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Home / Interviews & Articles / Kyal Marsh |
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This page was last updated on 20th May 2007. Page launched on 20th May 2007. Site launched on 24th January 2004.
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INTERVIEWS & ARTICLES
Kyal Marsh by Sophie Manning Cherwell, University of Oxford, UK, 18th May 2007
He’s survived steroid addiction, marriage at 20 and harassment by sex-starved Oxford girls. Sophie Manning gets up close and personal with the Neighbours heart-throb.
It’s obvious that Kyal Marsh, who played a troubled teenager dallying with steroids in Neighbours, takes good care of his body. He is blond, groomed, tanned and incredibly stacked. And he’s remarkably shy about it. There isn’t a tattoo or a piercing on his body (and yes, I have to find this out by asking). He goes to the gym every day but won’t tell me how many press-ups he can do and refuses point blank to show me. Will he dance with any Oxford girls? “Not unless I’m drunk”. It must be that time in every Australian soap actor’s career when he needs to guard his image very carefully.
That’s why Boyd Hoyland is trapped in the back of Filth. He must have got in through the back of the Westgate past Primark, a hideous carpark and two tramps like everybody else. Even so, Rock Oxford’s Super Bonz has done its best to manufacture some glamour. Kyal sits on the beds in the VIP area behind a large poster of himself, blissfully unaware or at least ignoring the significance of the white stains beside him. Girls are screaming and stretching their hands through the bars; as the bouncer fights his way through to let me in, we are both blinded by camera flashes.
Kyal has been contracted to stay for an hour, after which he is expected to mingle with the crowd and kiss some cheeks. It’s his first official club night, but the 19-year-old confides “actually I’m kind of sick of clubs. I’ve only been in London (he means Britain) for two days, and I’ve already been to Ha Ha, Zoo and Ruby Blue. I feel just about ready to settle down with a nice girl, you know, and have some kids”, he says, looking me squarely in the eye. Still awed and definitely not ready to be sharing flirty gags with Boyd from Neighbours, I must have looked puzzled and slightly appalled. “Anyway, I’m here for some promotions”, he continues, at which point I feel it necessary to ask my first question. Promotion of what? “Me! Promoting Me”, he grins stylishly. I pause, expecting more, but that really is it.
Kyal, it turns out, has blown his only prepared soundbites too early, and has no more jokes up his sleeves. He follows up sheepishly, and much more sincerely, “I just needed to get out there a bit, do some more work, maybe get into acting”. He sounds, suddenly, like a man without a plan. Kyal has just finished filming his last few episodes: an exit which he describes as a “let-down”, in which the scriptwriters simply allow Boyd to slip off the radar and fade out. Now, he has no better ideas than to tread the boards in a West End pantomime. His ideal role? Jack and the Beanstalk.
I am eager therefore to find out just how much confidence the star has in his own dramatic ability. “I’m not much of a character actor”, he admits. “I just do my own thing”. What he seems to mean is “I’m not very good. I just say my lines and let the director push me about on set. But I do have quite big muscles and a golden tan”.
It doesn’t seem to bother Kyal much. He is quite willing to reveal that the actors who play Stingray and Paul Robinson are far more talented. Of Neighbours’ cast-members, they’re also the most confident with women. Talking about the real-life Paul (successful if ageing heart-throb on Neighbours) Kyal enthuses “all the girls at work go completely gooey over him. Yeah, he really is charismatic. Just like on the show”.
Is there a little bit of Kyal in Boyd? The question seems to fox him, and immediately I regret asking it. The ever-so-slightly painful truth is that he left school halfway through year 10, at an age when “I was just starting to go to parties, meet girls, find out who I was”. In fact, there was no Kyal before Boyd; the two are more or less indistinguishable.
Life pre-Neighbours had been fairly ordinary: his Dad owns a building company, in which Kyal intended to do an apprenticeship (and indeed still might if his planned career in the pantomime goes tits-up). It looks like college was never on the cards. He describes himself as “not really the academic type, in a way that only a famous, beefy male actor can get away with. Boyd, of course, is naturally brainy and a medical student. It might be jealousy that provokes a split-second rebellion. “Boyd’s kind of a stupid character. I’d hate to be him”.
This isn’t the only time during our half hour that Kyal defies his producers. I wouldn’t leave without an answer to the enduring question on the lips of Neighbours fans everywhere: Sky or Janae? “I’m not really allowed to say but I will. I don’t think the writers should ever have split up Sky and Boyd”. It’s not clear at this point who is the alter-ego of who; Kyal/Boyd shoots me a look like a guilty sinner and adds mechanically, “of course, me and Jenae are a great couple too, but…”
He looks wistful as he recalls his favourite ever scene on the show. It’s when Sky and Boyd first meet; she’s crying on a bench and he consoles her. “I really helped her out”, comments Kyal, and I suspect that he’s no longer talking fiction. He may be no ordinary teenager, but he probably shared the same pubescent romance that we all remember: the one that begins with alcopops and adrenaline, develops in text speak, and winds up keeping two teenage schoolkids talking on the phone late into the night. It’s thrilling to imagine the same thing playing out on screen between two of Australia’s most famous teenagers.
There must surely have been perks to such an extraordinary adolescence. Any free stuff? Only occasionally. Is he rich? “I have a holiday home in Bali so I go there quite a lot.” That’s a yes, then. And is he treated like royalty wherever he goes? Kyal falters. Apparently in Australia Neighbours is a bit of a joke. “People actually gave me a lot of shit for being on the cast. In fact they still do give me a hard time. Whenever I’m out back home, there’s always a couple of guys trying to start a fight with me”.
Kyal admits to having a rather short fuse. You would too, I’m sure, if every time you stepped out of the house a group of lads thought it would be funny to see which of them could beat you up first. I ask if there is anything in particular that really pisses him off. “Yeh, you know what, there is”. At this point a real flash of irritation sparks in the boy’s disco-lit face. “It’s when I’m just standing there at a bar, and someone throws ice at me”. I can’t help laughing. That can hardly be a common occurrence. People are seldom that rude. Kyal looks just plain weary when he nods “yes they are, all the time”.
My heart bleeds, quite genuinely. And it gets worse. In spite of the screaming girls packing out Filth he claims that most girls are too intimidated to speak to him. Eventually the truth dawns: most of Boyd’s diehard fans are men. “Some guy sent me a letter once telling me he loved my big voice and muscles. I got another email from him a few months later with some really, really disgusting things in it”. Sadly Kyal is not the type to go into details on matters of sexual perversity. I tame my prying instincts, largely because I discover how boring his sex life seems to be. Kyal had a girlfriend for about eighteen months, but that ended a year ago.
Attention wandering, and certain that I’m unlikely to get any more choice quotes after the fan-mail episode, I am about to release Kyal from his cage into the zoo at large when I catch the word ‘hufter’ drifting from across the table. I’m interested to know whether young Australians actually use that kind of language. Kyal shouts across to his friend Ben “hey, you know ‘spiggin’ and ‘hufter’, you made them up, right?” It’s a shock to realise that Ben, tall-ish and pasty, is actually Stingray. “Oh, hi!” I beam in recognition. Nothing, not even a flicker of recognition. It’s hurtful and a little confusing: after all, Stingray and I spend almost every lunchtime together. His vowel sounds are reassuringly familiar to me, he looks a bit like my ex-boyfriend … and is now regarding me with unqualified disdain. Too much reality, I decide, is unsettling. It’s like Neighbours moving to ITV all over again. It is definitely time to push past the shrieking harem and get myself as quickly as I can back into the harsh lights of the Westgate Centre.
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