Ewen Leslie is the man you would not want to be left alone with and cannot quite write off: the damaged settler, the controlling husband. Rarely showy, he is at his best when a film needs someone frightening who does not know it.
Fi1m perspective
The part Ewen Leslie gets offered, over and over, is the man you would not want to be left alone with and cannot quite write off. Critics keep noticing it: the damaged settler, the manipulative husband, the soldier in the bush who believes he is only following orders. He has said that Warwick Thornton, casting him in Sweet Country (2017), "didn't want him to just be a monster", and that instruction could stand over most of his screen work since.
He came to film from the stage, and it shows in the way he holds still in a scene rather than filling it. He graduated from WAAPA in 2000, took the lead in Jewboy (2005), then moved to Sydney and spent the better part of a decade in the theatre: Prince Hal and Henry V opposite Cate Blanchett in The War of the Roses (2009), Richard III (2010), and a place in the Sydney Theatre Company's ensemble after Philip Seymour Hoffman directed him in Riflemind (2007). Screen work came back in earnest from the mid-2010s, with The Daughter (2015) for Simon Stone, Sweet Country, The Nightingale (2018) for Jennifer Kent, and television including Top of the Lake: China Girl (2017) and The Cry (2018).
Two of those films are on our books. In The Nightingale he plays Goodwin, in Leviticus (2026) he plays Rod, and in neither case did our review stop to mention him. We do not think that is a failure on his part. We came out of The Nightingale shaken by its middle hour and could not have told you afterwards what Goodwin looked like, and we mean that as a description of the part rather than a complaint: Kent's film belongs to Aisling Franciosi and Baykali Ganambarr, and a supporting man who pulled focus from them would have broken it. Leviticus is Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen's film for the same reason.
The reputation rests elsewhere: on Harry March in Sweet Country, which critics single out for the trauma under the violence; on Oliver Finch in The Daughter, decency going wrong by degrees; on Alistair Robertson in The Cry, a husband viewers found hard to like and hard to look away from. The one reservation that follows him is the one you would expect of a Shakespearean lead among Thornton's non-professional cast: that the professionals occasionally play a size too big for the film around them. It is a fair note and a small one.
He has talked about spending much of the job trying to upend what people assume he can do, and the animated voice work alongside the killers and the soldiers suggests he means it. Whether a director gives him the chance is another matter. Until one does, he is the best kind of supporting actor: the one the lead ought to be frightened of.
Biography
Ewen Leslie is an Australian actor. Born on 27 July 1980 in Fremantle, Western Australia, he began acting in school plays at the age of ten and appeared in the children's television series Ship to Shore from the age of twelve. He received a scholarship to study at John Curtin College of the Arts and graduated from the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts in 2000.
Leslie has had a prominent career in theatre, joining the Sydney Theatre Company Actors Company in 2008. He played Prince Hal/Henry V opposite Cate Blanchett in The War of the Roses (2009), for which he won a Helpmann Award and a Sydney Theatre Award. He later played Richard III for the Melbourne Theatre Company (2010), earning a second Helpmann Award, and appeared in Riflemind directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman.
On screen, his film roles include the lead in Jewboy (2005), Goodwin in The Nightingale (2018), Harry March in Sweet Country (2018), and Rod in Leviticus (2026). He has voiced Pigling Bland in the Peter Rabbit films (2018, 2021) and appeared in series such as Colin from Accounts (2022) and The Stranger (2022).
