Fire In The Belly
Cover story By Nick Scott.
Sunday Life
October 5, 2008

All fired up: Vince Colosimo on women, work and what makes him mad

On the surface, Vince Colosimo is all cool charm and affability but delve a little deeper — about the gossip, his family and his new Hollywood career — and you'll see those trademark flashes of passion and intensity.

Vince Colosimo's raspy chuckle enters the executive suite of the Hilton Sydney a few seconds before he does. And then he's here in the room, all toothy beams and bone-shattering handshakes, dressed in a white T-shirt, black vest, jeans and trainers.

Shortly, his scorching intensity - that which makes the 41-year-old so convincing in gritty roles such as Underbelly's Alphonse Gangitano - will unleash itself right in front of me. For now, though, he is amiable, more like a middle-aged version of the tender Gino, from the TV drama Moving Out, which earned him an AFI Award nomination for Best Actor at 17.

"Where do you want me to sit, mate?" he fusses. His affability, constantly reinforced by that chuckle, is almost disarming - and surprising considering Colosimo's feelings towards journalists. In 2007, he split up with his partner of 11 years, Neighbours actor Jane Hall, with whom he has a five-year-old daughter, Lucia. She's now old enough to understand grown-up stuff: "Most of the things I've been in, she can't bloody watch," he jokes later. "'Daaad, you're in Underbelly, aren't you? But I can't watch it, can I?'"

Since the couple separated, a brief relationship with Hall's Neighbours co-star, Kym Valentine, has also dissolved. Reports of a dalliance with Myer hottie Jennifer Hawkins, following the department store's summer fashion launch in Melbourne last month, thickened the plot.

"I've had a tough year-and-a-half of highs and absolute lows," explains Colosimo, "but the downs have come not from my relationships but from the interpretation of them in the media. There's nothing lower." The day after our interview, a newspaper will report that he and Jane are in a petty dispute about the cost of Lucia's swimming lessons. This is, he says, exactly what he is talking about.

And it is now, when asked about the tabloid gossip, that Colosimo's belly fire ignites. His pitch rises a few semitones, the gestures get a little wilder. "Scandalous crap - stuff they have written without a single quote from me about my daughter, my ex or any other partner I might have had. They've made it all up. You are the first one I have spoken to about it," he says. "I'm old enough and big enough to take your shit but when there is a child, that's the killer."

Of a rumoured feud between Hall and Valentine on the Neighbours set he says, "Kym and Jane are fine. That's made-up drama for trashy magazines. People who make this stuff up should realise these are two single, separated women who have little girls. Kym - she's a mate - has a five-year-old. You are jeopardising their livelihood, work and wellbeing. Stop doing it."

What about the rumours of a custody battle over Lucia? It's a new one to Colosimo and he doesn't like it one bit. "There is no custody battle," he says, aghast. "She lives half with me, half with her mother, and we live just around the corner from each other. We're amicable. We go out with her together. The only settlement is to do with property, and that's not bitter - it just takes time legally. But these f --- ing arseholes get in there and take the information from the Supreme Court, and sensationalise it because otherwise it's not interesting enough."

Colosimo is the first to admit he is still very attached to his former long-term lover. "I still love Jane. She's one of the best things that ever happened to me. She gave me a beautiful daughter and many more things. I hope she feels the same way. But our relationship came to an end. I was bitter and sad - I'd hoped it would go on forever, as I come from a background where family is important. But it's obviously not the way it was meant to be and so be it."

I dare to mention Jennifer Hawkins. "Jennifer is a mate." The giggle is back. "Every time I've been around her, a load of other people have always been there, too. It's like, 'Woah, I wish!"'

While Colosimo is in no mood to talk about his current relationship status, the twinkle in his eye when we talk women implies he is very much off the leash.

Colosimo's professional life, meanwhile, has hit a high note. In Ridley Scott's Body Of Lies, his first role in a major Hollywood project, he plays "a lackey driver and a guide" for a government operative (Leonardo DiCaprio) sent to Jordan to track down a terrorist under the manipulative guidance of his CIA boss (Russell Crowe).

Colosimo is modest about the size of his role, although he does say that whatever the movie and whoever its maker, "I won't stand in the background of a scene, eating a shit sandwich - I'm not that desperate. OK, if it was Robert De Niro, maybe..." Next up is the vampire fest Daybreakers, then Last Man, an Australian drama based on the Vietnam War also starring Joel Edgerton and Guy Pearce, and outback drama The Floating World.

Ridley Scott, DiCaprio, Crowe, international locations - Body Of Lies is a big affair. Why are the Hollywood execs shining a light on Colosimo now?

"Because I'm reeeaally fantastic." The mock sincerity dissolves into another fit of throaty giggles. "No, really, it's all about who knows who. My twin brother, Tony, has a floor-sanding business. He's been doing it 20 years. He's not the best floor sander in Melbourne but he's never once had to advertise."

