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‘I had no job, no prospects. That’s when it hit me’

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Scott Ryan stared at his own face on the 18-metre-long billboard lit up on Sunset Boulevard and felt a sense of destiny fulfilled. “Years ago, I’d told a mate, ‘I’ll be up there one day,’ ” he says. “Okay, we were drunk as skunks but I had a feeling if I worked my arse off it’d happen.” Ryan smiles at me like a man who has taken a low road to a higher place. After all, just 15 months prior to seeing that billboard, he was nudging 50, driving taxis and delivering pizzas in the Victorian town of Echuca, about as far from Hollywood – and success – as is possible.

You learn fast that Scott Ryan is an ordinary bloke with an extraordinary belief in himself. It’s a hard-won faith that spans three decades and many bucketfuls of blood, sweat and tears. But Ryan’s resolve boils in his eyes and gleams in his grin. “If you’ve got a passion, and you’re driven, it’s not important where you live or how much money you’ve got,” he attests. “If you wake up with a sense of purpose, it can save your life. And if you don’t, it can destroy you.”

For 20 years, Ryan’s purpose has been Mr Inbetween, the story of Ray Shoesmith, a kind-hearted, cold-blooded hitman moving between the mundane (school drop-offs, picking up after the dog, shopping for socks) and the profane (contract killing, grave digging, violent retribution), shifting like a shadow between the underworld and a rich inner life devoted to a tween daughter, a terminally ill brother and a hilariously motley crew of mates.

Mr Inbetween is really a character study, not a bang-bang crime story,” is how Ryan distils it. “It’s about Ray, and why he is the way he is. Along the way are hints and clues that help the audience build a picture of him. Respect Ray and he’ll respect you. Don’t respect him, and you’ve got a problem. Ray represents consequences. He embodies that credo: ‘The greatest warrior is the one with the most love in his heart.’ I had to write this story because in many ways, there is a lot of Ray in me; they’re the parts I usually keep under lock and key.”

No longer. Everyone who sees Mr Inbetween becomes a zealot. The New York Times hailed it as “a small marvel of sustained tone” and a “smart, deadpan deconstruction of tough-guy clichés”, while The Hollywood Reporter praised it as “a tour de force which jams more into 25-minute episodes than most hour-long American dramas, with lingering emotional after-effects”. Hugh Jackman raves, too: “Scott Ryan … is amazing, the whole thing is so brilliantly done”, and Helen Mirren is such a fangirl she pushed for her agent, CAA’s Fred Spektor, to sign Ryan. Debuting in 2018, the three-series drama is screening in 108 countries, including Australia. And right now, Quentin Tarantino and heavyweight producer Jerry Bruckheimer are said to be avidly reading Ryan’s latest script.

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Not since Blue Murder in 1995 has an Australian TV series been held in such giddy esteem. Even the writer of that iconic project, Ian David, is in awe. “Great stories are about great characters; what you feel about what happens comes from their heart, soul and guts. In Mr Inbetween, Scott Ryan’s hard-boiled anti-hero, Ray Shoesmith, is instant karma approaching, a character who grabs your short ′n’ curlies and shakes the change out of your pockets.” Despite (or perhaps because of) being so quixotic and quintessentially Australian an outlaw, Shoesmith is even more revered in the US than here.

Much of Mr Inbetween’s slavish fan devotion stems from a mythology around Ryan himself. Now 54, he has just two project credits on IMDB, both as creator-writer-star of one character: Ray Shoesmith. He has won four AACTAs, including best newcomer in 2018 – at age 48 – and a Logie for most outstanding actor, yet collected none in person.

Little wonder that people ask: who the hell is Scott Ryan? The folklore varies wildly. Some say Ryan was a real-life rent-a-kill, a jailbird, military sniper or ex-psychiatric patient. On the public record, he first pops up in 2005, then vanishes for 13 years until reappearing in 2018. By then Ryan’s story and Shoesmith’s are one legend: a man from nowhere who is now everywhere.

