To us he is top acting talent, but William McInnes happily describes himself as a ‘boofhead,’ set to return soon to NCIS: Sydney as Dr. Roy Penrose.
On set his colleagues know him for his penchant for levity and the occasional prank.
As McInnes tells TV Tonight, he was guilty of pranks as far back as his Blue Heelers days in the 1990s, when his Victoria Police costume came in handy for free food from take-aways.
“The first caterers on that were lovely people, but the food was not great. We hit on the idea of going through all the drive-throughs of Werribee. They were giving us free food, and we’d take it back to the crew. Neil Cosgrove was the Police Commissioner at the time, and I think it worked up to him, and he rang up Channel Seven and we got baked for it! It was pretty funny,” he says.
McInnes featured as Snr. Constable Nick Schultz in Mt. Thomas (“the crime capital of the world!”) for 2014 episodes.
“I thought ‘Ive got to get out of here’, when I solved the crime by reading James Clavell’s Shogun. They actually had me reading Shogun on set. Some guy had a samurai knife through his neck in theMount Thomas hospital. No one knew why. And I just said, ‘Ninjas!’” he laughs.
“They were nice people, and it was a nice show.”
McInnes will also return for the final season of The Newsreader as bullying news boss Lindsay Cunningham, a role he pulls off so well given he has seen his share of TV executives.
“I heard something that summed up commercial television when Pat Rafter won his first US Open, and I was doing Blue Heelers,” he recalls.
“Everyone came down to the loading bay. They were shooting Man O Man at the time in the other studio, and they just had the big screens on. Everyone was just stopping wor to watch him win. The suits came down, and I was standing in front of them, and (Pat Rafter) lifted up the the trophy and one guy says, ‘We’ve got to get him on when he gets back to Australia. He’s a great Australian.’”
“(And another exec replied) ‘Yeah, he won’t have to pay for head***s for a year.’”
“Did I just hear that guy say that?”
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