Just when Jordi Webber thought life was heading in one direction, fate intervened. The actor talks to George Fenwick about boy bands, belonging and the role that demanded every muscle – emotional and otherwise.
Almost two years ago to the day, Jordi Webber (Te Arawa, Ngāti Toa, Te Āti Awa) was drifting through a market on Australia’s Sunshine Coast. A while since his last acting job, Webber was living out of his van, surfing as much as possible, but down to his last $50 and borrowing money from his brother to get by. Among the cacophony of the market, he stumbled upon a tarot reader.
“She said, ‘Get ready for the warrior. A warrior is coming your way’,” he says. “A week or two later, I got an audition for Spartacus, and as soon as I read the brief, I was like, that’s mine. That’s my role.”
That warrior was Tarchon, the idealistic gladiator Webber, 31, plays in Spartacus: House of Ashur, a revival (and sequel of sorts) to the original franchise that began in 2010. It’s Webber’s biggest role to date, and it arrived just as he was contemplating throwing in the towel. A few years ago, itching for a change, Webber had released himself from the rat race by moving to Australia and opting for a nomadic lifestyle – but as the sweet poetry of a fickle industry goes, once he walked away, work came knocking.
“You really don’t need to chase the beast,” he says. “Really understand yourself to a T, get really comfortable with being by yourself, and that attracts things. When you’re going into casting rooms being like, ‘I haven’t washed these jeans and I’m here to do my thing, but the waves are real good right now. Here’s my offer, peace’. There’s just something that shifts.”
In person, Webber exudes a calm and stillness blissfully indifferent to the clattering of the Auckland cafe where we’ve met. Born and raised in Rotorua as the second-eldest of four, his roots are a blend of creative and physical: Dad is a flamenco musician, while Mum is an “everything woman”, he says. “She does triathlons, bodybuilding comps, she’s gone up Mt Everest, she’s done the Camino [de Santiago] and she’s a dancer.”
His sights were set on acting from day one, even though Rotorua Boys’ High School didn’t offer drama. “I was pretending I had armies and playing with a sword since I was little, and it hasn’t changed.”
Joining Rotorua Boys’ sister school for musicals like Grease and The Wedding Singer gave Webber his first taste of the performing rush, and his parents never doubted his chosen path, backing him all the way to Unitec’s performing arts programme in Auckland. But at the age of 18 – what he now describes as his “yes-man year” – he heard radio station The Edge was forming a boy band through a nationwide competition. “I was driving to a BK,” says Webber, “And I was like, am I meant to go for this thing?”
He sent in a video and next thing he knew, he’d dropped out of drama school to become one of six members of Titanium, the short-lived boy band behind hit songs like Come on Home and Soundtrack to Summer. A burst of chart success thrust the young men into the spotlight, touring Australia and opening for fellow mid-2010s artists like Jason Derulo and Cher Lloyd. It was a “bizarre, beautiful” time, Webber recalls.
“At its core, it was manufactured. They got six dudes from all different walks of life and went: here you go. It was exciting and fun, and it just worked because we were so young and starry-eyed that we went, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa!’.[After] two-and-a-half years, that’s when I started to go, OK, in my free time I probably wouldn’t hang out with this person. There’s other things that I want to do in life.”