Ryan plays hitman Ray Shoesmith in Mr Inbetween, which he also wrote and created.Credit:J. Pratley


Scott Ryan rarely consents to interviews and this one very nearly doesn’t happen – twice. There are long pauses in our text exchanges and each phone chat is full of wary silences. Even when we do lock in, Ryan texts back minutes later with “Don’t book flights just yet. I’m having second thoughts.” Next day, he calls me to apologise for “freaking out”, explaining there’s “stuff behind the scenes you don’t know” and “I don’t want anyone getting hurt.”

Finally, on a balmy Melbourne morning, I jab the button of Ryan’s red-brick art deco St Kilda apartment. He buzzes me up, and after a warm handshake and cock-eyed appraisal, ushers me out to eat. Right now, Ryan, like Shoesmith, exists in a twilight zone between notoriety and normality. He gets spotted or selfied daily but doesn’t strut like the creator of a critically hailed television show. Today, in black jeans and bomber jacket, a cap pulled low over his bald head and sunnies hiding his piercing hazel eyes, he saunters along bandy-legged, hands jammed in pockets.

“Scott’s always been a great writer but a poor communicator.”

At his favourite cafe, The Galleon, we order his go-to: spanakopita and salad. It’s no sooner landed than fantastic stories are falling from his lips with flecks of pastry. His two decades on the dole and 12 years celibate (“I was happiest when I was broke and striving”). How he loves guns (“the feel, the smell, the look”). Why The Sopranos and Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl are his compasses. Why Roy Batty from Blade Runner pips Don Logan from Sexy Beast as cinema’s greatest villain (“By the end Roy is kind of the hero”). And how “all my bad habits appeal to me … especially the most unappealing ones”.

Given his reticence for interviews and reclusive nature, such open-hearted chat is a shock. “Scott’s always been a great writer but a poor communicator,” his sister Melissa warns me. Yet this habit of going very deep, very early with those he trusts is familiar to Ryan’s tight circle of friends. “He gets into serious subjects fast, does Scotty,” laughs Brooke Satchwell, his one-time housemate and on-screen girlfriend in Mr Inbetween. “There’s a hunger for truth that Scott is desperate to explore and share. He’s a gentle-hearted man with a ferocious will.”

Scott Ryan with Justin Rosniak, who plays Shoesmith’s best friend in Mr Inbetween. “Underneath his tough nut is a beautiful person,” Rosniak says.

Scott Ryan with Justin Rosniak, who plays Shoesmith’s best friend in Mr Inbetween. “Underneath his tough nut is a beautiful person,” Rosniak says.Credit:Joel Pratley

That dichotomy lives in Ryan’s smile. In Mr Inbetween, Ray Shoesmith’s wolfish grin is deployed to both heart-melting and marrow-chilling effect. Usually, it’s a sure sign he’s about to long walk some scumbag off a short pier or redecorate a kitchen with the guy’s precious bodily fluids. When he does it to me, I’m terrified and charmed. He smiles like a fox chewing on guts.

“Once his bullshit meter susses you out, Scott can get silly,” says Justin Rozniak, who plays Shoesmith’s bestie, Gaz. “He’s a mad eccentric, but underneath his tough nut is a beautiful person.”

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Scott Ryan’s flat is as sparsely furnished as his scripts. There’s a cherry-red fridge in the kitchen and old leadlight doors in the lounge leading to a sofa, hearth and small television. Over the bed is a framed poster of Steve McQueen’s 1972 film The Getaway, while a vintage Vladimir Tretchikoff print, Balinese Girl, hangs in the hall, gazing serenely at a table holding his AACTAs and Logie. Out the back is a second bedroom for Nathan, Ryan’s 13-year-old son.

From a dark nook beside the front door something glimmers. “Ray’s Hero Shovel” reads the tag. I recognise it as the everyday tool Ray Shoesmith digs his graves with and often uses to lethal effect in filling them.

It’s rare to be invited into a subject’s home, with all their intimacies laid bare. But they say a hunter is blind to his own peril. Ryan, for all his initial paranoia, seems unfazed inviting a stickybeak into his nest. He snatches up a lacy slip near the sofa, and makes tea. Then he sits and we begin at the beginning. And that’s when it all comes out and everything goes dark.

Ryan in a scene from the show’s second season with on-screen girlfriend Brooke Satchwell, who says he has a “hunger for truth”.