Colosimo goes from swanning around film sets with triple-A-listers to cold beers in the local boozer with his twin brother whom he describes as, "Like me in "a lot of ways, and not alike in a lot of ways - which makes things interesting." Delving into the family history  shows it is not without its grit. "At 33, my mother [Lina] had worked behind a machine in a clothing factory for 20 years," he says. "My father [Santo] hasn't stopped working since he arrived in Australia - factory work, waiting, pressing clothes, everything. He is my hero. I look at him and I think, 'No matter what obstacles I've overcome, I'll never have to do what he's done - come to a country without speaking the language and start a new life."'

Colosimo's parents both came to Australia with their respective families, from the same part of southern Italy, in 1956. "It could have been New York or Canada but they got messages from people in Australia: 'There's work in Melbourne.' They met here, married in 1964 and bought a house in North Carlton, where I grew up," he says. "They still live in it today. We had a great upbringing. My father comes from a family of nine, my mother from a family of eight, so I have 36 first cousins."

Colosimo's older sister, Rachel, runs a women's eveningwear shop. His family, he says, has a habit of making him feel his age. "Mum had all her kids by 21," he explains. "In November, I will reach the age [42] that she became a grandmother, because Rachel had a kid at 22. That nephew is a constant gauge of how f --- ing old I am. He's just turned 20. The little prick's getting taller than me and asking me to get Big Day Out tickets for him. 'Woah, take it easy - I remember buckling you into the baby seat in my midnight-blue 253 Commodore V8."'

The roguish congeniality Colosimo is showing today is just as rife on set, according to Ian Watson, who directed him in forthcoming SBS police drama Carla Cametti PD. "He hugs everyone when he arrives on set," says Watson. "He's funny, always chattering, always entertaining. And he's naughty: it was only after I asked him what his mother used to call him as a kid when he misbehaved that I learned how to get his attention." (For the record, the vexed Mamma Colosimo would simply add a 'y' to her son's first name).

Despite the mirth, he seems on edge today. About 20 minutes into our discussion, he interrupts me mid-question and asks, "Are we heading in the right direction with this interview?" It is an interjection that usually comes from a hovering publicist, peeved that talk has veered away from a film that needs to be plugged, and it takes me an awkward split second to realise Vince's concern is actually for me. "I hope I'm not veering off. I'd hate to rant about what's happened to me, why it's happening to me, with you sitting there thinking, 'Well, let's get to my points.' I like to reality-check every now and again." He clocks my confusion. "Well, there's always this perspective that 'Vince is working wonders.' The reality is, I go home, and I work out how the hell I'm going to pay my mortgage next week. You have to do this job for love."

Happily, love is something Colosimo gets no shortage of on set. Tony Tilse, who directed him in both Underbelly and disaster thriller Scorched, echoes Ian Watson's enthusiasm. "I can't sing his praises highly enough," says Tilse. He has really strong instincts when it comes to character and drama." Adds director Ridley Scott, "Vince was a delight to work with - always there and always thinking. A very inventive talent."

Claudia Karvan, Colosimo's love interest in The Secret Life Of Us, and his wife in Daybreakers, quips: "I loved being married to him. He's a pleasure to act opposite - or, more accurately, react to. He is so effortless; so much dignity and strength."

Colosimo's star was first launched when casting agents for Moving Out toured Melbourne schools looking for "ethnic-looking" people. "Most of my characters' names have ended with 'i', he laughs. "Or sometimes 'o', when I'm meant to be Greek."

The part he landed made the teenage Colosimo an instant pin-up. "When I was 15 I couldn't go out," he says. "I was chased wherever I went. My father had to change our phone number. Everyone in Melbourne with the surname Colosimo had to get a private number. Relatives still pay me out on it - 'Because of you, we're not in the phone book."'

A devoted Carlton fan, Colosimo jokes about the simplicity of his life at that time. "It was just taken up with girls and playing football," he says, adding that he was a competent player but torn between AFL and soccer. "And food - I had to eat. But is there anything else, really? Let's boil life down, evaporate all the bullshit. What's left sitting there, if you want to be totally happy? Sport. Girls. Food.

"There were women all the time," he continues, "but I had to grow up pretty fast. I was afraid of who I had to be, what was expected of me. I had to go and study drama for three years just to find out what the f--k I was doing, because I wanted to keep it going and because my background had given me a mindset of, 'You must do an apprenticeship.'"

At the Victorian College Of The Arts, he learned the skills he would later need for meatier film and stage roles (notably A Streetcar Named Desire, Twelfth Night, Othello and The Wogboys).

"I had a restaurant for a while," he says imagining alternative careers. "Tucci Trattoria in Camberwell. I love that whole hospitality thing. I once thought it would be really cool to have a hair salon. Wish I had now - could have made a billion dollars. Probably would have done a stint selling cars or property."

When I point out how different his life might have been - how the personal lives of car salemen aren't publicly scrutinised - Colosimo nods pensively, before delivering his parting shot: "You know, if I'm caught at a club beating someone up, or in a toilet doing an E with a 15-year-old, or making pornos the day after Underbelly is released, you write about it and I'll take it  on the chin. But you have not got me for any of that."

I can't really argue with that, so we laugh together.  And with that, the infectious laugh peels away, and finally subsides only when the doors of the hotel lift slide shut.

Body Of Lies opens in cinemas on Thursday.