Samuel Johnson burst into most Australians’ lives as the loveable scamp Evan on Secret Life of Us 20 years ago.
The hit Channel 10 series made him a star and he was a mainstay on TV for 15 years after that, up until his AACTA-winning performance as Molly Meldrum in TV movie Molly in 2016.
Busy with the cancer charity he founded with his late sister Connie Johnson, he hadn’t appeared in an acting role in five years, until new Australian drama Eden, a mystery set in a bohemian coastal community with a dark underbelly.
“To be honest, I wasn’t sure I’d ever, ever act again,” Johnson said on Eden’s Cooper’s Shoot set, just outside of Byron Bay, in September last year. “I really had no drive to return. But something magic floated by, and you’ve got to be open to good things.
“The first question the director [John Curran] asked me when we spoke was ‘What are you doing here, I thought you were done?’. And I had to explain my way out of that one.”
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Johnson was a few episodes into production on Eden, as Ezra Katz, a washed-up police detective who returned to his hometown after a publicly humiliating drunken episode made him virally infamous.
In Eden, Johnson’s character is world weary, but the real person is invigorated and almost manically energetic.
He brought Love Your Sister-branded hand sanitiser to give out, sharing the story of how the charity pivoted during the lockdown to selling sanitiser and sex toys – “we had to focus on what people need, and sex toys have been selling like hot cakes” – when the organisation was forced off the road because of Covid.
Johnson’s work with Love Your Sister, which has included a record-breaking unicycle ride, 250 school visits and several books such as Heroes Next Door, has kept away from acting.
But before returning to the screen in a dramatic role, it was his 2019 stint on Dancing with the Stars that gave him life again after Connie’s death in 2017.
“Dancing with the Stars came within a year or two of her dying, because I’d done so much grieving beforehand,” he said. “I was ready to move on but I didn’t really get that permission to live until I put the dancing shoes on.
“That’s when I had to walk the plank again and go so far past everything I knew to start living again.”
Johnson said working on Dancing with the Stars was by the beach and because he’s “a bit superstitious”, Eden’s setting near the water also felt like that job would be “magic” as well.
Johnson often dropped “magic” into conversation, a special sauce that gives his projects that extra oomph to get him on-board.
“I don’t work on stuff that doesn’t leave me riveted,” Johnson explained. “I haven’t acted in a long time because I haven’t had a script move me.
“There are very few scripts that come your way that you tear through, that everything else gets put on hold because you’ve got to read what happens. So, I was very excited. I knew as soon as I couldn’t stop reading it, that this was a project I had to try to be on.”
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It wasn’t a done deal either. Johnson said every role on Eden was “fiercely contested”.
“It was equal parts exciting and terrifying because I was invested in it, and it would have crushed me if I wasn’t hired.
“One of the rules of acting is that you never end up on the ones you want, it’s kind of like acting folklore, the roles you dream of invariably slip through and go to a higher-profile actor.
“Even when you speak to people like Joel Edgerton or Guy Pearce, they talk about losing the ones they want to other actors that are above them and it never stops, no matter how much you manage to scale the peak.
“So, I never expected to be here. I did not expect to get the role at all. It was a huge surprise for me.”
Johnson said he loved Eden’s script because it was an original concept and because it “doesn’t read as Australian”.
At a time when the emphasis on telling Australian stories is strong because of the influx of international streaming brands, Johnson qualified his statement to mean that Eden’s script didn’t read like a typical Australian drama.
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“Australia does telly in a particular way,” he explained. “I think we have some of the best craftsmen and filmmakers in the world. And now we have streaming, and we’re not commercially restrained.
“It’s time we leave those commercial constraints behind. The autonomy that filmmakers are given on a streaming show versus a traditional TV shoot are worlds apart. There’s more creative freedom.
“It’s exciting as a performer because I’ve been stuck in commercial TV for two decades. I’m a bit worn.”
As an example, Johnson said when he made Molly, he only averaged 1.6 takes per shot, limited as he was by the demand to get through so many scenes in one day. Whereas he made sure that on Eden, he was going to be able to ask for a second or third take.
“They’re giving us time to make it great, to have space to play. If I’m going to do it, I want it to be my best, you know? It’s that internal struggle between budget and creativity.
“This is a time of great excitement and growth. I want to be part of the new wave of storytelling.”
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2021-06-14 06:32:04Z
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