Ryan in a scene from the show’s second season with on-screen girlfriend Brooke Satchwell, who says he has a “hunger for truth”. Credit:Mark Rogers


Scott Ryan grew up in Hallam, “a tough little town” 34 kilometres south-east of Melbourne at the foot of the Dandenong Ranges. He spent his boyhood ducking the spurwing plovers that dive-bombed local kids, walking down the railway tracks until he saw the train. “The driver would be madly blaring his horn, and I’d be pissbolting down the tracks screaming!”

He is the youngest of four kids born to Ted and Betty Ryan, an army ordnance officer and a homemaker. Ryan’s two older brothers are “very different” and “I’m a mish-mash of both,” he surmises. “Adam was a natural sportsman, did a pre-season with Richmond in the AFL, even finagled a tryout for the San Francisco 49ers. Paul’s a gentle soul, kind and sensitive.”

Scott is closest to his sister, Melissa, seven years older, an effervescent redhead with a mop of bouncing curls. “Scotty was a self-contained kid, cute and fun but shy and ill-at-ease – a real paradox,” she recalls. “Looking back, there was always an undercurrent to him … but I never realised it was the bullying until it showed up in Mr Inbetween.

Ryan’s childhood is where he learnt to act. “If you’re a sensitive kid in a working-class area, there’s always a predator who’ll sniff your weakness and take advantage of it,” he explains. “So I acted cool and calm to fit in and disappear. That’s how I survived.” Ryan’s eyes are shining, but he doesn’t blink. “It was f—ing horrible, but that struggle made me who I am.”

It’s also what makes Mr Inbetween the show that it is. Ryan’s “brutal” childhood is all on screen. “When I was 10 or 11, this kid went after me, verbally, then physically. Next thing, he’s against the wall, I’m killing him and the teachers are dragging me off.

“Another time I got a razor and went down to the local swings. Do I want to die? Or am I afraid to cut myself? So I cut my hand open. That’s when I knew I didn’t want to kill myself. I was just in a lot of pain.”

The Ryan family in the 1970s (clockwise from back left), Adam, Melissa, Scott and Paul.

The Ryan family in the 1970s (clockwise from back left), Adam, Melissa, Scott and Paul.Credit:Courtesy of Scott Ryan

On the rare but powerful occasions Shoesmith lets a tear slip its salty moorings, audiences relate. Ryan is often contacted by survivors of bullying, self-harm or other trauma. “I didn’t expect that, but it’s great that people respond. I mean, if you suffer you might as well share it. Otherwise, what’s the point? Speak about it, illuminate it, help people realise, ‘I’m not alone.’ I’ve been through a lot and my greatest achievement is turning myself into the person I am now. If my talking about it can help people in the dark find their way back to the light, great.”

Ryan’s friend Wendy Squires says female viewers feel deeply for such raw vulnerability. “Ray is a rare deep-dive into complex masculinity that is beautiful, honest and real,” she says. “He’s a serial killer, but women still want to hug Ray and show him the love he craves.” Criminal psychologist Tim Watson-Munro, a fan of Mr Inbetween, says it’s a familiar theme. “Women want to fix guys like Ray, but he can’t be rescued. Like most professional killers, Ray is a chameleon. He blends in, loves his mates and family, and is incredibly loyal. But he’s a psychopath desensitised by trauma in his past, forever torn between good and evil.”

“I got cocky and decided I was going to improvise an interview with the Invisible Man from behind a curtain. It bombed, and my career was over. I didn’t write again until my 20s.”

Storytelling was always how Ryan escaped his pain. “If I had a talent it was writing,” he says. “In primary school, everybody had to write a story and the teacher asked me to read mine aloud. Nobody else, just me.” He still glows at the memory. “That inspired me to start writing plays. Every Friday I’d act out a script I’d written in class. People started to notice me. Then I got cocky and decided I was going to improvise an interview with the Invisible Man from behind a curtain. It bombed, and my career was over. I didn’t write again until my 20s.”

