Feature
Perfectly Frank
by Matt Nippert
Veteran actor Frank Whitten has found fame and Outrageous Fortune.
The heavens have opened above the outdoor beer garden at Galbraith’s Alehouse, but Frank Whitten isn’t going anywhere. Wrapped in a black hoodie and puffer-jacket and wearing a white woollen skullcap, the cadaverous actor who plays Outrageous Fortune’s outrageously inappropriate Grandpa West is well-prepared for the weather. His interviewer, by contrast, isn’t.
Rain, courtesy of gale-force gusts, sidesteps the hopelessly inadequate tarpaulin and drenches us both. I’m cold and soaked: mightn’t it be better to talk inside?
No chance. Tapping his packet of Marlboro Reds, Whitten insists on staying outdoors for the ashtrays. This character actor, whose characters are usually bastards, can certainly be unco-operative. But he does share his smokes.
Though a familiar face on television, Whitten hasn’t been seen on stage in this country since the time of the fourth Labour government. Now he’s playing, an enigmatic mortican-cum-bureacrat in Mark Ravenhill’s The Cut along with his television co-star Robyn Malcolm at Auckland’s Silo Theatre.
In full flow he closely resembles a praying mantis: all long limbs and malevolent eyes, with an impossibly thin thorax. He swears like a trooper, barking “c---” with a frequency not heard since The Vagina Monologues – but also weeps convincingly wretched tears. Less experienced actors sharing the stage with him get eaten alive.
Whitten made his name on Australian television screens as a dark force of nature. “I’ve played a lot of nasty characters,” he says. “A lot of troubled priests, and a lot of rapists. There’s some synergy there: one lot in frocks, one lot in trousers.”
In cinema, his credits include “Engineer”, “Gay Apartment Owner”, “Primate” and “Manaroan in Aviator Hat”. His best-known role was as the bearish, oilskinned Ethan in Vincent Ward’s Vigil (Whitten took up horse-riding and gained two stone for the role), but other-wise his parts have been minor if not excised entirely.
Even his turn as a self-described “elderly vaudevillian” didn’t make the cut in Peter Jackson’s bloated King Kong remake.
“I had a trumpet and a stool and kept on having mishaps,” recalls Whitten. “The stage which we were working on wasn’t flat, so the stool had a mind of its own and wanted to fall over. They tried tying strings to it, but in the end …” he tails off. “So, anyway, I’m not in it.”
However, from 1992 and for 12 straight years, he was a constant presence on the small screen as the taciturn older bloke in Speights’ “Southern Man” ads. His sentences ended in “mate” and his weather-beaten face became the homegrown version of the Marlboro Man.
Eventually, though, the gig ended. Says Whitten: “Maybe they just decided that I was too old to be put on a horse, maybe they stopped them on compassionate grounds. A pity – they were a nice little earner.”
But playing either evil bastards or laconic high-country farmers was wearing thin anyway. “At one point I felt like I was put in a box. So I went to Sydney and was able to say to my agent: ‘Put me up for everything – the wrong age, the wrong height – everything wrong.’”
He ended up finding comedy, including a well-reviewed appearance as Puck in the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
“I was the oldest Puck in the history of theatre, I think – 59, not bad,” he says. “There was no springing around, but I did some very elegant ladder-work and looked like a combination of one of the gentlemen from Kiss and Joe Cocker. And kids loved it.”
With Outrageous Fortune Whitten has totally blended the bastard and the funny man. The series, he says, is successful because it “reflects a kind of fantasy, blue-collar New Zealand. It’s got lots of sex, nudity, and expletives – all good fun – and the characters, somehow people warm to them.” The eccentric actor enjoys his eccentric character and is well aware of Kate Winslet’s advice from Extras on winning awards.
“Seriously,” Winslet said while wearing a nun’s habit and citing Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, “you are guaranteed an Oscar if you play a mental.”
Whitten’s irascible Ted on Outrageous Fortune is certainly generationally challenged. With bouts of petty crime, early-stage Alzheimer’s and a sexually dubious fondness for granddaughter Pascal, he will literally piss on those he doesn’t like. Not surprisingly, he won best supporting actor at the recent Air New Zealand Screen Awards – and gave what was widely considered the best acceptance speech of the night.
“This is for the geriatrics,” the 65-year-old began after picking up his gong. With MC Oliver Driver’s border collie Jack sitting under the lectern to deter long-winded speeches, Whitten riffed: “I think I just pissed on the dog. No, I think the dog just pissed on me.”
He pauses, the audience of overdressed actors is somewhat stunned, but then the punchline brings down the house: “It’s a question of timing.”
Meanwhile, back at the bar, thunder has struck and the sheets of rain have thickened into duvets. The downpour overflows the guttering and sluices off the useless tarpaulin; the beer garden is quickly an inch deep in water. Whitten, refusing to move and grinning, lights another cigarette and says: “I’m starting to enjoy this.”
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