SHAUN MICALLEF'S ONLINE WORLD AROUND HIM                             Back               Home
	The Laws of Comedy Jo Litson Limelight Magazine November 2003 Early the year he was everywhere. Within months, he was nowhere. But Shaun Micallef is far from beaten, as Jo Litson discovered on the set of his new movie. May 2002. A church hall in an Adelaide suburb. The climax of The Honourable Wally Norman, about a meat worker who inadvertently finds himself running for Federal parliament, is being shot. It is of a debate between the meat worker, Wally Norman (Kevin Harrington), and the sitting member, the corrupt, supercilious Ken Oats (Shaun Micallef), who, true to form, is prepared to be as underhanded as necessary. He makes some shocking revelations that may force Wally to withdraw. Oats smirks - the smirk Micallef does so well. "Cut". Micallef and Harrington relax at their lecturns. They headline a terrific cast, which includes Greig Pickhaver (HG Nelson) and Bryan Dawe (The Games) - not to mention John Singleton as the Prime Minister. Directed by Ted Emery, whose television comedy credits include Fast Forward and Kath & Kim, The Honourable Wally Norman is a cute movie with plenty of silly laughs and a soft heart. But it also has some serious targets in its sights, including the human cost of economic rationalization, slick party politics, and the betrayal of the bush. With the film's wrap imminent, the unit publicist is on set interviewing the cast for the electronic press kit between takes. Pickhaver, Dawe and Micallef - three South Australian boys who met during filming and have clearly struck up a friendship- are warming to the task. Pickhaver as HG doing John Eliiot, lets rip with a diatribe about South Australia, politics, sport, filming, television and anything else that happens to pop into his head. Micallef and Dawe are his foils, entering into the fray every now and again with an incisive comic joust. By the time a hapless television reporter arrives they are well and truly on a roll. It's hilarious stuff but the TV reporter looks flummoxed, clearly envisioning an editing nightmare. Succinct sound bites? Forget it. Fast forward to September 2003: Micallef is chuckling down the phone from Melbourne. "I remember that being a hilarious day," he says. "One of us would go off and shoot our lines and then come back and do the electronic press kit interview, which somehow seemed more important (than the actual filming). We had a lot of fun." When Micallef was doing university review, he used to send promotional material to Roy and HG for them to mention on This Sporting Life, their Triple J radio show. "I remember Greig as HG reading it out a few times, so it was funny that years later, we should be working together. We didn't have any scenes together but we spent a lot of time sitting around, talking and laughing." "We share an interest in old comedians so we exchanged book titles. Bryan and I also had a lot of good long chats. Going back to our home town and trying to find points of reference (between us) was pretty easy as there's about one degree of separation between everyone in Adelaide." The Honourable Wally Norman is the first film from Rick Kalowski and Andrew Jones, two young writers who met while studying law at the University of New South Wales. Writing the role of Ken Oats, they used to practice his dialogue together in Micallef's voice. "He's a huge favourite of ours, we just love him, " says Kalowski. "We just couldn't believe it when he said yes." The performance Micallef turned in exceeded their expectations. "He and Kevin Harrington both tinkered with words and lines and improvised bits and pieces," says Kalowski. "I think whatever else is true of the film, their parts are better on film than they are on paper." Micallef was more relieved than anything else when he saw the film for the first time. "I sat there literally feeling sick (with nerves) before it started," he says. "I was pleasantly surprised and pleasantly relieved. I wasn't that bad. And it was a fun film. It's quite a sweet film, not the kind of thing I'm often connected with." Like Kalowski and Jones, Micallef was once a lawyer. After 10 years specialising in insurance - "not many laughs there" - he got his big break in comedy as a writer for Full Frontal. Six months later he was co-producing and performing in the show. It's been onwards and upwards ever since. His credits include The Big Gig, The Glynn Nicholas Show and Jimoein. Then he had his own, The Micallef Program, from 1998 to 2001. In 2000, he joined the cast of the phenomenally successful ABC TV series SeaChange as the decent but thoroughly wet warwick Munro (where he met Harrington, whose character Kevin  he later parodied on The Micallef Program). He also successfully hosted the 2001 Logies - a regular death trap - on the recommendation of his mate Andrew Denton. Wally Norman should have capped a triumphant year for him. At the start of 2003, Micallef seemed to be everywhere. In February, ABC TV launched the sitcom Welcher and Welcher, which Micallef created, wrote, co-produced and starred in. In March, Channel Ten screened Blackjack, a telemovie he created and co-wrote. A few weeks later his live variety show Micallef Tonight premiered on the Nine Network. In July, he was seen in the Australian feature film Bad Eggs, playing the Premier of Victoria (another role written for him). Then things started to come unstuck. Micallef Tonight's ratings suffered from being up against Andrew Denton's Enough Rope. In August, Nine gave the show the axe. Welcher and Welcher was also a fizzer. Micallef will no doubt bounce back, but