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High school was a fresh hell. Ryan was “asked to leave” both his alma maters. “Scotty was a smart kid,” Melissa Ryan says, “but it didn’t show up at school.” What did show up was what Ryan reckons might have been oppositional defiant disorder: “Unco-operative, defiant and hostile behaviour toward peers, parents, teachers and other authority figures.” Ryan says teachers slapped him, hit him with an umbrella and dragged him across the floor by his hair.

The final straw was when one barked at him to stop dragging his feet. “He was rude about it, so I told him to f— off and started high-stepping to goad him,” Ryan seethes. “I had piss running down my leg, I was so scared, but for some reason I felt compelled to do it. So, this bloke dragged me into a classroom, said, ‘Ryan is a bit of a smarty-pants’, and made me walk up and down as kids threw stuff at me. It was completely humiliating, and I never forgot it.”

At 17, Ryan moved in with his brother Paul in inner-city Richmond. “My mental health at that point was really starting to decline. Luckily, I was never much of a drug-taker or a drinker. I was already damaged enough, and I kinda realised that would suck me further into the pit. I was on the dole, trying to get jobs, but I’d have panic attacks or anxiety going for interviews. My relationship fell apart, and I became agoraphobic, only leaving the house once a week to shop, or sneaking out at night when the streets were empty to feed the possums in the park.”

Ryan’s salvation came in an unlikely form. “I was getting worse. Then I met a guy called Dr Richard Liu, a master of medicine and martial arts. He gave me these Chinese herbs to cook up in tea. They tasted like shit but they worked for me. He also taught me how to be a decent human being, a good friend and a man of your word. For 12 years, I lived like a monk: no meat, no sugar, no sex, no alcohol. Only yoga, vegies, tai chi and meditation.”

Deep in his 20s, Ryan finally had his epiphany. “I had no job, no prospects, not many friends. I was on my own, living in a rooming house with alcoholics and junkies, locks on the door, looking out a window onto a brick wall. That’s when it hit me. Writing. It’s what saved me.”

Scott Ryan is often contacted by survivors of bullying, self-harm or other trauma. “If my talking about it can help people in the dark find their way back to the light, great,” he says.

Scott Ryan is often contacted by survivors of bullying, self-harm or other trauma. “If my talking about it can help people in the dark find their way back to the light, great,” he says.Credit:Josh Robenstone


We’re walking in the rain on an old fire trail in the Dandenong Ranges. The bush is where Ryan writes his scripts – alone in the wilds, with only his laptop, a pouch of Champion Ruby tobacco and a fly-swatter for company. Out here he talks to himself as he taps the keys, testing words for weight and cadence on the birds and bugs. “It took me a long time to learn how to write dialogue that sounds real, not written,” he says. “Out here, in the middle of nowhere, I can rant and rave like a madman.”

Today, he talks in tangents again – music that makes him cry (Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel), stalkers (“I get calls late at night. They ring my bell”), a thwarted ambition to join the SAS (“With the trauma in my past, it’s probably best it never happened”), how Ray Shoesmith might address a transgender person (“Ray is fine with killing, but he doesn’t want to offend people”), and women (“I was engaged when I was 20, but I’ve never been married or in a relationship longer than two years. I’m single now and it’s great. I like to go where I want, when I want”).

Ryan uses such flights of fancy exquisitely in Mr Inbetween. He calls this device “talking shit”. “At first I thought, ‘Do people want to listen to this sort of dialogue?’ Then I saw Reservoir Dogs again and was, ‘Yes, talking shit actually works!’ ” Many of the show’s most bizarre riffs were written in the campervan we’ve driven up in, Ryan hunched over a table the size of a pizza box, making scenes in which Shoesmith chops up bodies or hurls “prison napalm” segue seamlessly into blokes riffing on “Would you root an alien?” or “What’s a vajankle?”

His co-stars love him for it. “Half the time as an actor you’re fighting the dialogue because it doesn’t flow like real conversation,” says Justin Rozniak, “but Scott’s stuff – even though the ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ are scripted – it’s so natural you barely have to think.”

From Nicholas Cassim, who plays Ray’s brother: “Scott’s a man of few words, so his writing is laconic, almost effortless. It’s not so much what’s said as what’s said between the lines.” And according to Brooke Satchwell: “He agonises over every word and syllable trying to calibrate raw experiences into scenes that resonate.”

