He’s been Elvis’s loving father, a drug-addicted barrister and corrupt cop Roger Rogerson. Editor in Chief Michelle Giglio speaks with Bungan Beach local Richard Roxburgh about his love of acting, school runs and new Stan series Prosper.
Richard Roxburgh loves a challenge. The Australian acting veteran has had an incredibly diverse career over 36 years in film, television and the stage, picking up over a dozen best actor awards nationally and internationally along the way.
At 62, where does Richard get the energy to take up new roles?
“The fact that I love doing it,” Richard says. “That’s honestly where the energy comes from. I still get scared by having to go to the places that you’re called upon to go to as an actor. Sometimes it’s terrifying, and sometimes it’s really awful.”
Richard recalls that during COVID-19, he starred in the ABC series Fires about the horrific 2019-2020 Black Summer bushfires, playing the role of a dairy farmer who loses his son.
“I always remember my (eldest) son asking me when I came back: ‘How was it dad?’ And I said, ‘Do you know what, it was absolutely hideous’.
“There’s no part of (losing your son) that’s going to be anything apart from horrific. Because as an actor interpreting that, you have to envision all of that for yourself. There’s no pleasure in that.”
The only positive aspect is that ‘you’re telling a story that is worth telling because (it’s about) what’s happening with natural disasters and climate change in this country,’ Richard adds.
It’s quite a contrast to the eight years he spent filming the hit ABC comedy series Rake about the brilliant yet deeply flawed barrister Cleaver Greene, who defends the undefendable – and wins. “For all the years that we did Rake, it was just the most fun you could ever imagine, because it was a family. People that I worked with every year came back and the same faces would be there in the makeup van, in the grip truck and the ensemble of actors. And I absolutely loved that. I cherished them.”
When we chatted back in late December, Richard was filming Ron Howard’s ‘survival thriller’ movie Eden with Jude Law and Vanessa Kirby on the Gold Coast. It presents more challenges for Richard, who has to do a ‘posh American 1930s accent’ and be proficient at an instrument. “There’s always new and interesting places to go,” he reflects. “I love being thrown into territory that you have no idea about.”
From left: Richard played Elvis’s loving father in the 2022 Baz Luhrmann film, and another father who lost his son in the ABC series FIres (2023).
Image credit: Ben King.
In his latest offering Prosper, Richard plays the enigmatic and ambitious Pastor Cal Quinn, head of fictional evangelical church U Star, one of the world’s fastest-growing megachurches.
Immersing himself in the evangelical world provided a great opportunity for Richard to stretch his boundaries. Richard was not raised with any religion, and says he was ‘loosely small-town Presbyterian’ growing up in regional Albury.
“I didn’t know anything in particular about the evangelical church. It was all new to me. So as part of your research, you listen to dozens and dozens of podcasts. You read books, you go to the church, you talk to people who were in the church.
“It’s fascinating on a human level because you are learning new stuff all the time. It keeps your mind alive.”
Richard’s power-hungry Pastor Cal exhibits on the one hand a desire to help his flock, reaching out to a drug-addicted woman to share his own experience of beating the habit. But on the other, he lives with incredible wealth obtained from church-goers who willingly donate to receive ‘miracles,’ and he will stop at nothing in his quest for world-domination. Can you be both good and greedy?
“It’s a very good question,” Richard reflects. “One of the working elements of the evangelical church is that you can marry those things together. You can be enormously wealthy and be a person of God. And those things live happily together in the evangelical ethos, which is why it’s paired so well with American capitalism.
“This is why it’s such a huge growth industry, because you are allowed to earn vast sums of money and be a fully functioning working Christian as well.
“I’m not making a judgment on it, but (it’s) a new thought in my mind in the world of Christianity. Early thinking was that it’s about relinquishing, about letting go. (There’s a) poverty element of it. And that’s certainly not the line in the evangelical movement.”
In the series, we see Cal is no saint. He struggles with his own faith, does lines of cocaine – despite being supposedly recovered from his drug addiction – and punches the husband of a woman in crisis because he questioned her $23,000 donation to U Star.
Cal is a somewhat ‘complex’ character, Richard explains. “To lead an evangelical church, you have to be incredibly charismatic. You have to be an alpha-dominant, powerful person with a lot of internal self-belief. And you have to be very magnetic. And are those necessarily the people who you would describe as somebody who is who is closest to Christ? I don’t know.”
