFI gong and in 1993 won the Mo award for dance performer of the year.
Hollywood came knocking and he answered the call, starring in a blockbuster by Pretty Woman director Garry Marshall. With Mercurio, Dan Aykroyd, Rosie O'Donnell and Dana Delany in the line-up, Exit to Eden was a sure-fire hit. Except it wasn't. Mercurio can still recall The Australian's film critic David Stratton, who asked plaintively on The Movie Show: "Why, why, why, Paul?"
That 1993 flop was followed by a string of Hollywood movies you've probably never heard of -- Back of Beyond, Red Ribbon Blues, The Dark Planet and The First 9 1/2 Weeks -- and parts in some Australian ones you might have: Cosi, Welcome to Woop Woop, Kick and Sydney: Story of a City.
In the six years after Strictly Ballroom, Mercurio spent roughly half his time in the US making movies and half in Australia. He started his own dance company, Australian Choreographic Ensemble, which ran for a few years, subsidised in part by his film earnings, but died in the mid-1990s after government funding was cut.
By 1999 he faced a crucial choice: to sell the Sydney beachside home bought with his Strictly Ballroom proceeds and move the family to LA for a serious crack at international fame and fortune, or stay based in Australia and try to make it work from here. Mercurio chose the latter.
"I went to LA and my wife flew over, we had a good look," he says. "It was a risk because I would have had to sell my house and live on that money in America for a year and hope things worked out. If they didn't, we'd have been coming back to Australia with nothing. I wasn't prepared to take that risk or put my family through it."
So Mercurio remained here, selling the house anyway and moving the family to Mittagong in regional NSW. The former star dancer and choreographer with Graeme Murphy's Sydney Dance Company had, by then, had a gutful of show-biz falsity. "I shied away from all that licking-bums type of stuff," he says. "I was never very good at it in Sydney. I could work the room all right, but I just got tired of it. So I guess in a way I hid away a bit."
It was the start of a difficult few years for Mercurio. Acting gigs were harder to come by in Australia than they'd been in the US; just getting through the casting agent's door and into an audition was nigh impossible. He got the odd spot on TV dramas such as Water Rats, Medivac, Blue Heelers and All Saints, and a presenter's role on the Nine Network's 2002 health show body+soul. But the Next Big Break was elusive.
"It was that whole thing of there not being work for a dancer in Australian TV, which frustrated the crap out of me because I'm an actor -- I can dance if you want me to, but don't stick me in the dancer box," he says. "The other side of it was because there was no work, whatever money I had was spent keeping our heads above water, which meant I couldn't get back to LA for auditions there. I haven't been back to LA on the audition circuit for three to four years." A casting agent, who does not want to be named, concedes Mercurio, to a certain extent, has been put in the dancer's box, but says his limited acting experience had as much to do with [his lack of roles] as anything. Put bluntly, the agent says, he wasn't the best actor in the world nor did he have the broadest range. And he was not alone in finding it hard to break through.
"I have nothing against him but once guys get beyond their mid-30s the roles shrink dramatically," the agent says. "All the stories are young stories. Most of the roles on TV are doctors, cops or lawyers and I don't see him really playing any of those. The characters I see him playing in many ways relate back to what he does best, which is dance. It's not about him being good or bad, it's just that it's a hugely competitive world. For every role there are 30 actors who could play the part."
Between acting jobs, Mercurio started labouring, did some dance teaching and had a stint cooking in a local Mittagong restaurant. More recently his family moved to Melbourne, where he took a job selling second-hand computers. A humbling experience for any actor, let alone one who keeps getting recognised.
"People will come up to me and go: `God, you look like Paul Mercurio', and they don't think it's me because they think I'm in some mansion somewhere making movies," he says. "You go to an opening, you get out of the limousine and walk up the red carpet and you're in a nice suit, and people go `Wow, he must be rich and famous.' That's the magic part of the movie stuff. The reality is, I was probably up at seven the next day digging a ditch for a plumber mate. I would much prefer to have been up at seven doing my own TV show or doing a movie but there [are] a lot of actors in Australia and not a lot of work."
Robert O'Neill, co-owner of NotebooksRUs in Melbourne's St Kilda where Mercurio worked earlier this year, takes his hat off to his former employee. "People recognised him. You'd see them walking in and whispering to each other ... The ones who were more excited to see him were the ones who would part with their dollars more often. [But] I don't think he liked trading on it. He probably did find it embarrassing, but he certainly didn't show that to me or to anyone else."
Meanwhile Mercurio's personal life was thrown into turmoil during this period with the suicide of his younger brother Michael. Then, last year, his friend and co-star in the movie Kick, Bangarra Dance Theatre's Russell Page, killed himself. Former Australian Ballet dancer Andrea Mercurio says the deaths affected her husband deeply: "It's a pocket of sadness he carries around with him." She credits his "spiritual optimism" and the family unit as the things that have got him through the past few years.
