UNLESS YOU'RE THE owner of a Carrollian-grade imagination, you'd struggle to picture Matt Nable in a romcom. Could you see him as the Owen Wilson character in Wedding Crashers? Or the Hugh Grant character in Notting Hill? Broad comedy, as far as we know, isn't Nable's bag. But you know what is, right? Menace. Suppressed rage. Melancholy. Dark secrets. Desperation. Few actors can nail those as believably and seemingly effortlessly as this guy does.
Take his turn in the new Australian film Transfusion (out 5 January in cinemas and streaming on Stan from 20 January), in which he plays Johnny, a former SAS soldier who's slid into the criminal underworld and sets about dragging his mate Ryan (Sam Worthington) in with him. Nable's performance amounts to a 106-min. nervous breakdown.
Now, in real time, there on my computer screen, is Nable's square-jawed, ruggedly handsome face. He's doing the rounds promoting Transfusion, which he also wrote and directed, and while he looks every bit the bloke you wouldn't mess with – unsmiling, beefy, tattooed – his tone is friendly, almost gentle, to the point where I feel I can tell him that I didn't much care for his character of Johnny.
“Look,” he says, “as an actor, you don't have to like the characters you play: you just have to understand them.” He goes on to say that he understood Johnny very well, that he's known many a returned serviceman who's felt marginalised and emasculated by society. “I didn't dislike Johnny either,” he adds. “Johnny is a good guy…
