On Getting The Shit Kicked Out Of Him By Tom Cruise

Every year, Australian actors make the pilgrimage to Hollywood in search of fame and fortune on the world stage. Some find it in action, some find it in comedy. And some, like Josh Helman, find it by getting the shit kicked out of them by Tom Cruise.

The 30-year-old South Australian had a few local credits to his name — a handful of Home And Away episodes, a bit part in Animal Kingdom — before taking off for the States, and since his relocation he's worked with some pretty big names. He played the younger incarnation of mutant-hating military man Stryker in Bryan Singer's X-Men: Days Of Future Past and upcoming X-Men Apocalypse and a rampaging War Boy in George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road.

"I figured most of the people auditioning for that role would be doing it a certain way, very aggressively, so I tried to push against that."

But it was his performance as Jeb, a thug for hire tasked with taking out Cruise's Jack Reacher — only to find himself nursing fractures, lacerations and a pair of messed-up testes after a vicious Reacher beatdown — that got the ball rolling for Helman.

"I was getting auditions for a lot of dipshit jocks and violent idiots," recalls Helman with a laugh. "But I loved the Jack Reacher script and I was a fan of [writer-director] Chris McQuarrie so I was just excited to go in. And I figured most of the people auditioning for that role would be doing it a certain way, very aggressively, so I tried to push against that. I credit Chris for giving me an American career."

Helman has been working steadily since then — when we caught up with him, he was in Vancouver, filming a sizeable supporting role in the spooky TV series Wayward Pines — and while his characters have tended to be aggressive or at least intimidating (he's a solid 6' 2", after all), they are also allowing for a little more nuance.

The dark, enthralling eight-episode TV drama Flesh And Bone, available soon on DVD and Blu-ray, revolves around Claire (Sarah Hay), a talented dancer trying to escape a painful past by making a name for herself in a prestigious New York ballet company. But even though she has the ability to excel, the cutthroat nature of professional ballet makes it difficult. And the demons of her past only add to her mounting anxiety.

Her relationship with her brother Bryan, played by Helman, is one of those demons. We won't discuss it in great depth here — some things are best left to the series itself — but Helman was quickly able to discern from reading the script for the first episode that "the role would be an incredible challenge".

"I was intrigued from the start by how to find the humanity in someone like Bryan and not play him as some kind of villain," he says. "Depending on what a show's schedule is like, they'll give the actors all the scripts for the entire season in advance. For Flesh And Bone, they were kind of protecting us from what was coming. I knew there would be an interesting development with the characters, but it wasn't until I started getting the scripts every couple of weeks that it really started coming into focus."

Getting inside Bryan's head required extensive research into post-traumatic stress disorder and what Helman calls "unusual childhood development and relationships", but also a lot of discussion with Flesh And Bone's team of writers, and primarily its creator Moira Walley-Beckett (whose previous credits include Breaking Bad).

"I knew if I was on the same page as Moira I'd be ok," he says. "We had almost exactly the same idea about who Bryan was, what was motivating him and what his damage was. From there I let all of that sink into my subconscious and allowed to emerge whatever felt right for Bryan and Claire. There was definitely a lot of mixed-up darkness I tried to get hold of."