He’s conquered the Grand Line and even travelled to outer space, but now homegrown talent Michael Dorman is coming back down to earth.
It’s 9am on a Monday morning and I, still blurry-eyed and without the necessary caffeine injection, am receiving a call from halfway across the globe. On the other end of the line sits Michael Dorman, a revered character actor who is perhaps best recognised for not being recognised at all. Like Gary Oldman or Doug Jones, Dorman does his best work with a certain admirable chameleonic quality. From pompous Victorian-era English sailors to hard-nosed Wyoming ranch hands, diversity has long been the hallmark of the actor’s extensive career. To tell you the truth, I’m not entirely sure which Michael Dorman will greet me when I pick up.
To my surprise, it is Michael Dorman, the dad. Over the muffled laughter of his two children and shriek of mid-morning cartoons, the New Zealand-born, Los Angeles-based actor paints an entirely relatable picture of modern parenthood. It’s refreshing to hear.
After spending the better part of two decades grinding out remarkable, if not entirely unheralded, performances, Dorman would be forgiven for having an air of L.A. self-importance. Instead, what you get is an actor who is as proud as punch to chat about his time in Australia, and for good reason. Dorman, alongside homegrown heavyweights Anna Torv and Roger Taylor, currently leads the number-one Netflix show in the country.
“When you’re in a foreign land, you’re trying to figure it out,” Dorman says of his foray into Hollywood. “You’re not at home, you’re out in the world. I’ve talked about the idea that when you are home you start to think because you know where everything is, you know how everything plays out. With Territory, it was all about going home.”
Directed by Wolf Creek filmmaker Greg McLean from a script penned by Mystery Road’s Timothy Lee, Territory tells the story of the beleaguered Lawson family. Owners of the fictional Marianne Station, the world’s largest cattle ranch, the Lawsons are a formidable force, wielding tremendous power in a delicate and fractured ecosystem. When an unspeakable tragedy throws the family into disrepute and without a clear heir, eldest son Graham senses an opportunity to step up. Standing in his way, however, are the ghosts of his embattled past and a father who fails to respect him.
Dorman is the man who brings the wretched Graham to life, effortlessly slipping into the sunken and solemn silhouette of a man who sits indefinitely at the edge. His performance is nothing short of masterful. Subtle in its emotion, Graham’s plight never strays into the realm of melodrama and Dorman plays the role with an almost unbearable tightness across his chest. Watching the series, you get the very real sense that at any point, Graham could fall down and never get back up.
“It’s just the human condition,” Dorman tells me of his role in Territory. “You’re exploring what it means to be a human in a moment like that. I always look at it in the sense that we’ve all had emotions and you just tap into and apply them where they’re needed, as best you can. You don’t always catch it; there are catches and misses. In this one, I feel like we managed to find the essence of the story that was on the page.”
At the risk of sounding cliché, it’s a story that demands telling. A rare glimpse at life in the nation’s most challenging terrain, Territory explores a lesser-known side to the Australian experience. Brimming with culture and rich with colourful characters, the Top End is rife with prospective stories, but few filmmakers have dared to tackle the Territory. Those who have, have largely landed on the tired tropes of the past. With the latest Netflix series, however, creators Timothy Lee and Ben Davies took things in an entirely new direction, and that’s precisely what interested Dorman in the first place.
“It was the characters, the story of that family’s interrelations and the generational trauma from being in this place, in this space, and the measuring of men,” he tells me. “And at the start of it, I loved that Anna’s character was, for me, the front and centre voice of the show, in a man’s world. I loved it.
“I’ve never seen it as a man’s world or a woman’s world.
“I grew up with three older sisters and it’s always just been a balance, which is so naive, and you have the real world and see how things are reviewed. I think the story touches on all the elements of the way that perhaps we saw things before our eyes were open.”
As you viewer, you should approach Territory in much the same way, if not just for the aesthetics. Expansive and bold in its visual depiction of the harsh bleakness of the Northern Territory, Lee and Davies’ world is replete with anguish, driven by blood and sweat. It is, with all sincerity, the loudest character in the show and that didn’t come by accident.
Much of Territory was shot on-location, filmed at the real-life Tipperary Station, which is home to 42,000 head of cattle. The rugged and rural locale, far removed from the rigours of metropolitan Australia, was an apt fill-in for the fictional Marianne Station—so large that it boasts its own airfield and school.
“I mean, you don’t have to bring it to life, you just go out and just point the camera and shoot,” Dorman explains. “When we were in the Top End, I’d never really spent much time in that kind of environment, and I’d never been on a plot that was so far removed from anything. It was just such a great expanse of land.
“So we spent a lot of time exploring, and we’d jump on a motorbike and rip around and go and swim in little rivers and see crocodiles in there; picking up snakes and taking them out of your room when you sleep. There is something magic about that, being up there, and influencing how we played out the rest of the show. I don’t think we would’ve been able to tell the same story if we weren’t on Tipperary first. And I don’t think you could tell the story without being in those elements.”
