By Nick Miller
Harry Potter, aka actor Gareth Reeves who plays the grown-up boy wizard in the hit stage show that’s Melbourne’s longest-running stage production, shows me his shoulder.
It’s strapped up like a wounded footballer’s. And he’s off to the physio again today.
Demanding role: Gareth Reeves Is Harry Potter in the Melbourne production which is now, compressed from its previous two-show format to a single three-and-a-half hour epic evening.Credit:Luis Enrique Ascui
As we sit down for a lunch at Dumbo cafe in West Footscray (an excellent addition to Melbourne’s obsession with pretending it’s Brooklyn), Reeves explains. You might think theatre is prancing about in tights. But Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is major league exertion, three-and-a-half hours of action, magic and rushing on and off stage, wands at the ready.
In Potter’s duel with Draco Malfoy, there’s a moment he flips upside down in mid-air. Last Friday night, something “kind of went a little funny”. Then a scene or so later he makes a sliding entrance onto the stage through a fireplace. Instead of relaxing and trusting the process, Reeves braced in anticipation of pain and landed heavily, threw his head back, and seized up his shoulder. He soldiered on, but Harry Potter had a pretty stiff posture for the rest of the night.
And so, Reeves, 43, is working with a physio who has worked with Cirque du Soleil, who told him “I’ve seen this all the time in trapeze artists”. He’s on a Cirque neck-strengthening program, putting his head on the wall between his knees in the Princess Theatre corridor before each show.
Draco Malfoy (Lachlan Woods) turns Harry Potter (Gareth Reeves) upside down during a wizarding duel in the Princess Theatre production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.Credit:Michelle Grace Hunder
And he’s not alone, there are “foam rollers and spiky balls everywhere backstage”, he says. He’s mates with Tom Wren, the first Australian Draco who’s now in Sydney doing Mary Poppins. They have a running gag about being “men of a certain age with kids, held together by rubber tape and anti-inflammatories”. Wren texted him the other day asking how he was going; Reeves just texted back “Agassi”, a reference to the first chapter of Andre Agassi’s autobiography, Open, where he recounts in excruciating detail the pain of waking up in agony and gradually fighting through the soreness to get onto a tennis court.
“There are some days, usually around Saturday or Sunday, where getting up for that four-show weekend can feel a bit like that.”
Cursed Child is a theatrical marathon. Now, compressed from its previous two-show format to a single three-and-a-half hour epic evening, the demands on the actors are even higher. They used to have two days off a week — “Monday to crash, Tuesday to get stuff done”, says Reeves. Now, they just get the Monday.
But this all makes Reeves sound like he’s here to vent. Actually, he loves it. Reeves has been with the show since its 2019 premiere, playing the title role (though the show’s plot is driven by the next generation, son Albus Potter and his schoolfriend, Scorpius Malfoy). He’d come to the show with a rich CV: trained at the New Zealand Drama School, with plenty of TV (Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries) and theatre (War Horse) under his belt.
“I’ve been an actor since I was... really forever,” he says. “But this is the first full-time job I’ve ever had. The longest gig I’d ever had before I think was War Horse – we didn’t quite reach a year – or a Bell Shakespeare tour, six to eight months. It’s just not something that ever happens.”
Accio mushrooms: Gareth Reeves is a regular at the Dumbo Cafe.Credit:Luis Enrique Ascui
He feels grateful and privileged to have this – especially as it made him one of the rare actors that qualified for JobKeeper. He wants to give back: “I’m interested in being an advocate and learning more about my industry and its challenges”, though he’s also acutely aware of being an ambassador for “a major global brand that is, by its very nature, kind of conservative”.
On their third polite attempt to capture our attention, the Dumbo staff take our order. I like the look of the fish burger: rockling fillet crumbed in panko with chilli sambal, herb mayo, cheese and pickles. Reeves goes for the wild mushrooms, grilled with kimchi and cheddar cornbread, poached egg, relish and a honey gochujang sauce.
He’s had it before – this is one of his favourite local eateries. And he’s just found out you can get the breakfast rolls home delivered.
“I’ve never done this, Uber Eating breakfast. But Luke [Clayson] who’s in the show was like ‘dude, I do this all the time’, so I did it for the first time last weekend. It was the best. Sunday morning, you’ve got to be at the theatre at 11.45am. It’s like coffees and bacon and egg rolls, they’re great.”
