More than 20 years after Neighbours, Jesse Spencer returns to Australian TV

After 18 years on US network television, where he clocked up 173 episodes on the medical drama House, and then another 205 episodes on Chicago Fire, Jesse Spencer knew he was home in Australia when he turned up for work late one day, and no one blinked.

“In the States, it’s such a factory mindset, and you’ve got to be there on time, and if you’re not on time, they’re calling up the production office, and calls go around if you’re five minutes late and everybody knows,” says Spencer.

“So I come in with this [US mindset] – you show up, early, preferably, and if you’re on time, you’re late – but I showed up once, like, 10 minutes late to the set, and I was panicking, ‘How did this happen?’ And I walked in, and the crew looked at me, shocked that I was even there.

“And they said, ‘Well, do you want to get a coffee?’ I thought it was going to be like, ‘Hey, go get into make-up, now. We gotta go here’. I had to learn to undo that production-line [mentality]. I had to learn to lay back.”

The 45-year-old actor was back home for the retro Disney+ series, Last Days of the Space Age. It’s Spencer’s first starring role on Australian television in more than 20 years, where he became a household name in Neighbours as Billy Kennedy, the spunky youngest son of Karl and Susan Kennedy, boyfriend of Anne Wilkinson and all-round teen heart-throb.

“I was looking for an Australian production, probably since 2004,” says Spencer over Zoom from his home in Boston. “We have this hiatus, but network TV, the schedule of it – sometimes I had six weeks off, sometimes a little more – but to make a production work is really difficult. Once you’re in [network TV], it’s very hard to get out of.”

So when Spencer left Chicago Fire in 2020 (he’s been back since in a guest role), he jumped at Last Days of the Space Age and the opportunity to return to Australia. Did he realise he was coming, well, semi-circle, playing a dad who lives in a cul-de-sac?

“It’s Neighbours on steroids,” he says, laughing. “[Reading the scripts], I never saw it as a cul-de-sac. And then when we showed up, Radha Mitchell, who plays Judy, my wife – we never really worked together on Neighbours, but we met on Neighbours – we were just going, ‘Oh my god, are we Neighbours in the ’70s?’”

They’re not. I’m pretty sure Neighbours has never touched on industrial disputes, Aboriginal land rights or the Miss Universe pageant, as Last Days of the Space Age does. “This one’s a little edgier,” says Spencer. “We could take this project in different directions that they probably can’t do on Neighbours.”

Set over six weeks in 1979, it follows the Bissett family – dad Tony, mum Judy and their teenage daughters Mia (Emily Grant) and Tilly (Mackenzie Mazur) – who live in Perth’s beachside suburb of Scarborough, as well as their neighbours, relatives and friends. Created by Australian-Welsh writer David Chidlow, it also stars Deborah Mailman as their neighbour Eileen Wilberforce, Scottish actor Iain Glenn, as Judy’s dad Bob, Jacek Koman as the handler of the Russian Miss Universe entrant and Heartbreak High’s Thomas Weatherall as Eileen’s grandson Bilya.

Although everything about their lives screams 1970s – the gloriously yellow and brown interiors, the Tupperware parties and the school careers counsellor who suggests working in a department store is the best career a girl can hope for – change is happening. And while some cope with it better than others, Spencer’s character, who is leading workers on strike at the local power plant, struggles to find a place for himself in the coming new world order.

“He’s got his family and he’s got his job and he’s got to keep those workers together,” says Spencer. “In the meantime, his wife is working for the company, so technically, she’s crossed the picket line, and it’s a fracture in their relationship.

“And then as we go on in the series, things get worse for Tony, his pride is kicked, and his wife has a coming-of-age, almost. As a housewife, she just wanted a stable family and for everything to be normal, and she’s propelled into this rise where she finds the potential in herself is brought forwards and she starts to believe in herself.”

Spencer then wonders if he can say audiences will be “rooting” for the families in the show.

Since he’s been in the US for the last 20 years, I’ll allow it.

“That one’s stuck in my craw, and I don’t know why I can’t get rid of it,” he says, shaking his head.

Stuck in my craw! That is a very American expression. He’s fully gone to the other side.

“It’s terrible, I’ll tell you,” he says. “OK, we are barracking for these families, how about that?”