In Territory, Dorman, lean and blond with a boyish smile, is almost unrecognisable. A scraggly beard protrudes from his chin, caked in dust and red dirt, while a weathered and worn drover shirt hides an uncharacteristically round belly. It’s a stark departure from the actor we first saw as John Tavner in Patriot, but it’s not the first time Dorman has transformed for a role. In fact, it’s become somewhat of a trademark.
For the blockbuster AppleTV+ smash, For All Mankind, Dorman famously underwent a complete metamorphosis, gaining a whopping 40lbs in between seasons one and two. The process was designed to sell the idea that the actor’s much-loved space cadet character, Gordo Stevens, was emerging from a 10-year time jump with a drinking problem and a belly full of regrets. A lesser performer would have opted for prosthetics, but Dorman, ever the perfectionist, bemoaned the thought of movie magic. In his mind, if he was going to do it, he was going to do it for real.
“At times, it takes a mental toll. With the weight, it’s physical in the sense that you’re putting your body through the wildest of experiences,” he says. “It’s so inflamed and uncomfortable because you’re doing it so fast your body doesn’t have time to catch up. But in terms of diving into a character, it’s something I love. I love being given the opportunity to tap into something and do the best that I can to portray it in the most real way.”
“That’s why I started telling stories, to start fires in people, to make someone feel seen.”
It’s an ethos that rings undeniably true in Territory. Dorman’s embattled Graham is one of the story’s most sympathetic characters, and his slow redemption is what brings true heart to the series. Lamented by his family and tortured by addiction, Graham’s battle to pull himself out of despair is as tragic as it is captivating.
At its core is the challenging dynamic between Graham and his father, Colin Lawson, played by the imposing Robert Taylor. The hard-nosed family patriarch sees his eldest son as a drunk and a failure, incapable of righting his wrongs and leading the Lawsons to prosperity.
For Dorman, tackling a role that approached issues such as domestic violence, alcoholism and masculinity was confronting but ultimately necessary.
“I’ve looked at it like a young man who measures himself on the laurels of his father or the boots of his father. He’s the type of character who looks up and knows that he’ll never be able to fill those shoes, but hasn’t realised that he has his own shoes. All he has to do is just be himself and stop trying to be someone else,” Dorman tells me. “For me, the trajectory of that was him running through to the bottom. He has to reach the bottom before he can bounce and start coming back up.”
“If you look at the character that I play, the way that it’s crushed him and he’s become so small and is filled with doubt and doesn’t have hope anymore. How do you drag yourself off the floor, get back up and put your boots on and keep walking? I love those stories where you get to see a character that’s so far gone come back.”
In our chat, Dorman diplomatically sways between topics, recalling past projects with a kind of quiet, fatherly enthusiasm. After almost two decades in the industry, the actor has amassed a varied filmography that can only be described as deeply eclectic. To him, no one project is more important than another, but there are certainly moments that stand out.
In 2021, Dorman stepped into one of the most anticipated positions in Netflix production history, joining the cast of The Straw Hats as Gol D. Roger in the smash live-action series One Piece. As he explains, while any actor would be grateful for the opportunity to join the project, he had a special connection to the original anime.
“One Piece was a book that I got my son, all of them actually, and it was the first thing that he ever read,” he explains. “That experience was so fun. It’s so short, so brief, but I get to play the character that starts the whole thing off. He’s the Pirate King. He’s the one that sparks the adventure. And yeah, good people, beautiful time, great space in the world. It was a wonderful experience.”
The series was a global smash. Skyrocketing up the Netflix charts, One Piece amassed a whopping 37.8 million views in its first two weeks, received a 96 per cent Audience Score from 10,000+ Rotten Tomatoes ratings and generated over 4 billion search impressions on TikTok alone. By any metric, it was a universal phenomenon, but remarkably, it almost didn’t happen.
“Initially, when I got the call from (the One Piece producers) asking if I’d be able to come and play, they wanted me to do a role that would take a few months,” he says. “I just didn’t have the time, and it was a “respectfully decline” even though I wished that I could have had that opportunity to go and do something that my son loves so much. Amazingly, they came back and said, ‘Well, what time do you have?’”
The two-week adventure would see the actor travel halfway around the world, filming his parts in a whirlwind session in Cape Town. His character, the Pirate King Gol D. Roger, is arguably the most important character in the series, responsible for laying the foundations for the much-loved franchise.
A short-lived role with blockbuster proportions, his portrayal would kick-start a live-action phenomenon that even Dorman didn’t see coming, but such is the tale of his remarkable, albeit unheralded, career. Despite leading a string of multi-part epics and action-adventures, Dorman remains somewhat of an industry enigma.
Hollywood is still trying to figure out what to make of Michael Dorman. An undeniable talent with a knack for disappearing into roles and emerging unrecognisable from the rubble of his past persona, the homegrown actor should be, by all accounts, a household name. But even through blockbuster success, Dorman’s star shines under a glimmer of anonymity. Perhaps, as I’m inclined the believe after spending some time with the actor, he likes it that way.
Territory premiered on Netflix on Thursday, October 24, 2024. The six-episode original series is available to stream globally, with episodes ranging in length from around 50 minutes to a dramatic 70-minute finale.