The role of lead pastor attracts a particular type of person, Richard reflects. “You need somebody magnetic to bring people to you. You’re not going attract people if you’re a kind of milk sop, a Wettex of a human. You’ve got to have majesty.
“But then who is that really powerful person (when they) walk off the stage? As we learn in this series, that powerful person is a really complicated person. And as you learn from reading about and studying the people who’ve been in these positions who’ve fallen from grace, there’s a lot of complexity in trying to uphold their stature. And their seeming infallibility bumping up against the fact that they’re human.”
The series has drawn comparisons with Australia’s own megachurch Hillsong, which also made an initially successful push into the USA. The church has in recent years been plagued by scandals, including fraud, misuse of funds and child abuse. Hillsong founder Brian Houston was forced to resign as global senior pastor in 2022 after allegations of ‘inappropriate’ behaviour towards two women.
Richard puts Prosper into a real-world context. “In my mind, especially in terms of its leadership, (the financial aspect) is something that needs to be interrogated. Because the evangelical church is a huge enterprise and it’s growing enormously across the planet. It’s a very good time for a series like Prosper.”
As for religion and his own three children that he has with wife Silvia Colloca – who grew up in deeply religious Italy – Richard says the couple has ‘left these choices to them, which is how I feel the choices should be left’.
As Pastor Cal in Stan series Prosper.
Richard and wife Silvia Colloca have three children together – Luna, Miro and Raphael. Image credit: Christian Gilles
“It’s for them to explore as they go on in their own lives and as they acquire maturity to be able to see what lies beneath. And to find their own truth in things.”
The dynamic couple juggle the demands of parenting Luna, six, Miro, 13 and Raphael, nearly 17, like all other parents – with the additional complication of a lot of interstate and international travel. Silvia is also a household name, as an actor and opera singer who has published several cookbooks and featured in her own cooking series.
“It’s a spectacular three-ring circus at all times, juggling with plates and balls in the air, all over the place!” Richard exclaims.
“We don’t have a nanny and our nearest grandparents are 12,000 kilometres away (in Italy). Some of it is luck, some of it is good management. There’s a revolving door of responsibilities within the family, so sometimes it’ll be me, and Silvia’s doing stuff elsewhere, and vice versa.”
The family moved to the Northern Beaches from the eastern suburbs when Raphael was two. Initially they were at Bilgola Plateau, then bought in Bungan. “We thought at the time that if we didn’t have to work nine-to-five jobs in town, why wouldn’t you want to just live somewhere that is so beautiful and has such great and immediate access and a relationship with nature? And that made sense to us.”
Richard jokes about doing the ‘parent Saturday morning grand prix’ to get the children to sport and other activities. “But there’s something great about that as well, because it’s a little intimate moment in a car with your kid,” he reflects. “And as they get into teenager-hood, that’s rare enough. You have to find the good in all of those kinds of things. Otherwise, it’s just a grind.”
Rebecca Gibney and Richard were reunited on the set of Prosper, with the pair not having worked together since Halifax f.p. in the mid-1990s. “She’s beautiful to work with,” says Richard about Rebecca.
Silvia moved across from Italy after the pair met on the set of Van Helsing where she played Richard’s wife, and the family maintains a very close relationship to Silvia’s native country, holidaying there on a regular basis. It is also somewhere Richard hopes to work one day.
“I absolutely love it! I’d love to live there. Silvia’s the one who’s less enthusiastic because Italy is a complicated place. I weirdly feel quite a sense of belonging when I go there now.”
The Roxburgh children also feel comfortable in Italy, Richard says. “Especially my little two ones, they have a strong sense of themselves as Italian. When we go there the hands come up and it’s a different expression of who they are, which I find fun.”
Richard is working on a co-production idea which he hopes to start pitching about Australia’s Italians. “I’m determined (to film in Italy) because Australia has a long and quite beautiful relationship with Italy.”
In the meantime, coming up this year he is playing Peter Greste in a movie about the Australian investigative journalist who was locked up for 400 days on politically motivated terrorism charges in an Egyptian prison. “It’s a really important story in terms of what has eroded in the landscape of journalism since 9/11. I feel like journalists after 9/11 became the hunted.”
For the moment, he is content moving back into the family’s Bungan home, which was renovated over the last year. As for who does the cooking, he laughs and says he is largely superfluous. “I’m surplus to needs, you would say. (But) the kids to this day still think that my lasagna is better than Silvia’s.
“Put that in the article and I can deal with the consequences later!”