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Often, as we walk, Ryan stops and swivels to confront me with a hard truth or challenge a twisted bit of logic. At one stage, he tells me about a childhood dream. He’s dead in a coffin. People mill around his grave, then move away. It’s the start of Scott Ryan being forgotten. “That was a driver for wanting to be somebody, to matter,” he says. “When people tell you all your life, ‘You’ll never amount to anything’, part of you digs in and says, ‘We’ll f—ing see about that.’ ” He jabs at his heart, then his head. “It all goes in here. My revenge is proving you wrong, being successful, living a good, happy life. That’s how I beat you.”


Back at Ryan’s apartment is a pile of books like the ones he was reading in 1998 when Ray Shoesmith twinkled into existence: paperback noir like Joey the Hitman: the Autobiography of a Mafia Killer, Chopper 2: Hits and Memories, The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer, Autobiography of a Murderer.

Reading pulp and writing pap, Ryan hit the keys until an idea took hold: The Magician, a mockumentary about a Melbourne hitman he called Ray Shoesmith, stalking while talking. “One day it grabbed me by the gut. ‘I’m gonna make this a feature!’ By then I was out of options and down to 59 kilos. I needed a purpose.” Closing in on 30, Ryan applied to a TAFE course in filmmaking at RMIT.

“One lecturer sneered, ‘Writer, director, producer and lead actor? You’re not Woody Allen!’ I said to her, ‘How do you know?’ ”

At the time, he was living in a condemned mansion in South Yarra. “Everyone else moved out when it was slated for demolition, but it took ages to knock it over so every week I stashed $80 of Austudy. When I had three grand, I started shooting.” With the Sony DCR-TRV900 camera his grandma’s inheritance afforded him, Ryan corralled his brothers and friends and filmed for 10 days over 13 months, with himself playing the central character, Ray Shoesmith. He then began editing.

“One lecturer sneered, ‘Writer, director, producer and lead actor? You’re not Woody Allen!’ I said to her, ‘How do you know?’ ”

Ryan with Mark “Chopper” Read, the inspiration for The Magician and its first fan.

Ryan with Mark “Chopper” Read, the inspiration for The Magician and its first fan.Credit:Courtesy of Scott Ryan

Ironically, “Chopper” Read, the primary inspiration for The Magician, was also its first fan. “He was head judge at the Melbourne Underground Film Festival,” Ryan recalls. “So we won virtually every category!” But its true champion was stuntman-director Nash Edgerton, who saw a sawn-off version at the St Kilda Film Festival in 2005. “My first thought was, ‘There’s something amazing about this guy [Ryan] in front of a camera,’ ” Edgerton tells me. When he offered to show it to some distributor mates, Ryan offered him a producer credit. “I said, ‘Okay, but if my name’s on it, I want to re-cut it,’ ” says Edgerton. “Next thing Scott was at Australia Post mailing the masters!”

An alliance was born. Edgerton’s feature-length edit of The Magician, with producer Michele Bennett’s help, found $450,000 in funding and a theatre release. It was nominated for a Film Critics Circle Award and toured to positive reviews (although The New York Times called it “a yob-filled slog of hard-man posturing bathed in an oppressive testosterone funk” and decried its “hairy buttocks”). Ryan had his breakthrough. He even had his Ray Shoesmith TV spin-off to pitch next.

So began the epic saga of getting Mr Inbetween made. “We tried a lot of pitches with all sorts of different people at various networks: SBS, Movie Network, HBO, here and overseas,” Edgerton recalls. “But streaming services weren’t the force they are now and no one wanted half-hour episodes. And some people didn’t want Scott in the lead. He was unknown, not a trained actor.” So Edgerton went to the US, where he made video clips for Bob Dylan.

Ryan (right) on the set of Mr Inbetween with director Nash Edgerton, who saw “something amazing” in Ryan at a 2005 film festival.

Ryan (right) on the set of Mr Inbetween with director Nash Edgerton, who saw “something amazing” in Ryan at a 2005 film festival.Credit:Mike O’Meally

“After a decade of knockbacks, Scott was over it,” says Edgerton. “He said, ‘It doesn’t have to be me in the lead, let’s just get it made.’ By then I think a part of him was ready to give up.”

