The Ugly American
Confessions of a jobbing actor
By John Dybvig

John Dyvbig is an Auckland actor. This is his first piece for Metro.

I was a sports presenter when I got into acting. And a former  basketball bad boy. When I was involved with a game it usually turned into something out of the WWF .During one game, I got so frustrated I jumped up off the bench, ran one way, ran the other way, then ended up by the scorers' table, where I grabbed a gym bag and hurled it high in the air. Turned out it belonged to John Burton, the referee upon whom I was venting my frustrations. His shirt, pants, underwear and socks rained down onto the court.

The look on his face was priceless.

I had also hosted several sports shows (NBA, NFL, Sportsweek) on Sky Network; in fact Stephen Mclvor and I hosted the first ever live broadcast, of a national basketball league game, in March 1990.

And last year I did three Olympic specials from Sydney: John Dybvig's Five Ring Circus. The closest I had come to anything theatrical was in hosting a big-time wrestling show, Main Event, on TV3. My beatnik Australian producer Ray Lillis of Pippi Productions, makers of the Pio shows, thought an acting class would give me more scope in my presenting roles.

The idea appealed to me. I attended my first acting class at the Auckland School for Performing Arts along with 15 or so other hopefuls. My first face-to-face scene with another female actor was a total disaster. Our faces were inches apart. I could see the tiny hairs on her upper lip as I mouthed some scripted endearments to this total stranger while the instructor, Vicki Yiannoutsos, and the rest of the class stared at us with enough intensity to light up New York. I felt like I was under Niagara Falls.

I ended up soaking wet. I wore a wetsuit to class and persevered for a year. I got the bug. The acting bug.

I became a drama student: I enrolled in Maggie Maxwell's acting technique class. I took Shakespeare, stage and acting technique from Auckland's legendary Raymond Hawthorne. I took voice from Linda Cartwright, and finally the Meisner Technique developed by Sanford Meisner, a legend in acting circles.

I was 42 when I burst into the acting world. Previously I had been a Neanderthal jock, dragging my knuckles on the ground. Macho was in, emotional displays were out, especially hugging other men. It took me a while to get comfortable with hugging but now I'm a regular hugaholic. Baby, sweetheart, love your work. Hug. Hug. Hug. That's it though; hugging another man is as far as I want to go. In my first major role I had to come out of the hetero- sexual closet and set the record straight.

I was the American hardass in the mini-series Fallout about the American response to the Labour Government passing the anti- nuclear bill making New Zealand a nuclear-free zone. I played the role of Richard Armitage, the Vietnam veteran who was the Assistant Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon at the time.

Everyone at one time or another needs a domino tipped in their favour to get them started;. the role in Fallout proved to be mine. I certainly wasn't the first pick for serious acting roles; in fact, I was finding it difficult to get any serious auditions. The writer of Fallout, Greg McGee, wanted a real American, not a Kiwi actor using a fake American accent, for the part of Armitage. He got me an audition. He went even further: he got Chris Bailey, the director, to audition me. I was in with a shot.

All the hard work I had done in my acting classes paid off. I nailed the audition. But South Pacific Pictures, the production company, wanted to give the role to a more experienced actor, John Bach.

Every production house wants to hire experienced actors, but how are you going to get that experience unless someone gives you a shot? Unbeknown to me at the time, both McGee and Bailey fought tooth and claw to get me that role. Their belief in my talent was the domino that tipped my acting career in the right direction.

Since then I've acted in locations all over Auckland that were transformed into magical worlds: Xena at the Apple & Pear Board cool stores in Henderson, Mysterious Island in Te Atatu North, the TV movie Hercules In The Underworld in an old warehouse in Mt Roskill, the Disney movie Ready To Run at the Ellerslie racecourse, Kids World in a rundown warehouse in Glenn Innes, When Love Comes at a night club on High Street, Greenstone in the back blocks of Kumeu, High Tide at the old Blind Institute in Parnell, The Climb in Blockhouse Bay, and the TV movie Exposure in an office building on the corner of Great South Road and Campbell Road. And I've discovered there's one thing you quickly learn when you get into acting: landing roles is not easy.

