Getting Muriel’s Wedding made Matt Day a household name. It’s still one of the best days of his life

Matt Day jokes that he’s “part of the furniture”. His early start came as a teenager on TV classic A Country Practice, where he clocked up more than 200 episodes, before he was cast in the iconic film Muriel’s Wedding and the romcom Love and Other Catastrophes. Then there is a solid list of roles in series such as Tangle, Rake and The Unusual Suspects, plus a scene-stealing turn as the villain in last year’s family film Runt.

Being part of the furniture is no bad thing. Many actors struggle for years to be recognised – and I’m not talking celebrity here – more like, “Oh, he’s always good, I’ll watch anything he is in”. Day has long been at the level – not around a lot but just enough that, when he does pop up, it’s always a pleasure to see him.

“I’ve been making a living out of it pretty much since I was 14 years old,” he says. “There are quiet times but I’ve always worked, I’ve always made a living, which is something that I’m proud of, I suppose: to get to my age and to still be at it.

“I still have this very strong memory of when I was doing A Country Practice when I was a teenager, and I left that and I remember a lot of people saying, ‘You’re crazy. This is a proper job.’ And I’m like, ‘Well, that’s exactly why I’m leaving – because it’s become a proper job.’

“And on the final day I was running around with a video camera and I videoed this assistant director, Eddie, and he goes, ‘You’re gonna be OK, kid. Do you know why? Because you’re a survivor. Do you know how I know? Because I’m a survivor and I know one when I see one.’ And I wear that mantle quite proudly.”

Day – who is now 53, with wild, greying hair and clear-framed spectacles – puts his survival down to “having no plan B. I don’t really have anything to fall back on, I never really did, so I just had to stick at it.”

He jokes he has PTSD as a surviving child actor. Was that from being bitten by Fatso the wombat on A Country Practice? “That’s kind of how you knew you were welcome on the show,” he says, laughing. “Fatso bites your leg under the table.”

Day is now back in season two of Strife, the Asher Keddie vehicle loosely based on journalist Mia Freedman’s book about her early days starting up the website Mamamia. He plays Jon, the ex-husband of Keddie’s character Evelyn, an even-keeled yin to her neurotic yang.

The couple, who separated in season one, are “birdnesting” – splitting their time between the family home, where their two teenagers live permanently, and Evelyn’s mother’s house. There’s a reconnection, of sorts, but otherwise they hum along in their supportive yet slightly dysfunctional way.

“It was a real gift for both of us, for Asher and myself,” he says. “There are more levels to him in this season than maybe there was in season one. You’re always finding your legs in the first season. No one’s sure exactly who everyone is and where they fit in but we’re laying down some really great groundwork in this second season.”

There is also a joy, says Day, in working on something that’s grown-up. Jon and Evelyn have an adult relationship and teenage children. Yes, they also have an impossibly large and lovely TV house, but their life and worries feel real.

“Sarah [Scheller] wrote something that feels really lived in,” he says. “And this relationship between these two characters feels very genuine. And I think that is because it’s from a writer who’s of a similar age – you can bring a lot of experience to it.

“And it does go beyond a lot of the cliches that we might see on screen. There’s this idea that [Evelyn has that] her breaking out of this relationship was the only thing she had to do to grow, where there’s a possibility that being within this relationship actually is more empowering.”

Day was about 10 when he started in amateur theatre in Melbourne’s Moonee Ponds, but he reckons there are only a few times in his career he’s really got it right, most recently in the Melbourne Theatre Company’s production of Sunday. He still finds it difficult to watch himself on screen and has only just started revisiting some of his old performances.

“There are some downfalls to early success,” he says. “You feel like, ‘Oh, well, this is it. This is how it works.’ You have found this thing that you do, and you think that will get you through, but I probably work a lot harder now than what I did when I was younger.

“I’m less ambitious but I’m more ambitious about the work. Opportunities and great bits of writing that fall into your lap are actually very rare, so when they do turn up I want to wring the most out of them. Every job is an opportunity to get it right. I used to say that as a joke but I’ve realised it’s actually very true.”

That early success, of course, was Muriel’s Wedding, in which he played Brice, Muriel’s soft-hearted first boyfriend (they met at the video store where they worked). Released in 1994, it turned a then-unknown Toni Collette into a star and gave Day an international profile. In honour of the film turning 30 last year, Collette made a surprise appearance at a screening at the Glasgow Film Festival in March and ended up dancing on stage. Has Day watched it back?

“I haven’t watched it for a very long time,” he says. “I probably will. I watched Love and Other Catastrophes a couple years ago because they had a screening at the Melbourne Film Festival, and that was quite confronting. I was watching it, going, ‘Why am I doing that? Why did I do this?’”

He did, however, go and see Muriel’s Wedding: The Musical, after much hesitation. “I found it really, really confronting, hard to deal with, but also kind of beautiful as well, to have been a part of something that obviously means so much to people.”

He still regards the day he landed the role as the best in his career.

“I grew up in the ’70s and ’80s, when Australian film was really prominent in the world and had a very distinctive brand,” he says. “We had the new wave of filmmakers and I wanted to be like Barry Otto, Jack Thompson and Bryan Brown and Sam Neill.

“And the only way you could do that was to be in a film. Television was still looked down upon – that’s why I left A Country Practice, because I desperately wanted to get into film. The only guys who were getting cast in films were Noah Taylor and Aden Young, so to have actually cracked a film was, it’s still one of the best days of my life.

“When [director] P. J. [Hogan] told me I got the part – I’d come in to audition three times, and then I came in and did the beanbag scene with Toni – I was still sitting in the beanbag and he said, ‘It’s yours.’

“It did open a lot of doors. It’s nice now, at this age, to know that I’m still part of the furniture in Australia and a lot of it is down to that film.”

Day still has big-screen ambitions – he’s about to direct his first feature-length film, the thriller Killer Breed, which he also wrote – but he acknowledges it’s hard in the Australian film industry to attain success these days, especially at the blockbuster level of Muriel’s Wedding.

Instead, he’s looking to the young mavericks, such as Danny and Michael Philippou, the Adelaide twins who started with a YouTube channel and are now about to release their second horror film with the uber-cool distributor A24. Day met them while he was working on the TV series Wolf Creek and they’d show him their videos.

“I was like, ‘Good luck with that’,” he says. “They just went out and shot all this crazy stuff and built their own audience and made the film that they wanted to make. That’s quite inspiring. But that’s no different from Bruce Beresford saying, ‘I want to do Breaker Morant’, and optioning the book and then going out and shooting it for $200,000 in South Australia. The sensibilities are probably different but the step is still that drive and that desire to get it made and to tell a story.”

Maybe he needs a YouTube channel. “My boys would die of embarrassment if I did that.”

Or what about a limited series about Muriel’s life, covering where Muriel, Rhonda and Brice are now – that sort of thing?

“I’m available!” he says, laughing. “That’s where it’s all at. At the moment it’s TV, and it’s incredible how that’s completely flipped around. When I was a kid, like, no one wanted to do TV. Everyone wanted to do film. And now people do film as a favour. Everyone wants to do TV. That’s where the storytelling is.”

Strife is now streaming on Binge.

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