Rodger Corser on Hollywood, health scares and second chances
"All that other stuff can go by the wayside," says Glitch's Rodger Corser of what changed his priorities. Photo: ABC
Rodger Corser knows all about second chances.
In the paranormal drama Glitch (in its third and final season on ABC and ABC iView) he plays one of six characters in a small town inexplicably brought back from the dead.
In real life, in 2006 Corser had a life-changing front-row seat to mortality’s wild ride when Renae Berry, his now wife and then-girlfriend of one year, was diagnosed with cervical cancer.
Despite initially being given a grim life expectancy, the Happy Feet actor rejected advice to have a hysterectomy, sought a second opinion and after a year-long battle was given the all clear.
She went on to give birth to the couple’s three children, Budd, 9, Cilla, 7, and Dustin, 4.
“When you get that sort of do-over, it makes you take stock,” Corser (who also has daughter, Zipporah, 17, from a previous relationship with singer Christine Anu) tells The New Daily.
“If you’re fortunate to get through a health scare like the one we had, it can be a blessing because it can make you recalibrate and say, ‘Let’s not sweat the small stuff and be thankful and grateful for what we have’, which is each other.”
Corser and Berry at June 30’s 2019 Logies on the Gold Coast. Photo: Getty
Judging by his social media accounts, Corser and Berry are still crazy about each other.
“You still turn my head like a disco ball,” he wrote about her on Instagram on their 11th wedding anniversary in October. “The ying to my yang,” he said this Valentine’s Day.
The life-changing outlook after Berry’s cancer battle has partly dictated Corser’s career path as a big star on the Australian small screen.
Since his 2000 debut in fantasy series Beastmaster, he’s appeared in Water Rats, Stingers, McLeod’s Daughters, Underbelly and Rush.
This year he was nominated for two Logies, including the Gold for his role as Dr Hugh Knight on Nine’s Doctor Doctor.
Corser and a castmate in Doctor Doctor. Photo: Nine
Although he has a manager and agent in the US, the 46-year-old is realistic about what a move to Hollywood would mean for his family.
“I couldn’t take a smaller role and justify moving over there unless it was something that could accommodate having a wife and four children,” says the three-time Gold Logie nominee.
“It’s different for younger actors. I’m not going to live in a share house. Any opportunity I could get would need to be a role and a pay packet big enough to justify disrupting all of our lives.
“It’s sort of all or nothing.”
Auditioning for those lead roles, “I go up against actors who have 20 years of history on American TV,” he says, adding that “now with streaming, you’re up against people like Russell Crowe and George Clooney … maybe something will land eventually.”
And even if it doesn’t, the “recalibrated” Corser is cool with it.
“Career and those things that you stress about day to day don’t really matter,” he says.
“Your loved ones and your close friends, that’s all that really matters. As long as everyone is happy and healthy, then life is good.
“All that other stuff can go by the wayside.”
As for where he sits – from ‘cynical’ to ‘believes in all things’ on Glitch’s supernatural themes, Corser says Berry is “more on that kind of level”.
The actor is “always telling me to trust and believe and that things happen for a reason, and I’m like, ‘Please, things will happen if I make them happen’,” he says.
“You can’t just sit there are wait for the universe to sort things out. I need a bit of spiritual enlightenment compared with a lot of people. Maybe I will in my older age.
“My wife says I need to relax a bit, so maybe I’ll take up meditation or something and get more in touch with my spiritual side.”
Glitch, ABC TV, Sundays at 9.30pm and on ABC iView
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