Get off your horse for a minute and in-between The Saddle Club Series 1 and 2, you find yourself working with the likes of Benjamin Bratt, Naomi Watts, Clarence Williams 111 and Josef Fiannes. Brett Tucker hasn’t been slothful since the first series wrapped. He has been working on a swag of American productions, television, films and TV movies, filmed both in America and in Australia.

Brett is working on The Great Raid (starring Benjamin Bratt) currently being filmed in Queensland and did the film The Outsider (directed by Randa Haines and starring Naomi Watts). And he has knocked back a starring role on the American soap Days of Our Lives. “It would have been a good financial move for me but it meant 49 weeks inside a studio each year for three years. Also, I had started to get good roles in movies and, at that stage, I didn’t need the stepping stone. And I knew I couldn’t do it; I would get too homesick for Australia,” he explains.

Actually, this 6 ft 2″ Aussie bloke from the country may be moving to Los Angeles for his career but he didn’t find it easy. “I had to do it in stages; otherwise it would have been too much of a culture shock. I have always been a country person and I even found it hard to move from Yarra Valley to Melbourne. When I first went to L.A. I found it as hard. So I have been back and forth about four times now for auditions, meetings and work. And I am now more accustomed to it,” he explains.

Strangely enough, Brett has found that it is easier for him to be cast in American films than Australian. “I think part of it is the way I look. I fit in more with the all-American type than I do with that quirkier look that Australian directors seem to like. And after working hard at it for three years, I have mastered the American accent and now when I go into an audition in the U.S, they have no idea I’m Australian,” he says.

Brett’s experience includes Mall Boy, which received critical acclaim at the Cannes Film Festival, television roles in the U.S. series The Lost World, The Extreme Team (U.S. telemovie), Rubicon (U.S. telemovie), Blonde (U.S. mini-series) and the Australian series McLeod’s Daughters, Blue Heelers, Halifax f.p. and Neighbours.

Growing up in the Yarra Valley, Brett is a great horse-rider and loves the opportunity the role of Max Regnery gives him to ride. “Even when I have finished my scenes, I like to go and watch the wranglers working with those beautiful horses in the series,” he says. An accomplished sportsman, he is a cyclist, plays tennis, cricket, basketball, boxes, has taken up snow-boarding and was a better than average footballer until he broke his nose in the third quarter of a spirited game the day before he was to audition for an important part. That sport was then put on the back burner.

Brett is now very much in demand both here and overseas, but can’t really point to one big break. “I reckon I epitomize a gradual process in this industry. There wasn’t one big thing that happened; it’s all been small steps,” he tells us.