Dan Wyllie has been acting for 40 years. Now, he’s being ‘brutally honest’ about his career

Exclusive: Dan Wyllie has been acting for 40 years, and he still can’t quite believe his latest job.

The veteran Australian actor, 56, known to generations of viewers from Muriel’s Wedding, Logie-winning Love My Way and for providing the voice of B2 in Bananas in Pyjamas, stars as Dr Curtis Parker in The F Ward, the new Stan Original medical dramedy streaming now.

Ask him what drew him to the role, and Wyllie doesn’t dress it up at first.

“It was a job, let’s be brutally honest,” he tells nine.com.au. “It saves me digging holes. And I’m never going to be a real brain surgeon, so why not do pretend?

“No, look, they were great scripts. I’ve worked with [producer] John Edwards many, many times before. He’s basically bought me my apartment. And I loved Bump, which was Kelsey [Munro]’s previous masterwork. The stars just aligned.”

Wyllie got the job late, while overseas.

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“I flew back from London on a Saturday, and then on the Monday I was wearing my kind of Wiggles-inspired scrubs and playing a doctor with incredible jet lag,” he explains with a smile.

“The F Ward is about a group of interns on their last chance, for various reasons, stationed at a falling-down hospital so they can meet the requirements to become fully-fledged doctors,” Wyllie adds. “I play Dr Curtis Parker, who’s a registrar, which is an emergency ward triage doctor.

“The show is about the trials and tribulations of these young doctors, the challenges they face at work, in relationships, and everything else.”

The series is led by International Emmy winner Anna Friel (Pushing Daisies, Marcella) as surgeon Gloria Wall, alongside a young Australian cast including Bump breakout Ioane Sa’ula and Lola Bond. Wyllie found life imitating art as he naturally stepped into a real-life mentorship role for the younger cast.

“I rocked up on set and then it kind of dawned on me that this was what my job was on and off the show,” he recalls. “That was really enlightening. It was great.”

Playing a doctor came with its own crash course, backed by real medical advisers on set.

“It’s quite challenging playing a doctor,” he reflects. “You kind of have to learn an incredibly different, brand-new skill set and almost a foreign language. You have to walk and talk. And doctors and nurses don’t run. This is rule number one, they don’t run.

“We were lucky enough to have incredible real doctors and advisers on set all the time. You’re doing CPR and putting cannulas in people and saying a lot of Latin verbs.”

Wyllie singled out his young co-stars for praise, too.

“The younger actors, particularly Ioane [Sa’ula] and Lola [Bond], who I worked with the most, were incredibly well-prepared and up for it and full of energy,” he says. “We all just had a smashing time.”

He was equally taken with Friel, who shot all six episodes in under a month.

“She’s not that well known here,” Wyllie explains. “But I’ve got neighbours who are English, and for them, she’s a massive icon of the TV industry. They’ve known her since the ’90s. She was the first lesbian kiss on Brookside in the early ’90s.

“[The F Ward] was a pretty intensive shoot. She was basically back-to-back every day ... She’s great and an absolute powerhouse. It was a complete privilege to meet her and work with her and get to bounce off her. She was magnificent.”

Wyllie’s own credits run deep. His last role before The F Ward surprisingly also had him in scrubs.

“I played a doctor in The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which was my last job before this one, which is weird,” he continues. “That was an incredible experience, getting to work with Justin Kurzel doing his first TV show.”

He also looks back fondly on Love My Way, the acclaimed Foxtel drama that won him the 2006 TV Week Silver Logie and an Astra Award for Most Outstanding Actor, as “groundbreaking, kind of inspired a different type of TV. And really provided creative beginnings for a lot of incredible people.”

Alongside Wyllie, Love My Way starred Claudia Karvan, Asher Keddie, Brendan Cowell and a pre-Avatar Sam Worthington.

“I’ve been on some iconic Australian films and done some great theatre as well,” he says. “I don’t know where to start, it’s like picking your favourite child. It’s very unfair.”

The actor made his first major splash in the early 1990s with memorable big-screen roles like Frank Fletcher in Spotswood and the volatile neo-Nazi skinhead Cackles in the cult classic Romper Stomper. His vast filmography also includes standouts like the criminal Bluey in Chopper, the family lawyer Ezra White in the gritty crime drama Animal Kingdom, and more recently in high-profile series like Secret City and Territory.

And four decades in, Wyllie isn’t done yet.

“I’m really lucky that I’m still hanging in there and I’ve got two usable knees,” he adds. “I’ve been blessed in this industry to have worked for so long. This was a complete and wonderful surprise. So I just hope I keep getting wonderful surprises.”

Wyllie is also hopeful of a second season for The F Ward.

“I thought the series was brilliant. It was emotional. I thought the characters were great. I loved it,” he smiles, calling the local take on a crowded genre a counterpoint to the American medical drama tradition. “It’s got a beautiful Australian quality to it. It’s still very, very intense and dramatic when it needs to be, but it’s got a very different flavour to it, which I think is great.”

The F Ward episode 1 is on Nine, Wednesday after The Block.

Nine Entertainment Co (the publisher of this website) owns and operates the streaming service Stan.