In his latest performance as John D’Agata in “The Lifespan of a Fact”, award-winning actor Steve Mouzakis masters a tightrope walk between facts and the truth. His real life, too, has also been one where lines and definitions are blurred.

“Well, I’m an actor, so I’m interpreting things all the time. I’m taking people’s words and doing things with them. There is always in my world poetic licence, so that’s not a foreign concept to me in terms of interpretation – a process which starts here and lands somewhere else,” he told Neos Kosmos.

“That’s something I’m very used to and I’m comfortable with.”

As a consumer of the news, he would like to believe that what he is reading is presented as factual – and that is what the Melbourne Theatre Company’s production, presented at Melbourne’s Art Centre grapples with.

The somewhat accurate, sort of fiction, non-fiction story was a Broadway success which, in its current adaptation, hits the mark as far as consumption of the news is concerned amid a global pandemic.

“The play is based on a book written prior to COVID, in 2019 so they had an awareness of what was going on in the world with fake news, though it doesn’t actually directly reference any of these things,” he said in regards to the play’s birth during the Trump era. “We did a lot of research and it seemed to us timely.”

As the essayist John D’Agata, who writes about a Las Vegas suicide, the character Mr Mouzakis plays locks horns with recent graduate Jim Fingal (Karl Richmond) tasked with fact-checking his work by editor Emily Penrose (Nadine Garner) – and so begins an epic ideological battle over the nature of truth and the value of storytelling.

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There are many things in the play that never happened. For instance, when John D’Agata took his mother to see the Broadway adaptation of his non-fiction book where he is one of the central characters, he had to explain why she was dead in the version of his life being staged.

Being Greek, and taking liberties

Mr Mouzakis’ parents have also put up with their son’s artistic liberties though they “were not involved in theatre”.

“Traditional as they were, they were very understanding and they understood that is who I was. No one has ever questioned it. Okay, I’ve questioned it,” he laughed, thinking of the tough times that are part and parcel of the job.

“Can you make a living out of this? Can you be successful? I always thought that I could at some level. A lot of the things that I dreamt about as a child have happened already,” he said. “If someone had said to me 20 or 25 years ago that I could be working in films and television and I could travel and I could work internationally, and work with people all around the world and do plays and all that, I would have said ‘yes’.”

Despite growing up far from the stage in the Melbourne suburbs, having a “very traditional working class family upbringing”, Mr Mouzakis always had a flare for the theatrical. “From a very young age I would impersonate people in my family. I would impersonate whoever caught my eye and would mimic people. I told a lot of stories, and in my teenage years, I had a love of film,” he said remembering the small video library that opened up around the corner when the family moved to Lower Templestowe, where he and his cousin would spend a lot of time discovering film classics. “I went from John Belushi and the Blues Brothers to Robert De Niro, and the Godfather, and Al Pacino. These were all my heroes. Sean Penn, Marlon Brando and it just went on and on. And I remember saying in my mind, ‘That’s what I want to do’. I was very taken,” he said.

The price performers pay

But at university he graduated from Arts and Engineering before being accepted into the Victorian College of the Arts “and that is what my life has been ever since”, fraught with insecurity but “with insecurity there’s always the possibility, there’s always the thing you’ve never thought about, the place you’ve never been to, the story you’ve never told, just there, waiting, and that’s something I’m very attracted to.”

The thespian ‘buzz’ comes at a price for those who work in the arts and entertainment industry. “Generally, when crises happen, and that can be any crisis, financial or otherwise, funding for the arts is the first thing to go and the last to come back,” he said, adding that the insecurity most people experienced during COVID is pretty much what performers feel anyway.
“The industry does come together to try and support people through the union,” he said, adding that he has survived doing many other jobs, “but I have never been defined by them” though his life, as an actor as been enriched by the “life lessons from people you, never under normal circumstances, might meet.”

As he looks to the future, he looks forward to the release of “Clickbait”, his upcoming American-Australian drama miniseries to be featured on Netflix.

READ MORE: When work is Mouzakis to the ears

He also thinks of writing, telling his stories, and going back to the golden sand beach of Finikounda with its postcard-perfect sunsets, where his father is from and nearby Finiki, his mother’s birthplace.

“Of course, I want to tell more stories about where I come from in the world. I want more stories about our particular culture to be on film and television,” he said, adding that as a Greek Australian, up until at least 10 years ago, the challenges were greater because “80 per cent of the work that’s going on out there you can’t have anything to do with because of your ethnicity”.

It was one of the reasons he went to the United States, where his agents asked him about all those ethnic-based characters he had performed in Australia. “They said, ‘dude, you’re white’, and I was like, ‘I know that, you know that, but they don’t understand’,” he said in reference to Australia. “For them, we’re white, so it is a different mentality.”

Looking to both the US and Australia, he points to two very multicultural environments only “there, in the US, minorities are black Hispanic, by the way they look,” he said, though he points to a big shift in Australia. “Twenty years ago I was told ‘you’re ethnic’ and now ‘you’re not really ethnic’, you’re white. But that’s not how I was treated, even though obviously I’m white,” he said.

“Everyone is being judged in some way… whether it be your looks, your ethnicity, your age, you know that everyone is being categorised,” he said.

“Perceptions are placed upon us from the outside and it’s your job to transcend what somebody says can’t be done.”

And as far as Mr Mouzakis is concerned, that’s a fact.

Nadine Garner, Steve Mouzakis and Karl Richmond star in the Australian premiere of “The Lifespan of a Fact” through to 10 July at the Fairfax Theatre of the Melbourne Arts Centre.