it's something he apparently doesn't want to discuss right now. Before our interview, his publicist stresses that Micallef will talk only about Wally Norman. Today, he's sitting in the sunshine outside the State Library in Melbourne, taking a break from writing, he tells me on his mobile phone. "The domed reading room has just opened here again after being refurbished so it's a pleasant place to work. I'm told Ray Lawler wrote Summer of the Seventeenth Doll in there so it obviously works for some people." Micallef, 41, comes across as courteous, modest, and, well, normal. Nothing like the monstrous deadpan television host or the other manic fools he loves to play. He is a family man (he and his wife have three sons, aged five, three and two) who doesn't drink alcohol or coffee, or smoke. Neither does he court limelight. Asked if he likes having a role like Oats written for him, he says: "That's very nice. But it's a pretty unpleasant character really so it might be less than flattering. But I must say, it was easy for me to play. I wasn't aware they had actually written it for me until I'd said yes to it." "But I read it and thought, this feels like my voice, so it was quite easy to get into the character and ad-lib around the line a bit, which they very kindly left in the final edit." "It wouldn't be accurate to say there's a lot of improvisation in there. But either I'd be so poor an actor that I'd forgotten my lines and had to improvise my way back to them, or Ted would come up with an idea he wanted to try out." Micallef says Emery, with whom he's worked on The Micallef Program, Full Frontal, and Welcher and Welcher is "very instinctive". "He works out how he wants to shoot it when he gets there rather than coming along with a storyboard. You think, how the hell's this going to cut together? But it does. Rick and Andrew were happy to let him do that. They were probably a bit anxious now and again but I'd say to them: 'Ted knows what he is doing, it'll be fine, he's edited it all in his head'." Had Emery not been part of the project, Micallef might have turned it down, even though he liked the script. It is only the second time he has played a sustained character (after SeaChange) and his largest film role so far. "I was conscious there would be a difference between the big screen versus what you do on the small screen. I just assumed I'd have to be a bit subtler and not so broad. It turns out that you can't go in with those sorts of rules. "I watched the rushes and thought, oh, I was a bit small there. I was underdoing rather than underplaying - and there's a subtle distinction between the two.  So I was learning on the job and it was reassuring to have Ted directing." Although Wally Norman will inevitably be compared to films like The Castle, Kalowski says the inspirations for he and Jones were Bill Forsyth's Local Hero and the films of Billy Wilder and Frank Capra. Micallef also loves Capra. "It's A Wonderful Life, in which James Stewart tries to kill himself and is rescued by an angel, is one of my favourite films," he says. "Also, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Meet John Doe. Those sort of films were standard television fare when I was growing up. "But as a youngster, I went for the performers: the Marx Brothers, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Laurel and Hardy, Morecambe and Wise. The clowns. I had a great affection for them. I remember coming home from school and the family sitting down to watch Laurel and Hardy on the ABC before dinner." His mum introduced him to The Goons, from which he discovered Peter Sellers, who became an influence. "You can see that in characters I choose to play. I tend to gravitate towards the fools who think that no-one's noticed they're fools." Oats may be malevolent, but he's also a twerp who smashes tennis rackets and hurls golf clubs whenever Wally's campaign is going well. "I rather suspect if I play the villain or the bastard in these things, he's always going to be a bit of an idiot," says Micallef. "It wouldn't be as much fun otherwise. I much prefer playing that kind of role than somebody a bit noble. "I just find it funny and instinctively go there when I'm playing a character. It seems a bit cold if I don't. It enables me to be both vulnerable and authoritative at the same time. Without the vulnerability, it'd just come off as unlikeable." Here he draws a strong correlation to Sellers. "All his characters were like this. If they went authoritative, they were little inadequate men trying to pass themselves off as something else." It's often remarked that Micallef looks exactly like the runaway lawyer he actually is, which he used to advantage in SeaChange and as the pompous, incompetent solicitor in Welcher and Welcher. As for returning to law, Micallef gives the idea short shrift. "It's something that doesn't interest me enough to go back to and it would be very difficult for me to do these days. It's the lack of gravitas that I would have in the courtroom. It would be a joke." He's rewriting a collection of essays, originally published in The Age, for a book. "I'm revisiting them, and writing some new ones," he says. "It's all very solitary and I'm quite enjoying the fact that no other hands but mine go across the work. At least at the moment. Everything else I've been doing for the past few years has been very collaborative and while that's quite rewarding, sometimes it's a bit frustrating. Once it gets into the hands of an editor, it will all start up again but at the moment it seems perfect." He pauses for a wry laugh. "It's always perfect until you show it to somebody."