Jacques Strydom on his role as Paul du Preez.
Your role in Land Of Thirst is very first professional acting role and your debut on TV - and all that at the age of 20! How does it feel? It's a whole new experience for me, honestly I loved every minute of Land of Thirst. I tried to spend as much time as possible on set. I felt like I learned a lot, from everyone. I could even sit down and talk to the sound guy, when he was not busy and see how he records sound.
What acting have you done before? I have only acted on stage. My only production was a matric production with Ingrid Wylde, who was the headmaster's wife at St Andrew's College, and I got to act in the Marguerite Poland story, Iron Love. Ingrid adapted it for the stage and I played Arthur Graham.
(Ingrid Wylde is the mother of the South African actress based in England who played Margaret, Nina Lucy Wylde; she helped find Jacques Strydom, who auditioned and won the role of Paul in Land of Thirst.) How did you get the role of Paul du Preez in Land Of Thirst? Ingrid Wylde told me that there was a role for an Eastern Cape farmboy who speaks English, Afrikaans and Xhosa, and she asked me if I still looked like a school boy, because by then I was studying at Stellenbosch. I spoke Afrikaans as my home language, but I grew up in English schools and I spoke Xhosa on our farm.
How is the Xhosa language, for a trilingual person like yourself? It's different to English and Afrikaans. Afrikaans is more descriptive than English. Xhosa is a little more vague in the sense that you can use a word in various ways, you have to listen to what the person's talking about to understand how a word is being used.
The main thing is to get the clicks right, the Xs and Cs - but that's nothing new to me, it comes naturally because I spoke Xhosa from a very young age.
What drew you to the story of Land Of Thirst? I thought it was very interesting. I felt there was quite a lot I could do with the role of Paul du Preez. He is a farm kid who's nervous and shy when he meets this strange man, Khanyiso Phalo. When I say "strange" I mean that Khanyiso is strange to Paul, in the first place, for someone who's grown up in the Karoo in that time, to meet somebody who is black but who speaks English perfectly.
Especially for someone like Paul, who never would have seen a black person speak English so well. He is used to only speaking Xhosa to black people and he doesn't know more than that in the "narrow realms of the Karoo". So Khanyiso is completely new to him, which is why he gets a bit of a shock when he first meets him.
Is Paul anything like you, given that you are both "Eastern Cape farm boys"? For starters, I'd say he's very shy, very naïve. He doesn't know much beyond the area he comes from, anything outside of that is new to him and he doesn't know how to handle it.
What first struck me was how quiet Paul was, in the beginning of the story. People speak to him and he wouldn't really say anything back. So my character is a little bit different from me because I'm more talkative. But that is about the only thing we don't have in common.
Because my parents were originally not that keen for me to go into drama, they pushed me to do another degree first, so I'd have something to fall back on, which is very similar to Paul, in a sense that his dad mainly, and also the other people in the area, view him as an outsider because of his artistic ability.
(Paul loves art and wants to be a sculptor.) Generally if you grow up on a farm in the Karoo, you end up farming. So since Paul doesn't want to farm, he isn't considered normal to the others. That makes life pretty difficult for him. When Margaret and Khanyiso come along, he eventually finds his feet and they support him.
So with me, it wasn't that people thought I was weird because I was into drama, it was just that my brothers and I were very academic and focusing hard to do as well as possible at school. My brothers carried on achieving at school, and then when I started getting more into drama they noticed a change in me.
It took awhile to get used to the change, but they accepted that I'm more talkative, that I need to be in an industry where I interact with people. My brothers would be happy working in business, whereas I couldn't see myself working in an office all day.
I guess also, like Paul, I was sheltered, more sheltered than my friends at school. In the holidays they would go to Johannesburg or Cape Town or to beach houses or even overseas. And from matric they could go out and party. I couldn't do as much as they did because I couldn't really go drive to a party, there's lot more admin that goes into going out with friends and having drinks when you live on a farm.
That was a positive experience as well because I worked on the farm, and I learned lot about myself and about business, because you have to run a farm as a business in order to make a profit.
I'm enjoying studying marketing (at Stellenbosch University), learning about business - maybe it will help one day if I become a producer.
Had you heard of the well-known South African actors who are with you in Land Of Thirst? I had heard of some of them: Hlomla Dandala and Susan Danford on TV and obviously Ian Roberts, who's so well known, for the drama work he's done, and especially in my area of the Eastern Cape, where he is also from. Then when I came here and met everyone else and heard of all the work they were doing, they were so big in the industry - it was very interesting.
Why do you think that your character, Paul, helps Khanyiso and Margaret? He helps them because they have been kind to him when no one else has been. Everyone else ostracised him and then all of a sudden one day there's this beautiful woman, Margaret, who's come to the area, and this black man who can speak fluent English. Even more strange that, the two of them befriend him.
Maybe Paul has a kind of puppy love for Margaret - I think he has a crush on her, there's definitely something there, but she's much older, so it can never be more than that and part of his character development is that he does come into his own.
There is something essential, they spur him on, encourage him to follow his dream - they are the only ones from the outside world who tell him that sculpting is a recognised profession and he can earn a living from it. It is through Margaret and Khanyiso that Paul finds out there is a wider world out there.
How does Paul deal with the gossip about him, and Margaret and Khanyiso? The scorn is expected, especially from Mrs Jakes. She's very cold and conservative, and she's more interested in keeping up appearances, her own, her family's, her sanatorium's. That is why she doesn't want Margaret around, because it's bad publicity for her sanatorium. But the irony is that she has lot of problems that nobody knows about and she just keeps it quiet.
The way the Karoo people ostracised Paul because of his love for art, is that something that you have ever seen? People at my school would accept someone who is into culture and not sport. At our school there was a good mix, in the sense that there were people playing first and second team rugby and also playing in dramas, so it wasn't really an issue in our school.
I think these days people are more willing to accept the fact that people are who they are whether you like it or not, and if someone is really good at something they would end up pursuing it, without being labelled one way or the other.
But I also know that there were old boys who came back to our school and they said they were good at music, art, acadaemia and not sport and they were labelled in their day. School was very difficult for them but it just ended up fuelling them to try harder at what they wanted to do.
That was quite inspirational talk to many people in our school because it helps people to realise you can say whatever you want about that guy, but he's following his dream - so makes it pointless all that labelling and meanness. So a lot less labelling and meanness started happening, and that's a good thing.
Do you think that people your age will like Land Of Thirst? I think so, because there's drama and there's a love story, and it's not your conventional love story either. Because it's from way back, in 1913, and the love between Khanyiso and Margaret was completely frowned upon, it was not what people expected back then. But today it's common practice so it will be interesting for young people to see that society has changed so much and in so many ways.
Do you want to carry on acting? I've always been a big dreamer so I wouldn't mind being a well known actor or even producing or directing. I love acting so much, for starters it never gets boring, every day is different. That is the most appealing for me - not to get up every day to the same thing. It's something that I could do for the rest of my life and not worry about getting a mid life crisis - or at least that's what I think now!
Is there anything you'd like to add? Yes: that was my first interview I ever did. I liked it!