Tom Long Interview

Looks different with his clothes on.

In the new Australian film The Book of Revelation, Tom Long plays a dancer who is abducted, raped, and brutalised by three women.

Adapted from the novel of the same name by acclaimed English author and recent Writers’ Festival attendee Rupert Thomson, TBOR is the story of Daniel, who, on his way down to the shop to buy a packet of cigarettes for his girlfriend, is accosted by three strangely dressed women.

When Daniel regains consciousness, he’s chained to the floor in a bleak, bare room. What follows is 12 days of graphic psychological and sexual abuse. When the women, who throughout the ordeal remain masked, release him, Daniel’s former life falls apart, and he embarks on an obsessive search for the three women who abducted him.

Long readily admits that playing Daniel was the most “testing” role of his career. To prepare for the role, he underwent three months of gruelling dance training with Meryl Tankard. “I’ve never danced at all, and socially I’m not a dancer. I think there are people who’ve got a real freedom and can lose themselves dancing, but I’m not one of them... It’s an incredibly exposing thing. I don’t like singing or dancing or any of those things where you really stand out.”

Which is an unexpected admission from any actor – least of all one whose character spends long stretches of a film spreadeagled naked, being humiliated in several confrontingly graphic scenes. Hardly suprising, then, that Long describes the role of Daniel as “risky” and concedes he was anxious about taking it on: “I did have hesitations. To dance, and be nude – and also the subject matter. Just the reaction of being a man, losing his power, somehow struck a chord and angered me, as a man. But that also fascinated me.”

The gender reversal that Long identifies is the crux of the film’s dark “appeal”. Directed by Australian Anna Kokkinos (Head On), TBOR tells the kind of story that’s been fodder for talk shows and tabloids for years. But this time it’s a man who’s the victim of sexual violence at the hands of women – an unsettling switcheroo that’s likely to have both male and female audience members squirming in their seats, equal parts intrigued, shocked, and repelled.

Long has yet to watch the film with an audience, and confesses that he’s apprehensive at the prospect. “Yeah, there’s a sense of apprehension there because, in a way, it’s like sitting and 500 people having sex with you. You know, to look in someone’s eye straight after... It’s so intimate. You know? You’ve masturbated.” Sitting in the busy foyer of the Westin Hotel, Long lowers his voice as he says this. “...you’ve done all this. To look in someone’s eyes – they’ve just spent that time with you – it’d be confronting for them, and for me.”

Long is well aware that the film will polarise viewers. “People are either gonna go with it [or not]. There’s gonna be a lot that don’t go with it. There’s gonna be some that get upset by it. There’s gonna be some who laugh at it. You’re gonna get every reaction, and everyone trying to cope with it a different way... But I think no matter what, it does sit with people for a while and gets people talking.”

But with the film yet to be released, Long acknowledges that it’s impossible to predict exactly how the film will be received.

“We’re throwing this thing out there, and you just wait to see what ripples or waves or tsunamis come back. You don’t know.”

-HS Fruck

The Book of Revelation is released September 7.

Interview transcript.