Coming Out Of The Shadows
By Katherine Tulich

I had hoped we might talk about Danni. I thought we might discuss the pressures of growing up the son of the prime minister. I expected to hear all about his darkly comic new TV show that is taking America by storm. But I really never thought I’d end up talking to Julian McMahon about gastronomy. Still, here he is, gobbling down a club sandwich, recounting with Jamie Oliver-like zeal the mouth-watering details of meals he has cooked and consumed. “I love it. I even thought once I would be a food critic,” he says with relish. “I might even do a cookbook one day.”

McMahon says he has gathered cookbooks from around the world, but his particular favourite is Donna Hay. “You know you can her books here now,” he enthuses. He’s such a dedicated cook he travels the 80km south from his LA home to Newport Beach to buy her produce, “just because they have a great food market”.

Now 35, McMahon has been a familiar name and face is Australia since he was a toddler running around Parliament House while his father, Sir William McMahon, served as Prime Minister (from March 1971 to December 1972), and his glamorous mother, Lady Sonia, graced the social pages of every newspaper and magazine. As her grew into a tall, striking young man, he was splashed all over our TV screens, first as the hunk in the Levis ad and then as a soap heartthrob in Home And Away. By the mid-1990s he was a fixture in the gossip pages and his marriage to Danni Minoque became the “Bennifer” (Ben and Jen) story of its day. But since then our relationship with the younger McMahon has been more like that of a distant cousin who occasionally sends the odd postcard home. He has lived away from Australia for the past 17 years, with only occasional visits home and periodic appearances on our TV screens in series such as Profiler and Charmed.

It has been a long search for an identity beyond Australia and the shadows of his famous family and former wife. But now his quest for recognition as an actor has finally come to fruition with a lead in the acclaimed new TV series Nip/Tuck (the first season is now showing in Australia, with the second due to begin shooting in the US in February). McMahon’s Hollywood profile has jumped exponentially as he features in endless magazine and newspaper articles in the US and does the rounds on the talk-show circuit.

We meet at the low-key Market Café in Beachwood Canyon, an old fashioned diner in a neighbourhood rarely visited by tourists, but a favourite of locals, particularly musicians and actors. The road to the café spirals north past Hollywood Blvd up towards the Hollywood sign. McMahon’s three bedroom home, which he shares with two German Shepherds, is high up the same road in the Hollywood Hills. “It’s really isolated. It’s like living on a ranch,” he says.

The waitress, coffee pot in hand, greets him as he enters. “How ya doing?” she offers in a homey tone. “Haven’t seen you in a while. How ya been?”

Dressed in faded blue jeans, an over-sized grey duffle coat slung over a long-sleeved orange T-shirt, McMahon’s face is unshaven and a woollen hat is pulled low on his head. He may be trying to dress down, but his striking features pierce through, particularly those mesmerising blue-green eyes. I wait to see where he wants to sit until I realise he’s waiting for me to take a seat first. That small chivalrous gesture takes me by surprise and hints at his good breeding. He is unfailing polite and softly spoken and there’s barely a trace left of his Australian accent.

“I was very Australian when I came here. Even the guy at the grocery store couldn’t understand what I was saying,” he tells me. “I guess the accent I am talking to you with is a mixture of … I don’t what, but most of the time I speak with a purely American accent.”

He says it was imperative that he “became American” to get work when he first arrived in LA. “I went to dialogue class every day and spoke with it every day. You don’t want to be going to an audition and then shitting yourself about the accent. There is enough to worry about without worrying whether your ‘r’s are strong enough.”

It’s quite a contrast to the likes of Nicole, Russ and Hugh, who lay on the Oz accent thicker then Vegemite when not in character. “I came from a very different route than many of those actors,” McMahon says defensively. “I came over here with not very much. The Australian actor who comes over with a great film under their belt gets into a great agency straight away and already has that cred behind them. I didn’t have any of that. I had to build it.”

McMahon landed in La in the early 1990s, determined to strike out on his own in a place where his name and love life meant nothing to anyone. He says he hasn’t looked back. “I like America. I like the anonymity here. I didn’t feel there was any pressure to be something else. I wasn’t the Prime Minister’s son or Lady Sonia’s son. There was none of that here for me. I evolved as I wanted to, and not under the umbrella of something else.”

He used to visit Australia ever year, but he hardly comes back these days. His mother and sisters visit him, instead. “I don’t miss Australia at all,” he declares – an admission few ex-pats would be brave enough to make. “In fact when I do come to Australia I feel like such a stranger. It takes me a few days to feel like I even fit in.”

But what about the common perception that LA is so superficial? “That’s bullshit,” he fires back. “You will find just as many false people in Sydney or Melbourne, or any big city. You have to pick the people you want to be around.”

His life in LA is now focussed around his three-year-old daughter, Madison, with whom he shares custody with his ex-wife, actor Brooke Burns. He married the former Baywatch babe in 1999 after a courtship that was initiated by a strategic date set up by their mutual agent. Their union lasted three years, and McMahon says that in the press at least it was relatively low-key compared to the hoopla that surrounded his marriage to his first wife, Danni Minogue.

He met Minogue on the set of Home and Away when he was 23 and she was 21. They married in a lavish ceremony in Melbourne in January 1994. “We were both very public about our relationship and it ended up shooting us in the foot,” he admits. “You don’t realise when you are falling in love with somebody and you are happy and want to have a great time and put that our publicly how much damage it can do and how difficult it can make it, but at the time we both thought it was the right thing to do.”

