It has been a decade since KuGompo City-born and bred actor Frank Rautenbach returned to SA from Los Angeles, where his dreams of making it big brought him to his knees.
Rautenbach, 54, famously became a limousine driver to make ends meet and also worked as a church janitor to put food on the table for himself and wife Leigh, while auditioning for roles that sadly failed to materialise.
He should have been a shoo-in in Hollywood.
Before playing slain photographer Ken Oosterbroek in the hit movie The Bang Bang Club alongside a Hollywood cast, he was already a big name in the SA film and television world, having made his name in 7de Laan and starring in Faith Like Potatoes and Hansie.
Since his return to home soil, Rautenbach has been in constant demand.
A week ago he was in Cape Town, reflecting on the mountain of work he has been fortunate enough to enjoy.
He spoke to the Daily Dispatch in the penthouse of Camps Bay’s The Bay Hotel ahead of facing the media at the Silwerskerm Film Festival at the premiere of SA author Deon Meyer’s latest book adaptation.
In Invisible, which is based on Meyer’s 2007 book Blood Safari, Rautenbach plays the role of Jacobus le Roux, starring alongside Australian actress Abbie Cornish, who plays his sister Emma, as well as local stars Tim Theron, Tumisho Masha, Siv Ngesi and Kim Engelbrecht.
Although he relished the complex role, Rautenbach says he has always wanted play Benny Griessel, a middle-aged, hard-bitten cop who appears in several Meyer bestsellers.
“I’ve read most of his books and I’ve always imagined I could play Benny Griessel.
“They are the kind of books you can get lost in and before I know it, I’ve read 200 pages.
“My biggest dream is to play Bennie Griessel. I’ve got enough scars to play Bennie ...”
The scars could well be the emotional ones resulting from the hardships he endured in LA, but for Rautenbach they contributed to the making of him.
When he stood ankle-deep in the contents of overflowing church toilets in his janitor job, he had an epiphany: no matter how bad things got, he was still loved.
“The States were definitively a struggle. It was like being in a storm.
“But since then I’ve been able to look back, especially when I wrote my book The Vagabond and I kind of look at it like the life of Joseph.
“If you read the account in Genesis, he was sold as a slave.
“He suffered. He was jailed, he went through a lot of tough stuff, but when he looked back he goes ‘What was meant for evil was God’s purpose anyway to change him into someone that was useful’.
“And when I look back at that time period in my life, it was the opposite of a waste of time.
“Because when I stood on Easter Sunday 2015 in an inch of sewage water because the toilets had flooded and it was my job to clean them and I could hear everyone upstairs having a great time, I smiled the biggest smile ever because I realised here I am at the lowest of the low but I still feel deeply loved, I still feel like I have an identity that I’m not ashamed of and I thought what a gift that is — to be able to be taken there to find out something that you could never find out in any other way.
“We spend our lives avoiding those experiences. We work ourselves to death avoiding those experiences, but why?
“We have a shame that we don’t want the world to see but if God loves me, why am I ashamed?
“Once you know that then the rest is biscuits!”
In the years since leaving the US, Rautenbach has had back-to-back work, but never takes his success for granted.
“Since I’ve been back, I haven’t stopped working. It’s been unusual.
“I now know that you can’t take this for granted. There’s a difference between thinking you’re that good that’s why you’re working a lot, versus this is grace allowing me to work because I know this could be taken away from me in a heartbeat — because it’s happened before.
“I’ve loved all the work I’ve done — Warrior, an American show, right through to doing Invisible and everything in-between — Summertide, Beter As Gister, Lioness and Unseen on Netflix and 14 seasons of my talk show Hier Sit die Manne — there’s so much work that’s happened.”
And yet, just when it seemed that making it in America was a distant dream, that country came a-calling.
“A couple of months ago, I got a call from a really good management company in LA that saw Summertide and they said they were so surprised I was not represented in America. They said they would love to represent me.
“So as of last month, I have representation in America again, which doesn’t mean anything except that I now have access to that market and if anything comes up I have someone in my corner helping to steer my career in that direction.”
