“Sometimes I’ve thought, ‘Wow, I wish I didn’t die at the end of that one so I could go again.” I would happily be doing Safe Harbour season eight right now. That most of the TV projects he’s been involved in lately, including the farce Operation Buffalo, morality and family drama Safe Harbour and the second series of Top of the Lake have been miniseries hasn’t been deliberate. It’s been said by so many people, you can take a much more novelistic approach to it and you can tell a longer story over a longer period of time.” “And it’s not that it’s completely flipped, I love cinema and I love some of the films I’ve been involved in, but TV now has just become a different thing.
“When I first graduated and moved to Sydney 20 years ago, and the audition would come through and it would be, ‘Ah, it’s a TV thing’ but then it would be, ‘Oh wow, it’s a film, I’m going to get to do a movie.’ The explosion in TV series in the past few years has been a boon for Leslie, who’d previously primarily worked in film or theatre. He’s better known for a clutch of serious, brooding types contending with dark pasts, including the detective on The Gloaming, or as a young man making his way to his father’s homeland in Dead Europe, or as Henry, the broken-hearted father in The Daughter.
In a career that has spanned almost three decades, starting as a child actor on Ship To Shore, a free-hearted character like Crosbie has been rare in Leslie’s filmography. He’s in these scenes where he has no idea there are enormous stakes, and that was part of the fun, the joy of playing someone that was very open-hearted, kind of wore his heart on his sleeve.” “He’s a tragic character who doesn’t realise he’s a tragic character. I was the one who was sort of this pawn at the centre of all these different characters’ machinations. It’s quite the swing to go from being the gaslighter to the gaslightee, but that’s how it played out for Leslie, who went from drama The Cry, where he portrayed a controlling narcissist to The Luminaries, a lavish period production in which his character is a stooge in other people’s schemes. “I’d never seen it before and I watched it, and I was like, oh man, I should’ve watched this for The Cry!” Leslie told over video from his home in Sydney.
This film – and its 1938 British predecessor on which it’s based – is where the modern conception of gaslighting comes from. The film is about a young woman whose emotionally abusive husband manipulates her into believing she’s crazy. When Ewen Leslie asked director Claire McCarthy what movies he should watch to prepare for his role on The Luminaries, she suggested Gaslight, George Cukor’s 1944 thriller starring Ingrid Bergman.
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