David Wenham on the return of Johnny ‘Spit' Spitieri: ‘Every second day someone comes up to talk about him'

The Guardian

25-02-2025

David Wenham avoided wearing thongs for 22 years. That's ever since an iconic scene in the 2003 heist caper Gettin' Square, in which he slapped his way down a suburban street in thongs and leopard-skin briefs, on the run from cops. If you've ever tried running in thongs, you'll appreciate the lasting limping.
'I probably would have done that more than 50 times. Jonathan likes many takes,' Wenham says of the film-maker Jonathan Teplitzky.
The scene made Johnny 'Spit' Spitieri the most endearing and memorable character in Gettin' Square, despite hot young talent Sam Worthington playing the central protagonist, Barry. Now everyone's favourite heroin addict is back for a sequel, Spit: while his straggly mullet is now balding on top, the too-short shorts are familiar (Wenham sourced Spit's wardrobe from the women and children's sections of op shops). And though Spit's now off the gear, he still has to do the odd runner.
Gettin' Square only made $2.1m at the box office, but went gangbusters on video and DVD, says Wenham, who won an Australian Film Institute award for best actor for his performance: 'One of the major reasons I agreed to come back was at least every second day I have someone coming up to me and talking about the character. The amount of people who've seen it is quite incredible.'
There are other returning actors – David Field as crooked cop Arne Deviers; Gary Sweet as gangster Chicka Martin; Helen Thomson as Marion Barrington – and the Gold Coast, once again, is its own gaudy character. Teplitzky is back at the helm and many of the same crew have returned, which Wenham says created a school-camp feel, particularly when they bunkered down for weeks at the Covid quarantine centre at Toowoomba, which stands in for an immigration detention centre. The shoot 'was one of the happiest creative periods I've encountered', Wenham says.
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This time, Spit is unofficially running an English language program at the detention centre, having re-entered Australia on a false passport after skipping town at the end of the first film. He has other personal dramas to deal with – punctuated by a cold sore that appears on his lip whenever he's stressed – but finds the time to be a mate to the refugees he's inside with.
'He's genuinely an unjudgmental character,' Wenham says of Spit. 'He takes everybody on face value, irrespective of who they are. I think that's a pretty fabulous characteristic.'
The first time he read the Gettin' Square script, he could hear Spit's voice and see the rhythm of his movements. 'I lived in and around Kings Cross for nearly 30 years, so I'd seen many characters like Johnny Spitieri,' he says.
But the character was created by Chris Nyst, a criminal lawyer who wrote both the films and a bunch of crime novels besides. In his mind, Spit has street smarts and plays everything by his own rules: 'People in the criminal milieu do tend to be aspirational people, in the sense that they want a real life, but they don't want to work 20 years to get there. They want to cut corners, and in that sense, we can probably all identify with people like Johnny Spit at some level.'
Spit reminds Nyst of some of the Aussie battlers he's had as clients, but also Norman Gunston, the artless character played by Garry McDonald in The Aunty Jack Show, who interviewed and irritated celebrities.
Nyst is the man responsible for the ingenious dialogue that is the cornerstone of both films. If you saw Gettin' Square you may remember Timothy Spall's character's calorific point system of booze, or the ridiculous coded conversation that Spit has about double-scoop vanilla ice-cream when he's trying to sell drugs. Then there's the infamous courtroom scene where Spit stymies the stiff proceedings with his whining insistence that he must be provided the $20 bus fare home.
'When I first was writing my novels, if somebody said something I would often write it down on a little piece of paper and put it in my wallet,' Nyst admits. 'Your old-time Sydney and Melbourne crooks did have a great turn of phrase and some old Aussie sayings that they used to death.'
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Nyst was obsessed with movies as a teenager but his father convinced him to be a lawyer; his dad's case being helped by the fact that Perry Mason was big on TV at the time. Sometimes his father would take him to the criminal courts for a day out, and Nyst greatly appreciated the theatre of it.
His father was born and bred in France and spoke many languages, but growing up in postwar Australia, Nyst and his brothers were keen to adopt as many Australianisms as possible. Having this upbringing gave him the impetus to make Spit a commentary on the debate around immigration.
'There was a lot of negativity around immigration and that seemed crazy to me, particularly because we're pretty much all immigrants in this country,' he says. 'It seemed unfortunate that it was being made a political football, particularly given our national ethos of mateship and egalitarianism. I wanted to find a non-abrasive context to remind people of Australian values.'
Wenham admits to being 'slightly nervous' when he initially read the script. The well-meaning Spit changes the name of Jihad (played by Arlo Green) to Jarod, and teaches the inmates how to integrate, real Aussie style.
'The majority of the people who played the inmates are either refugees or offspring of refugees,' says Wenham, who sat in on the casting sessions with Teplitzky. 'The surprising thing for me about this particular storyline was the actors themselves completely embraced the way that those characters were being portrayed … They said, for the first time, we're not just portrayed as refugees. Some of them felt frustrated that in many depictions in cinema and in literary pieces, they're deified – that's the word they used.'
Whereas Gettin' Square was dead-set comedy, Spit has more gravitas. Wenham says the modus operandi was to make a film with more layers: 'It will hopefully have you leaving the cinema with a big smile on your face and some faith in humanity.'
Q&A preview screenings of Spit are being held around the country now; see here for dates. Spit is out in Australian cinemas from 6 March