Anyone who watches television will also have noticed Rautenbach in a series of insurance adverts which help pay the bills and make his work as an actor financially possible.
He does some rapid mental maths, calculating how many of the commercials he has shot.
“They’ve been a real blessing. I’ve shot 22 commercials in total.
“Advertising pays well, obviously, and so these ads give me the leverage to keep doing this.
“Because to be honest, in the kind of suffering the industry has gone through not only in South Africa, but worldwide, a lot of people have had to leave the industry because you just can’t make a living wage any more.
“So I look back and say that this has been amazing grace and I’m extremely grateful. And also, that I’ve done work that I love and am proud of.”
When he got the call that he would be part of a new Meyer television series, he was thrilled.
“My character Jacobus le Roux is a bit of an enigma in that you hear him in the first five seconds of the show but you don’t know who he is.
“His sister Emma is played by Abbie Cornish and the brother and sister have not spoken to each other in about 20 years and as the show unfolds, you’ll find out why.
“Jacobus is not a baddie, he is a victim of circumstance. It was very lekker to play him.
“He’s a complex character. He went into game ranging and he discovers something that he should never have seen. A high level government thing.
“And they tell him if you tell anyone you are done, so he escapes and has been in hiding all this time and has the biggest secret that he holds.
“I compare him to a guy who went to Angola in the 1970s and mid-1980s and doesn’t want to talk about it. I have an older brother who went to Angola and doesn’t talk about it.”
Playing opposite Cornish was all the more smooth because he had met her before.
“I had quite a lot of scenes with Abbie who is Australian but lives in LA. She is a brilliant actress.
“I was thrown in the deep end because the very first scene with her is emotional because the brother and sister have not seen each other for so long.
“I met her on the Bang Bang Club when she was dating Ryan Phillipe who starred in it!
“So there was an immediate familiarity and we could play brother and sister nicely.
“But it was very intense scenes because by the time he meets up with his sister he can’t wait to tell someone what happened. He just wants to get rid of this burden.
“The challenge of playing a character like that is that he has got to believe what he’s done up to that point is the best he could have done.
“He’d made so many mistakes, but had to own them.”
As is typical in Meyer thrillers, combat comes into play and Rautenbach is relieved he was in good shape ahead of filming the fight scenes.
“It was very physical. I gym always so I didn’t have to prepare. Because when you’re 54 and okes throw you across the room, most 54-year-olds will fall apart.
“I was sore afterwards . . . I know how to handle a rifle too.”
Although Rautenbach did not meet Meyer, who also co-wrote the screenplay, during the shooting of Invisible, he did bump into the author and his wife Marianne a month ago at the airport.
“Neels van Jaarsveld was with me, and he was in another series of Deon’s and so he goes ‘Hey, hello Deon’ and both Deon and his wife Marianne look at me and say ‘Jacobus!’
“They greeted me by my character’s name! They’d been watching rushes and edits for months so they know who Jacobus is. So I said ‘hi, I’m Frank’, so it was very cool.”
Shooting Invisible in Hoedspruit near Kruger Park was a bonus.
“I love the Lowveld, it’s beautiful and we stayed at Moditlo Lodge.
“It was flipping hot but I got to ride a scrambler bike which I used to do as a kid on the dunes at Nahoon Reef.
“It was all dirt roads and sandy back then and it was a jol. There was no walkway there, it was just open. So it took me back to that.”
Rautenbach visited his home town last year when he was the guest of honour at his alma mater Selborne College’s founder’s day in October.
“They gave me a lovely Bearer of the Palm award and I was very honoured. It was unexpected.
“I made a speech and it brought back so many memories. My best school years were at Selborne.”
While there, he took wife Leigh to visit some some of his old stomping grounds.
“I took her to Nahoon Beach and then I played at the East London golf course — I’m passionate about golf. And we went to Sanook!
“I didn’t get to surf and I was really, really sad that I didn’t. But I couldn’t take my golf clubs, my surfboard and my wetsuit with me.
“I was flying from one job to another — I was a Travelling Wilbury already.”
· Invisible will premiere on M-Net (DStv Channel 101) from October 14.
