The Trenerry Reserve, an off-leash dog park high above the southern headland of Coogee Bay, on one of the last warm days of the late Sydney summer is busy. Locals watch their tiny dogs play and suburban tourists have piled in for a blast of sunshine and a walk with spectacular views. “I usually find the ocean very relaxing,” says Anthony LaPaglia. “Contemplative. But today, it’s too busy for me.”
The 65-year-old Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning Australian actor, best known for his starring role in the US police drama Without a Trace and Australian films such as Lantana, Balibo, Holding the Man, Nitram and Boy Swallows Universe, doesn’t like being recognised, talked at, or being hit up for a selfie. “I love acting, but I don’t like the box it comes in, sometimes.”
LaPaglia is walking across the undulating grass with some care. I ask him if he’s carrying an injury. Turns out, he’s got two artificial hips. “After I fly, I get a bit of inflammation but then I come good,” he says in a soft, raspy voice. “I’m a bit jetlagged at the moment.”
LaPaglia has flown in from Los Angeles where he lives with his wife, Alexandra Henkel, and their beloved dogs. He has lived in the States for his entire adult life and speaks with a transatlantic accent, hitting the “r”s hard.
He’s not a guy who needs to warm up to conversation. For the next 90 minutes (it was supposed to be an hour, to his publicist’s chagrin), LaPaglia talks non-stop. The initial grumpiness quickly subsides. He’s warm and entertaining, full of barbed and/or self-deprecating anecdotes about growing up in Adelaide, the eldest son of a volatile Italian car mechanic, his soccer ambitions and the time he went to a “sports shrink” to understand himself better.
He recalls his rejection from drama school, hustling to get an agent, how he nearly landed the role of Tony Soprano, his wild times in New York’s Little Italy and his disgust that Ryan Gosling won Best Actor this year for Barbie (“shoot me”) instead of Barry Keoghan for his nude dancing in Saltburn (“the guts on him!”).
LaPaglia is in Sydney to play Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s classic Death of a Salesman. It’s a big play – three hours long – an epic commentary on the American Dream in the guise of a story about a travelling salesman at the end of the road. It comes to Sydney’s Theatre Royal after a critically acclaimed season in Melbourne.
It’s not a play LaPaglia thought he would ever do. “I first saw Death of a Salesman when Brian Dennehy did it in New York, and I thought I’d love to do that play. But he really owned the role, why mess with that?”
That was before he took a call from Neil Armfield, who had directed him in the film Holding the Man, released in 2015. The opportunity was too good to refuse – and not just because the play is a classic and the part, a monster.
“There is so much of my father in that man,” LaPaglia says, quietly. “I always say that acting is part therapy. It’s part personal therapy. You get to work out your demons sometimes. And I just understand Willy Loman.”
LaPaglia’s father Egideo – known as Eddy – came to Adelaide from Calabria, Italy, to visit relatives. He was 18 and didn’t make the return trip. Instead he met and married Maria. They raised three sons in Adelaide’s outer suburbs. Eddy became a car mechanic. He didn’t much approve of his son’s interest in playing soccer. Young Anthony’s dreams of becoming an actor rankled him.
“We had a very adversarial relationship, from day one, until he died,” LaPaglia says. “We were arguing because he wouldn’t take his medication. He had aggressive cancer and he only took Panadol! He told me to go fuck myself a few days before he died and that was pretty much the last thing he ever said to me.”
LaPaglia says this with both exasperation and compassion. “He was who he was, until the day he died. He had a tough life. People called him a spick and a dago. He got into fist fights. He was a hard man, but it wasn’t his fault. You only know what you know.”
Audiences in Australia know LaPaglia as a screen actor, but he has impeccable stage references. He won a Tony Award for his performance as Brooklyn worker Eddie Carbone in another Arthur Miller drama A View From the Bridge on Broadway, in 1997.
It was during rehearsals for the Broadway opening that LaPaglia became friendly with the Pulitzer prize-winning playwright. “Arthur was there for every rehearsal, it was an actor’s dream,” he says. “He was a very generous, introverted man. But when he walked in a room, he had something, every woman looked at him. I don’t have that.”
In rehearsals, LaPaglia recalls, there were old magazines from the 1950s lying around, some with photos of Miller’s former wife, Marilyn Monroe. “We tried to clear them away because he was sensitive about Marilyn, but one day he picked one up and stopped on the page with Marilyn and read it,” he says. “Then he said under his breath, ‘you learn something new every day’.”
LaPaglia laughs, bringing his hand to his face to rub his forehead, a gesture he does frequently. It’s as if he’s amazed by his own anecdotes. I notice he wears two watches, for two time zones.
“I think Arthur found himself thrust into something that was doomed to fail. He was a very private man. Fame was not something he was comfortable with.”
The sun is beating down and Anthony is not wearing a hat. He suggests we retreat into the shade under massive Norfolk pine trees. “Look at this place,” he says gazing at the ocean. “There is nothing like this in America. They think they have nice beaches but they really don’t.”
***
Theatre hasn’t always been easy. One of the few plays LaPaglia has worked on was the Broadway show Lend Me a Tenor (2010). It ran for six months to sold out houses, but LaPaglia still rages about one bad review in The New York Times. “It was a guy who was a TV critic, he was engrossed with Gossip Girl. Why did they send that guy?” he says, incredulous. Everyone in the show was “so unbelievably deflated” by the review but LaPaglia told them “not everything is a home run.”
“You can’t be afraid of failure,” he shrugs. “I’ve never been afraid of it. And I’ve failed plenty. But from every single one of them. I learned something. Mostly what not to do, and to trust your first instinct.”
LaPaglia is renting a house in Coogee for the season of Death of a Salesman. He prefers it to hotel life. His partner Alex is home in LA. His adult daughter Bridget, whom he had with his first wife, the actor Gia Carides, recently moved to New York to study design.
“My wife and my daughter are my best friends,” LaPaglia says. “There is a big age difference between my wife [33] and I, but I always say she has the mind of an 80-year-old. She has a huge general knowledge, she knows all about opera and if you get her started on the French Revolution, you’re in trouble. She is a prolific reader and an old soul.”
In LA, LaPaglia is content to hang out on the couch with the dogs rather than work the celebrity scene. Henkel insisted on rescuing a Husky and her four pups recently, to add to their existing dog family. “Those puppies were assholes,” LaPaglia laughs. “We gave them away to good homes but I grew attached to the mother, Luna, and she was attached to me, so she stayed. She sits on the couch with me and watches movie. That’s all I’m doing these days.”
Death of a Salesman plays at Theatre Royal in Sydney from 17 May 2024.
