Dan Spielman's golden opportunity

When Melbourne actor Dan Spielman received an email from film director Corrie Chen to join the cast of a new SBS drama New Gold Mountain, he was instantly drawn to telling the untold story of Chinese miners who arrived in the Victorian Goldfields in the 1850s … and the fact it was riffing on his favourite series of all time – Deadwood. 

“It’s not the normal way you go about getting roles, to be offered something,” says Dan Spielman who earlier this year managed to complete an uninterrupted MTC run of Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes.

New Gold Mountain was filmed in Sovereign Hill and around Melbourne. The four-part series stars actress and supermodel Alyssa Sutherland and NZ/Chinese actor Yoson An.  It’s like a frontier western set in the era of the Gold Rush, but not as we know it.

As a teenager, Spielman spent a lot of time visiting an uncle in North East Tasmania where he lived in an ex-mining town.  

“I remember coming across Chinese graves that were older than any post-colonial artefacts around and was surprised that there’s not much that we know a lot about. New Gold Mountain certainly shows a side we need to hear more about,” he says. 

Spielman plays the historical figure Captain Frederick Standish. 

“He was born into aristocracy and left England for Australia under the shadow of gambling debt. He has some authority, but is a morally ambivalent figure in the story,” Spielman says. 

“He was a man of conscience, enjoyed his relationship with Chinese head men at his camp and wasn’t out and out cruel. He was trying to take the path of least resistance.”

Spielman might be best known for his roles in The Secret Life of Us, Offspring and more recently Sisters and Stateless, but he has a life away from the screen too.  He has been running his own joinery and furniture business as a parallel side hustle, and during Melbourne’s longest lockdown, started drawing birds and selling the artworks online. 

He counts himself as one of the lucky ones in the pandemic, who managed five weeks of filming across two jobs in 18 months. 

“I spent eight weeks drawing, it’s always something I wanted to do,” Spielman says. 

“Drawing birds was a joyful focus among the difficulty of being in Melbourne. Birds have always been my companion and I observe them on set too. I noticed a crow following our assistant director while filming New Gold Mountain,” says Spielman, who has a workshop in his 93-year-old grandmother’s garage in Studley Park. 

Spielman has done the odd drawing of dogs for close friends, but this was a leap of faith in a new direction.  

“The years of technical drawing for my joinery work certainly built a skill level underneath that I hadn’t thought about before,” Spielman says. His artworks capture birdlife at its most intimate – there’s a tawny frogmouth, barn owls and rainbow lorikeets too.

And then there’s his elegant furniture – tables that revel in many character traits.  

“There is so much to learn in the art of woodwork,” Spielman says. 

“I have been doing it for 20 years and I feel I am just starting to scratch the surface of what I need to learn. When it comes to joinery, I do it because it gives me the same feeling I get when I do theatre, film and television work. It’s the visual arts, it’s a community of knowledge and people sharing in your enthusiasm for solving problems,” he says. 

“Aside from making things that are beautiful and elegantly functional and those are the things that keep me coming back every day.”

New Gold Mountain / Premieres on SBS, October 13, and on SBS on Demand.

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