It’s been a long time since Jesse Spencer was actually allowed to use his Australian accent. So long, in fact, that the Melbourne-born actor had to re-learn it for his new role in Disney+ series Last Days Of The Space Age.
“I had to work on my dialect a bit, because being in front of the camera for 10 years doing American [accents], it was hard to switch that off,” Jesse, 45, recalls. “I was so used to going [to that accent]. It’s weird how hard it is to let it go.”
Jesse earned plenty of Aussie fans playing Billy Kennedy on Neighbours from 1994 until he left the soap in 2000 to follow the well-trodden path to the US to try his luck in Hollywood.
And luck, as it happens, was on Jesse’s side. He landed two long-running roles on much-loved American series: as Dr Robert Chase on medical show House and firefighter Matt Casey on Chicago Fire.
Though he’s grateful for his overseas success, Jesse tells TV WEEK that he’d been looking for a smaller project like Last Days to take on after almost two decades of gruelling shoots in the US.
“With network TV in the States, the schedule is just nuts. I used to think the Neighbours schedule was crazy, but network TV blows it out of the water,” Jesse says with a laugh. “It’s just so many hours on set and then weekends, and it’s a real, real grind. So I’d always looked for [smaller] projects and then was never quite able to make them happen.
“I left Chicago Fire, and then I started a family, and I was doing that for a while,” Jesse adds. “Then Last Days of the Space Age came up. It was nice to be able to just work for a few months on my first Aussie project in over 20 years. I was so excited to do it.”
The eight-part series is set in Perth in 1979 and explores how several families navigate this period of huge social change – when the world had weathered the Vietnam War and was deep in the throes of the Cold War, the space race had been and gone, and the women’s rights movement was louder than ever.
“It’s about families, love and loss, hope and change and transformation,” Jesse explains. “And those themes are universal.”
Jesse stars as Tony, a husband and father currently on strike from the power company he works for over pay disputes. Complicating matters is the fact that his progressive wife Judy (Radha Mitchell), works at the same company and isn’t striking, due to the fact that someone needs to provide for their family.
The pair lead an ensemble cast including Deborah Mailman and Game Of Thrones actor Iain Glen, who plays Judy’s father.
The characters are shown dealing with the social issues of the time – like racism, sexism, homophobia, and gender inequality – in different ways.
“It’s a mishmash of people who are trying to move beyond certain ideals and then people who are stuck, which creates for good dynamics,” Jesse says of the series, in which his character has two headstrong teenage daughters, played by Emily Grant and Mackenzie Mazur.
“It’s funny, even Tony, he’s quite a modern father. He wants his daughters to go out and, you know, go get ‘em,” Jesse points out. “But then he’ll tell his brother, who’s homosexual, ‘Can’t you just get married?’ So he’s caught in between those two worlds on certain issues.”
While Last Days is set the same year Jesse was born, he did feel a certain nostalgia when filming began.
“Even though the show is set in 1979 and I don’t remember any of this, it’s familiar. The sets that they used, and the cars – I used to have a ‘69 HR Holden [like in the show]. They wanted me to do a driving test and I was like, ‘I got this. I can do this with my eyes closed!’” Jesse laughs.
“And the outfits – they tried to put me in Stubbies shorts for a minute, I looked like a footy player!”
It’s not the first time Jesse has felt nostalgic for his home country in recent years, having filmed scenes for the 2022 Neighbours finale, before it was revived.
“This is how old-school my cousins are, they sent me, like, a DVD of the episode,” he recalls. “But I haven’t been able to watch it.”
Jesse muses that it’s the end of an era now that Ryan Moloney, who played the long-running character of Toadie, has departed the soap.
“So many people grew up with him and the Kennedys on the screen,” he reflects. “I have Brits telling me ‘They [the Kennedys] were kind of like my family. They were always there.’”
So now that he’s got the taste for working in Australia again, can we expect Jesse to pop up in more homegrown projects?
“Absolutely,” Jesse teases. “Maybe me and Ryan Moloney will do something together. Our big return!”
Stream Last Days Of The Space Age on Disney Plus from $13.99/mth.
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