There’s one problem with becoming famous for playing an iconic TV character. Gyton Grantley, aka Underbelly’s Carl Williams, knows it all too well.
“What’s frustrating is Underbelly was in 2008, and ever since then I’ve been offered fat guys, fat bumbling morons – and I’m not actually that fat,” Gyton tells TV WEEK. “I can play that character, but generally, I’m the opposite of that. I’m a reasonably fit, intelligent kind of human being!”
Gyton is speaking to TV WEEK from Italy, where he’s living with his wife and their three children. He’s currently appearing in Human Error as Allan Carter, a suburban dad, deep in debt, who thinks he can get himself out of trouble by becoming a hitman.
“Let’s just say this: the gun felt very familiar in my hand,” Gyton adds.
Allan Carter may be another bumbling criminal, but, with his long hair and beard, looks very different from Carl Williams. Gyton says one of Human Error’s directors, Mat King, encouraged him to get “as messy as possible”, back when he was still living in Melbourne.
“Mat and I are friends – our kids go to the same school,” Gyton explains. “He’d run into me at drop-off and say, ‘Don’t cut your hair! Don’t change your beard!’ So I did hold off on the grooming for a while.”
But Gyton says he likes his hair long anyway: “I’ve got the mandatory middle-aged man bun at the moment,” he jokes. “I couldn’t afford a Porsche!”
Gyton, 44, has been living on the Italian island of Sardinia with his wife Alex Ortuso and children Rocco, eight, Sohi, five, and three-year-old Olive, for just over a year now. Alex is Italian-Australian, and she has dual citizenship.
“We wanted to have the experience of living in another country, in another culture, learning the language,” Gyton explains. “I’m a Queenslander, so it’s been very nice to be in a warm climate.”
He says Rocco, Sohi and Olive love life in Italy. They spend a lot of time at the beach and have made plenty of friends.
“I was asking Olive the other day if she remembers home, and she doesn’t even remember our house back in Melbourne,” he says.
The food is “incredible”, and the family regularly eat pasta for lunch, but Gyton says he’s not putting on weight.
“Everyone walks everywhere. We’re doing 20,000 steps a day. My son started telling me, ‘You’ve increased your exercise 100 per cent.’”
Gyton would like to get acting work in Italy – “Silvia Colloca [the Italian-born actress and cooking-show personality married to actor Richard Roxburgh] has introduced me to her agent over here” – but accepts that his “lack of Italian” might make that difficult. For now, he’s teaching acting, recording voiceovers in his bedroom studio and occasionally returning to Australia for jobs.
A job he recently returned for is a new show where teams of celebrities take a road trip across Australia. Gyton is paired up with comedian Nikki Osborne, who he’s known for 25 years.
“We studied acting at QUT, 1999 to 2001, so we’re old friends,” he explains.
With two-and-a-half decades of acting behind him, Gyton has played a lot more than just bumbling criminals. He was Kane in House Husbands, a World War I soldier in Beneath Hill 60, and Ron Weasley in the stage production of Harry Potter And The Cursed Child. One thing he’s still hanging out to do: star in an action movie.
“I’d like to shave my head, put on 20 kilos of muscle and be a B-grade action star, driving fast cars and jumping off buildings,” he says. “That’d be fun.”
While Gyton and his family love Italy, there are things about Australia they miss.
“We can’t find Blu Tack anywhere,” Gyton says. “We miss Kmart – my wife asked me to FaceTime her and walk her through Kmart when I was back in Australia – and I miss people [drivers] indicating at roundabouts.
“There are plenty of things we miss, for sure. We’re definitely coming back.”
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