One of my favourite hard-luck stories concerns my Meisner acting teacher Mike Saccente, an inspirational teacher and actor.

Mike studied with Sanford Meisner at the Playhouse in the early 1980s. He worked around New York for a bit, then took Horace Greely's advice and headed west for Los Angeles. Along the way he married and had a family. The woman he married was from New Zealand, hence his arrival in the Land of the Long White Cloud.

Mike auditioned for the role of a security guard in an American cable movie called Atomic Twister. It was a small two-day part. But a nice little part. Mike got a callback with the director. The security guard was the first person to die in the movie trying to outrun the twister from his little guard shack to the main building. The director asked Mike if he had any problems with running. Mike assured him he was an excellent runner, a beautiful runner, that he could run like the wind. Mike called me the next day in jubilation and said he got the part.

But, as it turned out Mike got pipped at the post. The owner of I the film company found a guy who was faster than the wind. Mike called me again, this time in disbelief, to say he' d lost the part.

"Who got the part?"

"You won't believe it." 

"I will. I will. Who got it?"

"Carl Lewis."

" The Carl Lewis?"

"Yeah."

"Carl Lewis the Olympic sprinter?"

 "Uh huh."

"Carl Lewis the winner of nine Olympic gold medals got your part?"

"Yes that Carl Lewis."

I WAS ABOUT as far as one can get from Hollywood when I started my acting career. But as luck would have it, Hollywood came to me. I'll never forget my first audition for Hercules. Neither will Diana Rowan, the casting agent. I was going for a role as a minion, not an ordinary minion, but one from hell -the Underworld in Hercules-speak.

When I first started acting, what I lacked in technique I made up for in enthusiasm. I was so fired up for the audition that I broke the sound barrier with my first sentence. By the time I was halfway through I was completely red in the face, the veins in my neck couldn't bulge out any further and I was spitting. My ranting and raving had reached Mach Five and rising when suddenly there was a meltdown in the recording system. It shut itself off. 

Diana Rowan looked as though she had swallowed a hot chilli. Whole. She blinked several times and slowly muttered, half to me and half to herself: "You shut the camera down."

I smiled weakly as I wiped saliva from the comers of my mouth.  But I got the part. Sorta, the director liked my enthusiasm and energy. He turned my minion into a non-speaking role as a Trappist Monk.

Another thing you quickly learn is how to wait. The acting motto seems to be: hurry up and wait. The daily schedule  goes wardrobe, makeup, sit.

Hercules in the Underworld was one of the five television movies that preceded the series, Hercules The Legendary Journeys, this was where I did my minion thing. It was on this set that I learned the art of waiting. I had to be in wardrobe at 6am. I wasn't there long; I wore only my Jockey briefs and a stringy grass skirt.

Makeup was a different story. My entire body covered in slimy green mud made from a green powder and KY jelly. The slime cold from being kept in the refrigerator and at 6am in the middle of winter the makeup room was freezing. My nipples stuck three feet. The slime was smeared everywhere: in my hair, beard, moustache, armpit hairs... I was caked in it.

One day, after getting all slimed up, I sat until lunch. After lunch I sat until the afternoon break, then I sat some more. I never it on set that day. I sat for 12 hours. That's the way it seems to be in this business. Sometimes you arrive, do your scenes and skedaddle, but mostly you wait. My philosophy about this is simple: they got me for the day. It's their dime. They can spend it way they see fit.

Busty blondes are typecast. Big burly men get the same treatment. The character descriptions for the roles I auditioned for Hercules and Xena ail had the same ring: strong, pushy! aggressive, tough and hard, mean-looking, evil, not afraid to throw his weight around. I played thugs, slave-traders, pirates, her men, warlords and insane maniacs. 

