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As Paul Robinson, he was one of Ramsay Street’s most notorious scoundrels. Now, he’s hoping to dazzle on the dancefloor. Here, he talks about the loss of his brother, leaving soap acting and his wildest storylines
Stefan Dennis joined the cast of Neighbours as Paul Robinson, the git, for its first episode in 1985. He declines to tell me how old he was then. “See,” he says, with a glint of that Paul cunning: “That’s gonna give my age away if I tell you.” If I were to take a guess – looking at him today, in Boxpark in Wembley, pin neat and ready for anything (he could nip to the shops or go clubbing) in a Lacoste polo shirt, leaping on and off high chairs as gracefully as a cat, I would say early 60s. Wikipedia says he is 67 in October. My first and enduring impression is not his age, but the fact that he must, in some bigwig showrunner’s imagination, be this year’s Strictly Come Dancing crown prince. That’s just how it works – there are some irredeemably bad dancers who are fun to watch, there are some perfect physical specimens in their prime who look like the obvious contenders but then flame out, and then there’s the person who thinks they can’t cut a rug but has some inner dancer, that’s waited a lifetime to be activated, like a sleeper agent. Sorry to spoil it, everyone, but he is definitely that guy.
Anyway, back to his age, which he insists is undisclosed. “The reason is, I was doing Flying Doctors …” This is the Australian drama about the outback. It was on in the daytime, if you were at school in the 80s you only watched it when you were ill, and I wonder how much the memory of it – very high drama, slightly terrifying, wide-open scenery, absolutely millions of sheep – was coloured by having a temperature. Anyway, Dennis was in the original miniseries but didn’t return for the series because, by that time, he was already Bad Paul in Neighbours. “And in the green room, I’m reading a magazine, and there was my wife on the cover, my first wife.”
This would have been Roz Roy, at that time a hostess on the Australian version of The Price is Right – they divorced in 1989. “And I turned round and said: ‘That’s my wife!’” It’s funny, you can hear the disbelief in his younger self, that he has a job as an actor and a beautiful wife on a magazine, and someone’s been employed to teach him to ride a horse. But anyway, he was playing a 19-year-old, and the director let it be known, “jokingly, but I could see the seriousness under it” that if they’d known how old he really was, he wouldn’t have got the gig. “I actually did lose a job after that, when they found out how old I really was.”
It is impossible to overstate or explain how important Neighbours was, to those of us born in the 70s and 80s. Neighbours first aired in 1985 in Australia. It came to the UK in 1986 on BBC One and went out twice a day, like The Archers, the lunchtime one a repeat of the previous afternoon’s. The title was cheesy, and when Dennis was originally asked to sign for six months, he said: “It probably will only last that long anyway – Neighbours, what a corny name.” The title had nothing on the theme tune, which ended: “That’s when good neighbours become good friends.”
I wonder how the show ever became a drama when everyone in it was so nice. Kylie Minogue (Charlene) was nice, Jason Donovan (Scott) was nice, Anne Charleston (Madge) was nice, Alan Dale, playing Dennis’s dad, was nice. But Dennis thinks this is the root of its popularity. “A lot of soaps are quite dark and quite heavy, you don’t get a break from it. We still had the drama in there, but it was interspersed with lightness, be it comedy or just … lightness.” But that, to my mind, is what makes its popularity so mysterious; how do you get engrossed in the love arc of two nice people who are nice to each other and are certainly soon to marry, or nine nice neighbours who are about to become good friends? And yet we were.
This wasn’t lost on Dennis, who nearly broke his wrist in the late 80s, hanging on to a building, trying to escape a baying mob of teenage fans in Ireland. “It was Beatlemania, it was insane.” In a town in the north of England, a lady came up to him and smacked him on the arm, saying, “Paul, you’re a very naughty boy,” then scuttled off. He acts all this out, slapping me for effect, then hastily apologising. Paul was a scheming ratbag, always looking for a chance to get the better of people. Dennis is quite defensive of him and underlines stoutly that he was only like that because he got shot by his wife, Terry, after he had found out she had killed her former bank-robbing husband (a detail I’d completely forgotten, because he seemed just born bad). “Every soap has a villain, and I happened to be the resident,” says Dennis. “But Paul was always a likable one. He did some pretty nasty stuff but he always managed to turn it round with people.”
When the audition for Paul first came up, Dennis didn’t want to do it. He was up for a part in a film, The Lighthorsemen, for which he thought he was destined, and not only because he could ride a horse. It’s a great story about the Australian mounted cavalry in the Sinai and Palestine campaign of the first world war, but it was not a good film – and flopped – so it was probably just as well he didn’t get the part. Neighbours, on the other hand, though dropped after seven months by its original channel – Seven (“The CEO, Ron Casey, went to his grave with that”) – was picked up by another network, Channel 10, where it ran for the next 39 years.
People sometimes explain Neighbours’ popularity by its cast, which reads like a roll call of pretty much every Australian actor ever to be exported, except for Nicole Kidman. But the original cast had only 12 members (Minogue and Donovan were yet to join, Natalie Imbruglia was still at school and Margot Robbie was yet to be born). Dennis describes Dale, who played the widowed Robinson family patriarch Jim as a “lifelong friend”. While Dale has cropped up in various shows since, from West Wing to Ugly Betty, other Neighbours cast members were straight-down-the-line soap actors – whatever made that peculiar magic, it wasn’t star power. “It was very intimate, we really trusted each other, they were brilliant, Paul Keane [Des], Jason, although Jason was the second Scott, I was also dear friends with Darius [Perkins], who played the first Scott. Unfortunately, he died a few years ago.”