By 1996 the marriage was over, with McMahon living in the US and Minogue pursuing her career in London. McMahon says he has no contact with his former wife these days, but admires her professional tenacity. “I think her new song is great, it’s doing really well over here in the clubs,” he offers. Although he once dated bad girl Shannen Doherty (his co star on Charmed), McMahon doesn’t consider himself much of a ladies’ man and is now happily single.

“Neither of my marriages lasted very long, but at the same time I think a lot of good came out of it. I don’t think I’m the best candidate for marriage, but I’m not so scared by it that I wouldn’t consider doing it again.”

He maintains a happy co-existence with Burns (now reported to be dating Bruce Willis) who lives nearby and he has constant contact with his daughter. “I see her nearly everyday. She either comes on the set, or she hangs out with me at home,” he says.

I wonder whether having had a frequently absent dad in his own childhood drives him to make spending time with his daughter a priority. He bristles at the suggestion. “I’m sure it may have something to do with it, but I didn’t feel abandoned as a kid at all. I feel very connected to my parents, so I don’t think it’s me coming from a place of, ‘They weren’t there for me so I have to be there for my daughter’. It comes out of my own want. I love spending time with her.”

Of course, his must have been an unusual and privileged childhood, but McMahon insists his parents went to great lengths to instil a healthy sense of balance in their three children (Julian has two sisters – Melinda who is two years older and Deborah, three years younger – both still live in Sydney) “Sure we had a maid, but I had to clean up my room before the maid came,” he laughs. “My parents weren’t frivolous and ridiculous throwing things at you. They weren’t like that. They were very cautious in regards to making sure we did things ourselves.”

McMahon has little memory of the time his father was PM (he was only three), or of the sensation his mother caused on their 1971 visit to the White House during the Nixon Administration, when all the press could focus on was her dress with its thigh-high split. “I only remember people showing me pictures, but none of that stuff has much to do with the way I grew up,” he says dismissively.

He first left Australia at 18. After what he describes as a period of “bumming around, surfing” he attempted a short stint in law school, more to please his parents then himself. “They felt I should do something. But I couldn’t stand the books, the study, especially in something I really had no interest.”

When he was offered a chance to model he grabbed it. “My younger sister was doing a deportment class with June Dally Watkins who was a family friend. I was just sitting there and this guy walked up to me and asked me if I would like to model. I had a contract within a week. I didn’t really even know what modelling was, but it was freedom and a chance to travel.”

He was in Europe when his father died in 1989 at the age of 80, after a struggle with cancer. “That was tough because I was in Milan when I found out. I flew straight back for the funeral.” Although his father was nearly 60 when he was born, McMahon says they enjoyed a good relationship. He remembers him as “someone who always treated everybody the same”.

“He was not only a lot older but he was also a very busy man. It’s a little different to having someone who is home every night,” he says. “But I think we had a good relationship, particularly in the last few years.”

This, despite the fact that his parents hardly approved of his choice of career. “It certainly would not have been their first choice. They would have preferred I choose another path. But they knew I was a headstrong kid and there would be no stopping me.” He says his mother has since warmed to the idea and “loves his new show”. “She has been over here visiting me on set, and was with me when the show premiered.”

Modelling let to work in two Aussie soaps, The Power And The Passion and Home And Away and a forgettable film, Exchange Lifeguards (with Elliott Gould), before McMahon landed in his first US role on the daytime soap Another World in 1992.

He reasoned there was no pint hanging around waiting for that “breakthrough” film role that would catapult him to stardom. “I thought I would rather get work in TV than wait tables while I hop[ed for that great ‘indy’ film that would make me a star. I always felt that if I worked hard enough it would come my way at some point.”

After the series of supporting roles in the TV series Profiler and Charmed, McMahon landed his first lead role in Nip/Tuck. The series, about two plastic surgeons facing mid-life crises in the superficial milieu of the surgery-obsessed beautiful people of Miami, has become the highest-rating cable show since its debut in the US in July. It also has critics raving Six Feet under-like about its gritty realist and sizzling scripts.

But McMahon was not first choice for the role of the narcissistic Dr Christian Troy. “I wasn’t at the top of their list. I wasn’t even on the list,” McMahon says. “They didn’t want to see me. I filmed my own audition in my kitchen and gave it to them, but it was a struggle the whole way. They just didn’t seem to see me in the role.”

It’s hard to see why they hesitated. McMahon really gets under the skin of Troy, a wild, immature playboy who lives in a perfect apartment, dives the ultimate car and bed hops from one beautiful woman to the next.

McMahon is known as a good-humoured jokester on set by his fellow actors, spending much of his time playing video games in his trailer between scenes. When asked to describe McMahon, Ryan Murphy, the show’s creator (a former Miami Herald journalist), said: “Maybe because he had such a privileged childhood, he doesn’t want the caviar. He wants the hot dog.”

“I think what Ryan was trying to say,” explains McMahon, “is that I am nothing like my character. I’m the total opposite.”

Money, fast cars, women: it would have been so easy for the dashing former prime minister’s son to have slipped into a Christian Troy-like lifestyle, but McMahon has torn at the wrappings of privilege all his life. Even as a kid, when his parents had him chauffeured to school, he rejected it. “I told my parents I didn’t want to get driven because I didn’t want to be separate from everyone else. I wanted to catch the bus,” he says. “I never wanted to be someone who was handed things, even when I was a little kid.”

As we leave the café and he heads to his gleaming white pick-up truck to collect his daughter, he agrees that life in LA is good. “This is where I have spent my adult-forming years, and my development has a lot to do with me being here,” he reflects. “I would never have known the truth of what I could do if I was in a country where everyone knew who I was already.”