The demands of a show like this are hard for a dad. Which is ironic, seeing the beating heart of the drama is the troubled relationship between fathers and sons. Reeves has a 26-year-old son — “he’s fine” — but an eight year-old as well. He has only one night a week to read him bedtime stories, and get to that sleepy point where his son quietly talks about his thoughts and worries, “and [I’m] just realising how much of that I’ve missed out in the last four years”.
Gareth Reeves says he loves the diversity in age, gender, cultural background and sexuality of the Cursed Child cast.Credit:Matt Murphy
He’s awake to the paradox of parenting, seeing that “piece of your heart running around outside of you [while] if you delve too deeply into the details, you would never recommend that”.
He thought he’d done everything right to prepare his son to see the show: warning him of the jump-scares, the flying Dementors, the hand out of the grave, the themes of horror and evil.
“I sat down afterwards and said ‘were you OK with the Dementors?’ and he said, ‘I loved them they were awesome’. But then he said: ‘You said some very mean things ... did you mean them?’
“I’d completely failed to prepare him for the fact that there was a scene, really early on, when I turn to my son (Albus Potter) and say ‘there are times that I wish you weren’t my son’.”
And suddenly Reeves found himself talking about how “sometimes we say things we don’t mean, and [Harry] carries a lot of anger and I ended up getting in way over my head about post-traumatic stress and survivor guilt and anger management, and the fact that parents are fallible, and people, too. I don’t know how I managed to forget that’s a major part of the story”.
Wild mushrooms, grilled with kimchi and cheddar cornbread, poached egg, relish and a honey gochujang sauce from Dumbo Cafe.Credit:Luis Enrique Ascui
Our food arrives: the mushrooms are as delicious as always, says Reeves, and my fish burger is a perfectly balanced delight, albeit the cause of Australia’s recent lettuce shortage.
Dumbo Cafe’s fish burger fish burger: rockling fillet crumbed in panko with chilli sambal, herb mayo, cheese and pickles.Credit:Luis Enrique Ascui
Wait, did he say he had a 26 year-old son? It turns out that Reeves had a bit of a wild youth, back in New Zealand.
“I’d had this baby in Christchurch at 16, I’d spent some time with him and his mum, then I got into drama school and I went up to Wellington and I was running away from everything.”
But that first year at drama school – which he’d lied about his age to get in – he just thought he could “wing it” on looks and talent. And it got too much.
He “wanted to be Samuel Beckett”, was picked as the young New Zealand playwright of the year and went to a conference in Townsville with playwrights from around the world. But he’d had the temerity to write about the Irish Troubles, realised quickly his naivety, and spent the rest of the trip mortified, running away from his own work and acting in everyone else’s.
Accio bill: our receipt from Dumbo Cafe.
Then, back at drama school, he hadn’t learned a monologue, hadn’t written an essay, and “I just had a kind of meltdown and threw a chair at my teachers, I think I said something like ‘well you’ve got what you wanted, you broke me’ and I walked out.”
He came to his senses a little and found a mentor at the school, a new movement tutor who had trained at the strict Lecoq school in France. “He was given the task of trying to turn me around.”
That tutor made him run to school every morning – which knocked his pot smoking habit on the head. He opened his eyes to the world of theatre from Europe and the Pacific. And he, and others “helped me realise I was part of something, a tradition and a culture, and there was a place for me”.
“I got my shit together. Reconnected with my little boy. By the time I came out of my third year at drama school, I was very driven, ambitious, and focused,” he says.
It’s another anecdote that makes you wonder about the link between role and actor: an inspired piece of casting. Harry Potter had trouble at school, was a brilliant but sulky adolescent. And a lot of the Potter characters ended up having kids very young.
Reeves loves the diversity in age, gender, cultural background and sexuality of the Cursed Child cast – and he’s full of admiration for the bravery and awareness of the younger generations. Apart from anything else, it’s a good comeback to questions about the legacy of JK Rowling, whose public statements on trans issues cause seemingly endless controversy.
“Her views don’t reflect our production,” he says. “She can go on saying what she says, but we are who we are, and we’re doing what we’re doing, and we’re pretty proud of it.”
Soon, it’s time to grab the bill and for Reeves to head off, to pick up his boy from school and then head to the theatre for another bruising, wonderful evening of being a dad not entirely unlike himself.
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