When Dennis was a child, his older brother was killed aged 12 by a drunk driver. He’s said of this previously: “The repercussions of someone getting behind the wheel on drugs or drink, it’s devastating to the people around them. This happened decades and decades ago, and it still affects me today – I’m more affected today than I was back then.” The family were thick as thieves growing up on the Gold Coast – “like Australia’s Honolulu” – always “putting on shows” (he leans into the microphone and says: “Don’t forget I put inverted commas round ‘shows’). His mum had acted at the Theatre Royal in the 50s, his dad was in the navy.
He always wanted to be an actor, but trained as a chef – this was the 70s, a boring time for food, a great time for everything else, he says. If he could time travel anywhere in history, he says: “Other people would go to the dark ages, I’d go back to the 70s.” Seriously? Why? “It was a naughty era. Promiscuous in every way, not just sex.” He does an elaborate mime, starting with smoking a joint, then some completely indecipherable gesticulating. “I’d be branded as a bad boy if I started telling you stories.” Show business suits him in every way: he doesn’t overthink it, he loves performing, but he doesn’t, one senses, love the discretion it requires. He’d rather tell everyone everything.
By 1992, he had done Neighbours long enough, and thought: “I don’t want to be typecast, I don’t want to be working my whole life on a soap. Every young Australian actor has Hollywood in their sights.” He did go over to the US, but says: “I didn’t know how the machine worked.” Plus, this was a time before they realised that Australian actors could also do other accents. “They used to say: ‘Your voice is so cute’, but they didn’t want to use it.”
He had been back and forward between Australia and the UK, doing publicity – he calls that gruelling 24-hour flight, “the long bus ride” – and “having doors opened because of Neighbours”, so when he moved to London, the work was nonstop, with more voiceover work than he could do and back-to-back stage jobs. He was in Blood Brothers in the West End: “There’s another one, like Neighbours, it’s pure entertainment.” Is it? It’s the least light entertainment you can think of, I say, given that the brothers both [spoiler alert] die, tragically, at the end. “Well, sure, it’s gut-wrenching, but it’s also side-splitting.” He met his second wife, Gail Easdale, when they were both doing a panto – she’s a “sensational dancer. She gave it up to have children.” They married in 2000 – before that, he lived for seven years with his best friend, the TV executive Nick Milligan. “I’d come over to England, and he said: ‘Stay with me while you get on your feet.’ So I said: ‘I’ll stay for about six months.’ And I lived with him for seven years.” Twelve years ago, Milligan and his eight-year-old daughter died in a horrific speedboat accident in Cornwall. “It’s so sad, what happened,” he says.
In the late 1990s, he started a production company. “I was passionate about it, I was just not good at it. And I think I realised that I wasn’t good.” He and Easdale had their first son, Cameron, in 2002, and were intending to go back to Australia to build a house and raise their children. A last ditch success with his film company meant that Easdale went ahead: “I left her by herself in a foreign country with a baby. I think she was very lonely. I still feel terrible about it.” She must have forgiven him – 25 years married with three just about or almost adult children, and they are still on the phone every quarter hour, talking about soya milk and being nice to each other. Cameron is studying law and is a beautiful singer, Declan is a marvellous actor but wants to be an astrophysicist, Darci is interested in neuroscience and is a natural dancer, has been since she was five. “She’s the one I have to impress on Strictly.”
By the time he settled back in Australia in 2004, the call came to rejoin the Neighbours cast, because of course it did, and again, he didn’t want to do it. “I had the greatest respect for it. It’s a brilliant show. But I felt I’d been over in the UK, and I’d done a lot of stuff that nobody in Australia would know about because it was on stage, or it was local TV, and I’d just look like I’d come back …” – he mimes a tail between his legs, at least, I think it was a tail – “and said, can I have a job on Neighbours, please?” Dale, who was living in the US by then, talked him into it. “He said: ‘Don’t be stupid, Stef. This is a great gig. And besides, you’re not an actor unless you’re working.’”
Two years later, in 2006, he got fired. “They said: ‘We have to fire you, for doing your job so well.’” Wait, what? “They said: ‘It doesn’t matter what we’ve thrown at you, and some of the things have been quite ridiculous and a bit over the top, you’ve always made it work. It’s our fault, not yours. The character has now almost become a caricature, he’s too big for what we’re trying to do.’ Paul’s return to Neighbours was was like evil on steroids - he would marry seven times in total, have unnumbered affairs, and it was this, more than his constant scamming of his associates (the phrase “fool me once” does spring to mind - he’d been at this game for over two decades) that earned him a reputation for unalloyed mischief.
After the firing, he told the production company: “I’m an actor. It’s my job to make it work.” Then, two days later, they had thought of a fix; instead of getting rid of him, they were going to make him an amputee. Originally, they were just going to remove his foot, but the stunt coordinator on Neighbours had himself lost his leg at the shin, and the producers figured they could use him as a stand-in for closeups. I don’t understand at all what problem this solves, but I have to admit, the making of Neighbours sounds exactly like a plot in Neighbours – grisly and horrific but serendipitous and collaborative, engrossing and completely incomprehensible.
Neighbours made it through Covid – indeed, the distancing protocols that were adopted for TV sets worldwide were devised on Neighbours, which just could not stop production, there would have been panic – and then had its finale in 2022, before returning in 2023 and lasting until 2025. It was an unbelievably star-studded affair, featuring not just Minogue but Donovan, Holly Valance, Robbie – Guy Pearce came back! Because of the UK hiatus, Dennis wasn’t its longest serving character, but he was the only person to be in the first episode and the last, and it has certainly shaped his life. “I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you today had it not been for my time in Neighbours. I wouldn’t be doing Strictly. Whether it was the first seven years or whether it was the 29 years in total, I’ve been extremely lucky.”