Little comes easy to Scott Ryan. “I’m a very unlucky person,” he deadpans. “Nothing falls in my lap. I’ve had to bust my arse for everything. See, I believe in reincarnation. We’re like Formula One drivers pulling into the pits for new tyres, then we’re off in a new life. But the past carries through with you.

“Ray doesn’t believe in karma – he wouldn’t do what he does if he did. But I do, and if I break karma it f—s me. So I do the right thing, treat people well …” He shakes his head. “But for all the luck I’ve had I must’ve been a serial killer in a past life.”

“I’m a very unlucky person. Nothing falls in my lap. I’ve had to bust my arse for everything. See, I believe in reincarnation.”

Ryan’s karma was dealt another blow in 2009. A young Hollywood director had seen The Magician and cast Ryan to star in Hesher, the story of a heavy metal-loving lout who squats in the house of a boy whose mother died in a car accident. “I auditioned and got the part,” Ryan recalls. “They flew me to the US and I started rehearsals with Natalie Portman. Then John C. Reilly pulled out, Joseph Gordon-Levitt got my role and I got f— all.” His sister Melissa says he was devastated. Today, he shrugs. “It would’ve been my big break. In the end, it was Mr Inbetween a bunch of years later … at least it came.”

In 2017, after 20 years in gestation and 12 in limbo, pay TV channel FX Australia began filming Mr Inbetween in Sydney. “I was shitting bricks,” Ryan confesses. “By then I was driving cabs in Echuca. I hadn’t acted since The Magician 14 years before. That first day on set I had a panic attack and ran to a public toilet shaking like a shitting dog. It took me 45 minutes to get it together but no one knew I was freaking the f— out.”

Ryan had more cause to freak out when FX Australia went bust in 2018, leaving the show in flux. Luckily, FX US swooped. After millions of Americans watched its debut season, the US channel commissioned two more series and promoted them on Sunset Boulevard. Karma.

Ryan in The Magician, his first feature film and the inspiration for Mr Inbetween.

Ryan in The Magician, his first feature film and the inspiration for Mr Inbetween.

Although Ryan says writing is “the love of my life, sad as that sounds”, he considers acting “a searing pain in my arse”. Yet his performance in Mr Inbetween is frequently staggering. “Even when he’s giving you tumbleweeds, Scott is giving you an awful lot,” observes Brooke Satchwell. It’s a style critic Doug Anderson says is incredibly rare. “It’s the gift of stillness,” he tells me.

“That blank mask seldom fails those with the chops to employ it properly. Even when Shoesmith’s eyes are as cold as razor blades, Ryan gives him warmth. His laconic acting is a rare kind of honesty that needs no embellishment or trickery to maintain momentum.”

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In 2021, after 26 episodes, Ryan called “Cut!” on Mr Inbetween. “This’ll sound weird, but after one 16-hour day dragging bodies around and burying them, I wasn’t me. I was Ray. It wasn’t good.” There were other factors in stopping the show, but they’re complicated. “Scott and Ray have lots in common – humour and darkness – what you see is what you get,” Melissa Ryan reminds me. “They’re also incredibly loyal, and there are people Scott has been loyal to who have treated him badly, and it’s left scars.” Ryan will tell me his most valuable mistake in life is “trusting people” and that the talent he most covets is “the ability to spot bullshit from a distance”.

Beyond three little words on how Mr Inbetween series four might have begun (“Ray in LA”), Ryan has moved on. Right now, he is deep into his new project, a road trip-serial killer-bank heist tale provisionally titled Everybody Dies. “I’m three drafts in, and it’s getting better and better,” he enthuses. “If it gets picked up, I’d like to direct and star in this one. First I thought I’d play the bank robber … but now it’s the serial killer.” Ryan flashes me that smile. “It’s pretty much who I am anyway.”

