Tom Wright (Australian actor)

Thomas Michael Wright^[1] (born 22 June 1983) is an award winning Australian actor, writer, director and producer. He came to attention as Johnno Mitcham in Jane Campion's series Top of the Lake, for which he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the 2013 US Critics Choice Awards.

He is the co-founder and director of The Black Lung Theatre and Whaling Firm.^[2]

Early life

Wright was born June 22, 1983 in Melbourne, the eldest of three children.

Career

Regarding his casting in the series, The Australian said: "With his clear green eyes, unruly hair and quiet intensity, Thomas M. Wright evokes a young Daniel Day-Lewis, and it is not the first time that comparison has been made: Jane Campion said the same thing after meeting him."^[3]

In 2015, he filmed the Universal / Working Title feature Everest, based on the 1996 ‘Into Thin Air’ tragedy.

Years before the film, Wright walked for a month in the Himalayas on his own, without a porter or guide, crossing the highest mountain pass in the world. He walked for 30 days and lost sixteen kilograms.^[4]

Wright recently completed filming HHhH, an adaptation of the 2008 Priz De Goncourt winning novel, with Jack O’Connell, Stephen Graham and Jason Clarke. He also recently filmed the Sony / WGN America Series Outsiders in the lead role of Sheriff Wade Houghton for producers Peter Tolan and Paul Giamatti. His performance has been acclaimed across the press^[5] and cited as the standout of the series by Hollywood Reporter^[6] and Variety.^[7]

He appeared as cult-figure Steven Linder in the US adaptation of The Bridge. Executive Producer Elwood Reid said of Wright’s audition for the series ‘it was the best audition I have ever seen. He walked in and the temperature of the room changed.’^[8]

He played the murdered journalist Brian Peters in Balibo (2009), and Thomas Bodenham in Van Diemen's Land (2009).

As an actor in his earliest mainstage work in theatre, he was compared to a young Geoffrey Rush (Herald Sun) and has since played lead roles for the Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne Theatre Company and Sydney Theatre Company, including the title role Baal in the controversial production commissioned by Artistic Directors Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton and directed by his close contemporary, theatre and film director Simon Stone.

Balibo director Robert Connolly said of Wright and Stone, ‘We constantly fight against an ordinariness in our artistic endeavours and they really are willing to go their own way. It's intoxicating, actually, the originality of their vision is so strong.’^[9]

Wright has a strong background in theatre as a writer, director, producer and designer as well. He created The Black Lung Theatre and Whaling Firm in 2006 at the age of twenty two, with fellow writer and director Thomas Henning.

Black Lung, the inaugural resident company at Malthouse Theatre in 2007, were at the forefront of a changing of the guard in Australian theatre. The company has received nominations, awards and critical acclaim since its inception and has been hailed as one of the most influential independent companies of the past decade.

Renowned for its uncompromising aesthetic, Black Lung brought cinematic reference and an anarchic process and performance style to their work. Chris Kohn writing for Realtime called their premiere production Avast ‘Insanely fast-paced, artfully arrhythmic, meta-theatrical - a breathtaking combination of precision and chaos. I left drunk on theatre, intoxicated on the experience of simply being’^[10]

Under the Black Lung banner, Wright has created productions with Adelaide Festival and Darwin Festival, Belvoir, Malthouse Theatre, and Queensland Theatre Co. and Brisbane Festival, among others.

Wright is the designer, and director of Doku Rai, a production created over four and a half years, with a three-month rehearsal process on the remote island of Atauro, East Timor.

Doku Rai came about after Wright formed a close relationship with Michael Stone, then Chief Military Advisor to the President of Timor, Nobel Peace Prize winner Jose Ramos Horta. Stone facilitated Wright flying in and out of the country over a number of years. Doku Rai was created with a group of independent Timorese artists, a number of them former resistance fighters. The film sequences in Doku Rai were co-directed by Wright with award-winning director Amiel Courtin-Wilson.^[11][12]

Doku Rai played to public and critical acclaim over a two year period. Acclaimed as ‘theatre so authentic and original that it should be compulsory" ^[13] and ‘a vivid communion of cultures ancient and modern, that expands the realm of theatrical possibility’,^[14] it was named one of the best productions of 2013/14 by Time Out and The Monthly Magazine, as well as being nominated for best production of the year at the 2013 Green Room Awards.

In 2017 he was the subject of an Archibald Prize finalist portrait by Marcus Wills, 'Antagonist / Protagonist (Thomas M. Wight)'

He is the writer, director and producer of the feature film Acute Misfortune. The film debuted at the Melbourne International Film Festival, where it was the winner of The Age Critic's Award for Best Australian Feature Film.^[15]

Filmography

References

External links

• Tom Wright on IMDb
• The Black Lung Theatre
• Savages