My parts were mean, and basically self-explanatory. I was never going to end up with the girl. In my first major guest role in Hercules I played a Satyr, leader of a group of bandits terrorising a village. This role called for three hours of makeup and wearing a prosthetic. For that they needed a bust of my head so I went to a company where they plugged my ears with wax, dunked my head in a bucket of thick rubber jelly and then encased my head in strips of plaster of Paris.

It took 30 minutes for the plaster to harden and I could breathe only through my nose; this definitely wasn't a part for a claustrophobic. After that, I had to see an eye doctor to be fitted with low contact lenses.

The funniest scene of that episode happened off the set. Along with all my makeup, I also had a pack of killer dogs. Universal brought in a special dog handler with four vicious Rottweiler hunting dogs. We were about to go into the woods to shoot this scene when an elderly gentlemen and his Labrador approached I was standing there in a furry animal suit with a prosthetic my head festering with wounds and was wearing yellow contact lenses but the old man paid me no heed; it was as if he came upon Satyrs all the time. The Rottweilers were another story. When they saw the Labrador they went ballistic; the dog handler, a big tough dude with tattoos and muscled forearms, was straining for all was worth to keep his pack of small snarling dinosaurs under control. The old gent looked straight down his nose at the dog handler and the frothing Rottweilers, and in clipped English vowels commanded: "That's right, you'd better keep your dogs under control Old Ma-x here can get very nasty."

IN THE VERY first episode of Hercules The Legendary Journeys, I play a tavern thug in the teaser. My band of men is robbing the tavern while I hold a knife to the throat of a wench. Just before Kevin Sorbo (Hercules) and Michael Hurst (Iolaus) walk in, I utter the very first line: "Hurry up and get the money."

The Ugly American. That's what you get when you're the American actor in overseas productions, Forget about being the hero; you're going to be the villain, so you might as well sit back, relax and enjoy your work.

I've never had any serious mishaps on a set but there were times I've been anxious. On the set of High Tide I had to get shot. Even when it's make-believe, having someone point a gun at you at point blank range makes you uneasy, especially as the armourer had told me right before my big death scene how Brandon Lee was shot and killed on the set of The Crow. I knew there was going to be a flash charge in the gun. I didn't panic, But I couldn't get to the first assistant director fast enough. In between sucking in huge breaths, I told him that I wanted I to personally check the gun barrel before they loaded the charge.

On the set of Atomic Twister pirates, warlords I was almost crushed by a runaway cop car  Actor John Leigh played a police deputy; in one scene he had to race up parts were to a nuclear power plant in Tennessee (actually the Huntly Power Station) in his patrol car at high speed, slam on the brakes and jump out. Normally this would not be a difficult scene to shoot but it became a bit tricky when Leigh casually mentioned that he didn't know how to drive.

Upon learning this, the safety officer stacked heavy. cement bags into a wall several feet from where John was Supposed to stop. I was standing behind those bags, well out of harm's way, when the director yelled "action" and Leigh came screaming down the road in his cruiser, a couple of tons of metal moving at high velocity in the hands of a novice who didn't understand the relationship between braking and space. The car exploded right through those cement bags, scattering everyone, including me. 

EVER SINCE I I gave everything up to immerse myself fulltime in acting, I've been flat broke and slightly desperate. It's both a joy and a struggle. Countless auditions. Countless rejections. There are no in-betweens for the majority of actors in New Zealand. One minute you're totally immersed in a project where the stakes are always high no matter the budget - as soon as the cameras start to roll, so does the cash flow for the production company.  Working with highly skilled directors, producers, crew and fellow actors puts you on an incredible high for a few days, a few weeks or a couple of months. It's like you're floating on a cloud above life.

The next minute, bang, The needle is yanked out of your arm.

Cold turkey, No work. The craving and frustration never leave you until you bag your next hit, your next working gig. It's the creative rush that keeps you going.

January 2002 / Metro

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