It's an observation with which his best mate, AB principal dancer Stephen Heathcote, agrees. "The amazing thing about Paul is he sticks with it, he has that faith that no matter how low he gets, that things will get better," Heathcote says. So there is no bitterness? "Paul has suffered great disappointment and events over the [past] few years [that] have caused profound sadness, but the words bitterness and Paul Mercurio do not go together," he says. "He is enormously aware of how much damage [that] would create."
One of the ways Mercurio deals with these events is by writing about them on the website www. paulmercurio.net, set up years ago by a fan. "I put some poems up there that I wrote," he says. "One lady wrote back and thanked me for it because she had lost someone to suicide and was struggling with why, and said my poem helped her come to terms with it and understand it. I'm so proud and humbled and glad I could touch people in that way and help them." Mercurio's is, in many ways, the story of every actor who rightly or wrongly becomes defined as hot or not by the choices they make. Capitalising on success such as Strictly Ballroom must happen very quickly, yet so much of it comes down to chance and luck. Starring in Marshall's next film after Pretty Woman would have seemed a pretty good choice on paper, yet it turned out not to be.
Mercurio is philosophical about whether he has made good or bad choices in the past decade. "No regrets. Whoever it was who said I'd rather die with disappointment than regret, I've done well with that," he laughs. "There are certainly things I'm disappointed about but there's no point in saying: `I wonder.' You make a choice based on the information at hand and how you feel about it at the time."
Like many actors, however, he can point to the one that got away: a role in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, which he rejected because he didn't want to reinforce the stereotype that all male dancers are gay. He admits that, flush with choice and being told he was destined for great things, he knocked back movies that perhaps he should have taken.
"I was offered this axe-murderer role in New Zealand. I thought: "Why do I want to promote that sort of thing?" Films are great but I think we do have a moral obligation to be careful about what we are putting out there," he says.
"I wonder if I have changed? I don't know because I'm now in a different position. I don't question the moral stance ... but I question whether [knocking back those films] was a smart career move ultimately. If someone came to me now and said we want you to play an axe-murderer, I really don't know what I'd do."
Luckily for Mercurio, someone came to ask him to play a much gentler role, that of Ethan in The Full Monty, the stage musical based on the 1997 hit film, which opens in Melbourne on New Year's Eve.
That someone was David Atkins, Sydney Olympic ceremonies and musicals whiz and Monty producer. Mercurio's personality and sense of humour fit nicely with the role, Atkins says, and he could dance and act (and, it turns out, sing). He believes Mercurio's hard years have helped him empathise with a character who turns to stripping after being retrenched -- and have also helped make him a better actor.
"Paul, in many ways, played himself in Strictly Ballroom and prior to that had a lot of success with dance," Atkins says. "He had to learn how to act in front of everyone, which is a hard thing to do. The good thing is he did. I've seen a couple of things where I've been taken aback by how good an actor he's become. In some ways you have to look at it fatalistically." It is tempting to say Monty represents a turning point in Mercurio's fortunes, but the last thing he wants is to be hexed by the proclamation that his Next Big Break has landed.
"I love the idea that it could be my next big break but do you know how many times I've heard that?" he laughs. "I have to do things because they make me feel good and make me feel like I'm making a difference in the world. If making a difference to my career is a by-product of that, then that's terrific, but it's not why I'm doing it."
Still, at the risk of jinxing him, things do appear to be looking up. Mercurio has spent the past five months working in Canada as movement consultant on Alex Proyas's new film I Robot, starring Will Smith. He is full of plans to start a beer cafe in Melbourne and, if its Broadway and West End success is any indication, Monty will have a good three-month run in Melbourne before transferring to Sydney for an equally long stint.
He might not want to say it out loud but Mercurio can sense the change. "I am happy. I can feel it in my bones, I can feel it in the spring in my step, I can feel it in my more confident approach to each day and to life in general," he wrote on his website last month.
"It's weird because over the [past] few years I have meditated, read and written in attempts to purge my unhappiness ... It was tough and I don't think I actually succeeded in the way I wanted.
"I don't know why I feel surprised at how easy it feels to be happy ... [it] feels like I have just had a wonderful full body massage and all my anxiety has been rubbed away never to return.
"It also feels like it is going to last for a while."
In a flurry of feathers and sequins, Strictly Ballroom's star dancer shot into the film stratosphere. Then he crashed to earth, acting in turkeys, digging ditches and selling used computers to make ends meet. Ten years on, could The Full Montygive Paul Mercurio a second break?
By Katrina Strickland
The Weekend Australian
11 October 2003