That Spencer slips in the odd Americanism – he later struggles to pronounce the Sydney suburb of Kirribilli, but puts that down to being raised in Melbourne more than anything else – is no great surprise. When he left Neighbours after more than 400 episodes in 2000 (Billy was sent to the place from which characters rarely return, Queensland), Spencer spent a few years in the UK, before a call from his manager changed his career.

“I wasn’t sure if I was going to quit acting,” he says. I was in my fourth year in the UK, I got a place at Monash [University in Melbourne], and I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m working occasionally’ – I did a film in New York, and even did [the Geoffrey Rush/Judy Davis film] Swimming Upstream – but I was like, I’m not feeling like I’m actually getting anywhere or going in the direction I really wanted.

“And then House came along, and I think that’s why I got it because I’d sort of given up and I didn’t [want to] go in for that audition because I was like, ‘well, I’m not going to get it’. And my agent was like, ‘Jesse, what else are you doing today?’ I was like, ‘I’m going to the pub’. She went, ‘Just do me a favour.’

“So I ended up flying over to the States, I bought my own ticket – it was £800, probably the best £800 I’ve spent – one way over to LA to audition in front of the network.”

The medical drama, which starred Hugh Laurie as the show’s irascible namesake, was an international hit, picking up Emmys, Golden Globes and a Peabody award. In 2008, it was named the most watched show in the world. Apart from Laurie, Spencer was the only cast member to stay with the show for its entire eight-season run. He then jumped straight into Chicago Fire, cementing a career that’s quite unusual for many actors – unless you’re on Neighbours or Home and Away – 18 years of steady employment.

“It taught me a lot,” he says of the experience of working in the US. “The long days that we used to do on network TV, sometimes we used to do 16, I think the max was an 18-hour day. I was driving home at 6am or 7am, going, ‘I probably shouldn’t be driving right now, I feel a bit weird, but I think I’m gonna be OK’. It’s this work ethic in the States, they work so hard here [in the US], and it’s driven into them quite early.

“I don’t mind doing that, but I was glad to step away from that because after 20 years, network TV can burn you out.”

Spencer still gets recognised from his Neighbours days – and has made a couple of video cameos since he left, including in a message for the show’s final episode on Ten in 2022 (it has since been resurrected on Amazon Prime Video). A 40-something British friend, who watched the show religiously after school, was in raptures when I told him I was interviewing Spencer. “No way,” he said. “I was so Team Billy when he and Anne were in a love triangle with Fanto.”

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“I’ve been in the industry 30-plus years, so you see different generations that react to different things,” he says. “So, any Brit around my age, it will all be Neighbours. With House, it’s a different set [of fans]. House is a weird thing because it’s still got academics and physicians that watch it now, so it covers a really wide range, but a lot of intellectual types and people in academia who are more brainy and they like that sort of stuff.

“And then Chicago Fire, whenever I’m in Chicago, any Midwestern family knows me. They have no idea what Neighbours is.”

Apart from hoping for a second season of Last Days of the Space Age, Spencer is now untethered, workwise, for the first time in a long time. He’s busy at home – his wife is expecting their second daughter – but he is now living the life of a regular schmegular actor, who is just looking for the next job.

“It is a really weird, strange transition to do 18 years of network and then just stop on a dime,” he says. “But thankfully, with the distraction of babies and children and cooking, being domestic, I’ve been taking a step back.

“I do miss the full-time thing, but also not really. Chicago was really tough. We’re out there in the outdoors, in the [firefighting] gear and putting out fires. It was 10 years of minus 20 degrees [Fahrenheit]. I’d be standing out there some days, and it’d be like, ‘It’s colder out here than it is on Mars, right?’ So that stuff I don’t miss. I miss the people I worked with and actually doing the job. But, yeah, it is a little strange to step away from it.”

I’m sure Karl and Susan would welcome him back to 28 Ramsay Street with open arms. After all, his portrait with TV siblings Malcolm and Libby still hangs in the Kennedy house.

“That’s a classic,” he says, laughing. “I’m sure that thing’s like Banksy now, that thing’s worth money.”

It probably belongs in the National Portrait Gallery – an Australian icon.

“Then I can retire.”

Last Days of the Space Age streams on Disney+ from October 2.

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