Martin scored the lead role in a movie. There was just one problem

A year after moving to Los Angeles in 2013, former Home and Away actor Martin Dingle Wall landed what looked like his big film break. He was cast as the lead in a Russian rom-com titled All That Jam.

It wasn’t until the first table read that he realised there had been a serious miscommunication. His part did not have just a few lines in Russian. It was all in Russian.

“So I had a meltdown,” Dingle Wall says. His fee had already been spent. There was no backing out.

“I had that moment where you look yourself in the mirror and go: ‘Mate, the whole world is bilingual. Australians, Americans, British – we’re the only ones that don’t speak at least two languages. The brain has this capacity.’”

With the help of his director, he soldiered through. “And f— me dead, eight weeks later, there now exists a film which is me in the romantic lead speaking full Russian.”

That fish-out-of-water feeling came back to haunt the Bondi-raised, Gold Coast-based performer when he was cast as an Australian frontiersman in the American West in This Bloody Country.

The low-budget film became the most popular western on Amazon Prime for five weeks when it dropped in the US last year. Now it’s having its big-screen premiere at the Gold Coast Film Festival on April 29, with Dingle Wall in attendance.

In This Bloody Country, a Mormon preacher, Josiah Ballard (Larry Cedar), his three wives (Maggie Gwin, Rainey Qualley and Cameron Meyer) and multiple children leave Salt Lake City to cross the Arizona badlands to reach a frontier settlement in 1869.

Ballard trusts in the good book rather than the Winchester, but the family hires an Australian gunslinger, Ned Campbell (Dingle Wall) to protect them – bandits and Paiute traditional owners stand in their way.

When you think of antipodean characters in American westerns, it can be both strangely right (Zoe Bell in The Hateful Eight) and utterly cringe (Paul Hogan in Lightning Jack).

Happily, Dingle Wall is a revelation in a role that the one-time soapie heartthrob has aged into like a confident blend of Clint Eastwood and Gary Cooper.

His Campbell is a classic loner, haunted by conscience but willing to do what a man’s gotta do.

“It’s not courage, Jack,” Campbell tells the preacher’s younger brother, Nathaniel (Jacob Ward). “You just pull the trigger. Or you don’t.”

Dingle Wall says the battle for his character is “against blind faith and the resistance to anything logical”.

As portrayed by Cedar, who played the opium addict Leon Stalsworth in Deadwood, the Mormon patriarch is small-minded and sanctimonious, scornful of his wives’ ability to do anything but cook, rear children and perform their conjugal duties. When Campbell proposes teaching the women to shoot, Ballard thinks he’s out of his mind.

It’s an inconvenient truth, Dingle Wall says, that Mormon wives were largely cutting the western trails.

“That doesn’t suit the narrow Hollywood narrative, but they were the actual pioneers …

“In the world of open lies that we’re now living in, give us a movie that speaks a bit of truth to power, you know?”

The film’s American writer and director, Craig Packard, believes Dingle Wall is a movie star in “the old Steve McQueen model”.

“He has all the swagger and confidence, yet at the same time, he’s an actor with a capital A,” Packard wrote in an email.

Packard says he wrote the part of Campbell to be Australian, inspired by his Seattle-based Australian actor friend Paul Eenhoorn, who died in 2022.

“I’d never seen an Aussie in the Old West, and it struck me as interesting because it implies quite a journey to get there, as well as some history to get familiar enough with the territory to serve as a guide.”

Dingle Wall came to acting while backpacking around Europe in his early 20s. Late at night in a small Italian town, he stumbled across a person he thought was being bullied. It turned out to be street theatre.

Affected, he attended drop-in improv classes, was rejected by NIDA, and landed an agent anyway.

“I eventually started to get into audition rooms, which is where you really learn. That’s where you fail spectacularly and constantly, where the rubber hits the road,” he says.

“I think some casting agents were just quite patient with me because they could sense my enthusiasm.”

Landing Home and Away’s young doctor, Flynn Saunders, thrust him “into another universe” and scored him a Logie nomination, but he left after two years. Roles in Underbelly, Satisfaction, Cops: L.A.C., and the Nicole Kidman film Strangerland followed.

In Hollywood, where he lived for eight years, he quickly realised a fondness for beer was holding him back, and the part in All That Jam came five weeks after he got sober. That led to the lead in an Egyptian-American spy series, Cypher. He was also in The Dry and Upper Middle Bogan.

“It’s all a conga line of insanity,” he laughs. He goes where the work is, but joint custody of his 11-year-old son anchors him in Currumbin.

On reading Packard’s This Bloody Country script Dingle Wall couldn’t quite believe his luck that they were looking for an Australian to star in it.

“And to everyone’s absolute delight, we shot to number one and stayed there for a month,” he says.

“It could have been a question of, ‘How dare they put an Australian frontiersman in what is clearly an American role.’ The writer had dug around and gone, ‘No mate, there were Australians there.’”

It was filmed on the vast Deer Springs Ranch in Utah, where the terrain didn’t allow for trailers; the cast slept in cabins without running water or electricity. Flash floods crashed the set, making it into the film. The filmmaking experience mirrored the characters’ gruelling cross-country crawl.

Dingle Wall wrote a 10-page backstory for his character, but otherwise, his preparation for the role was simply a love of the genre.

“I had, by default, been preparing my entire life.”

Gold Coast Film Festival runs until May 3. This Bloody Country streams on Prime later in 2026.

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