Australian actor Andrew Lees is an actor on the rise. Melbourne born Lees made his acting debut in the Steven Spielberg/Tom Hanks led The Pacific before then earning roles in Home And Away, H20, Rescue Special Ops and Dance Academy. It was after he made the brave decision to move to the US though that things really took off.
Not long after landing in the States Lees one of the role of vampire on a mission Lucien Castle in the third season of hit television series The Originals. Getting to play the main villain for a season showed casting agents what Lees was capable of and now before the end of the year we will see him on the big screen in a new thriller titled Unfriended: Dark Web and alongside Hugo Weaving and Stephen Lang sci-fi adventure Mortal Engines.
Lees is one of the special guests at Oz Comic Con in Melbourne this year and Dave Griffiths was lucky enough to sit down and talk to him before hand. As we talk about his time playing Lucien he tells us that he very nearly didn’t get the role at all. “I’d been for a few auditions and been in the running for a few characters on Vampire Diaries but this was my first audition for The Originals,” he explains. “I did the audition and then it was a month of hearing nothing and then one Thursday at 5pm my agent called me up and said ‘oh you got that one, they’ve booked it you need to be out of the house and on a plane at 5am tomorrow morning. You have to move to Atlanta for perhaps a week or two or maybe even nine months.’ I actually thought that I had ruined the audition because we had this helicopter hovering outside the audition, teh first scene was great and then during the second scene this chopper comes along and I’m like ‘great’. They got me to wait in the waiting room, then I came back in and then as soon as I started the scene again the chopper came back. That happened twice so I walked out of there thinking that the first scene was great but that the second scene had me so distracted that I thought it was gone.”
So what has him the most excited about appearing at Oz Comic-Con? “I’ve never done a comic con in Australia,” he says excited. “It is so amazing to be able to be back in the city that I was born in and actually get to meet the fans here, it is going to be such a different experience to what all the U.S. ones have been like. I’m just excited to do it because I’ve never had the opportunity to do it before.”
Oz Comic Con is being held in Melbourne on 9-10 June. Tickets can be purchased here. You can listen to the full Andrew Lees interview below.
No Comments