The latest Aussie actor making a name for himself on US television, Alex O’Loughlin
Sunday Magazine
14 October 2007
It’s late on a Tuesday afternoon and Aussie actor Alex O’Loughlin is negotiating his way through LA on his way to work.
Night-shoots are de rigueur for the 31-year-old expat now –as the lead new US drama series Moonlight, which premiered a fortnight ago, he plays Mick St John. A troubled vampire who becomes a PI as a means of putting his dark powers to good use.
“He has a pretty staunch moral code”
says O’Loughlin of his ‘immortal investigator’, whose taste for human blood is quenched via the local blood bank rather than the more traditional way.
“Mick takes on predatorial cases because he feels that the more he can rid the world of them, the further away he can get from the predator within himself.
But I wouldn’t be surprised if he snaps at some stage in the season or in season two”.
That’s if season two is made. O’Loughlin, who moved to LA three years ago and endured a “very frugal” 12 months without work before striking it lucky, is painfully aware of the realities of his profession.
CBS has only picked up 13 episodes, which it can drop at any time if the show doesn’t rate.
“You hear all sorts of horror stories in Hollywood,” he muses. “But I am working today, and as long as I’m working and can pay the rent, I’m happy.”
He can afford to be happy for other reasons, too. Since appearing in Sunday magazine off the back of 2004’s Oyster Farmer, the Canberra-born actor has shot films with Kate Beckinsale (Whiteout), And Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Keri Russell (August Rush).
O’Loughlin is ‘extremely excited’ about the latter, which sees him playing a rock guitarist from Dublin who moves to New York with his band.
He also snared a girlfriend, actor Holly Valance.
“She’s a lot of fun and it’s lovely having a fellow expat to concur with at the end of the day.”
It seems that not landing the role of 007 after an 11-hour screen-test in London has done him no harm.
“It was a nice dream for a week,”
he says of his much-published audition in 2005. As for another much-published ‘fact’ – that he’s the son of AC/DC frontman Bon Scott. – O’Loughlin is clearly amused.
“If I’m his son, the bloke I call Dad is a dark horse. I loved AC/DC – but it’s not true.”
Mind you, playing along with the rumour could work in his favour, with rock‘n’roll love story August Rush about to be released in the US.
O’Loughlin laughs, “Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything until after the film.”
Magazine Scan
Alex O´Loughlin ~ An Intense Study 