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Scott Ryan stared at his own face on the 18-metre-long billboard lit up on Sunset Boulevard and felt a sense of destiny fulfilled. “Years ago, I’d told a mate, ‘I’ll be up there one day,’ ” he says. “Okay, we were drunk as skunks but I had a feeling if I worked my arse off it’d happen.” Ryan smiles at me like a man who has taken a low road to a higher place. After all, just 15 months prior to seeing that billboard, he was nudging 50, driving taxis and delivering pizzas in the Victorian town of Echuca, about as far from Hollywood – and success – as is possible.

You learn fast that Scott Ryan is an ordinary bloke with an extraordinary belief in himself. It’s a hard-won faith that spans three decades and many bucketfuls of blood, sweat and tears. But Ryan’s resolve boils in his eyes and gleams in his grin. “If you’ve got a passion, and you’re driven, it’s not important where you live or how much money you’ve got,” he attests. “If you wake up with a sense of purpose, it can save your life. And if you don’t, it can destroy you.”

For 20 years, Ryan’s purpose has been Mr Inbetween, the story of Ray Shoesmith, a kind-hearted, cold-blooded hitman moving between the mundane (school drop-offs, picking up after the dog, shopping for socks) and the profane (contract killing, grave digging, violent retribution), shifting like a shadow between the underworld and a rich inner life devoted to a tween daughter, a terminally ill brother and a hilariously motley crew of mates.

Mr Inbetween is really a character study, not a bang-bang crime story,” is how Ryan distils it. “It’s about Ray, and why he is the way he is. Along the way are hints and clues that help the audience build a picture of him. Respect Ray and he’ll respect you. Don’t respect him, and you’ve got a problem. Ray represents consequences. He embodies that credo: ‘The greatest warrior is the one with the most love in his heart.’ I had to write this story because in many ways, there is a lot of Ray in me; they’re the parts I usually keep under lock and key.”

No longer. Everyone who sees Mr Inbetween becomes a zealot. The New York Times hailed it as “a small marvel of sustained tone” and a “smart, deadpan deconstruction of tough-guy clichés”, while The Hollywood Reporter praised it as “a tour de force which jams more into 25-minute episodes than most hour-long American dramas, with lingering emotional after-effects”. Hugh Jackman raves, too: “Scott Ryan … is amazing, the whole thing is so brilliantly done”, and Helen Mirren is such a fangirl she pushed for her agent, CAA’s Fred Spektor, to sign Ryan. Debuting in 2018, the three-series drama is screening in 108 countries, including Australia. And right now, Quentin Tarantino and heavyweight producer Jerry Bruckheimer are said to be avidly reading Ryan’s latest script.

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Not since Blue Murder in 1995 has an Australian TV series been held in such giddy esteem. Even the writer of that iconic project, Ian David, is in awe. “Great stories are about great characters; what you feel about what happens comes from their heart, soul and guts. In Mr Inbetween, Scott Ryan’s hard-boiled anti-hero, Ray Shoesmith, is instant karma approaching, a character who grabs your short ′n’ curlies and shakes the change out of your pockets.” Despite (or perhaps because of) being so quixotic and quintessentially Australian an outlaw, Shoesmith is even more revered in the US than here.

Much of Mr Inbetween’s slavish fan devotion stems from a mythology around Ryan himself. Now 54, he has just two project credits on IMDB, both as creator-writer-star of one character: Ray Shoesmith. He has won four AACTAs, including best newcomer in 2018 – at age 48 – and a Logie for most outstanding actor, yet collected none in person.

Little wonder that people ask: who the hell is Scott Ryan? The folklore varies wildly. Some say Ryan was a real-life rent-a-kill, a jailbird, military sniper or ex-psychiatric patient. On the public record, he first pops up in 2005, then vanishes for 13 years until reappearing in 2018. By then Ryan’s story and Shoesmith’s are one legend: a man from nowhere who is now everywhere.

Ryan plays hitman Ray Shoesmith in Mr Inbetween, which he also wrote and created.

Ryan plays hitman Ray Shoesmith in Mr Inbetween, which he also wrote and created.Credit:J. Pratley


Scott Ryan rarely consents to interviews and this one very nearly doesn’t happen – twice. There are long pauses in our text exchanges and each phone chat is full of wary silences. Even when we do lock in, Ryan texts back minutes later with “Don’t book flights just yet. I’m having second thoughts.” Next day, he calls me to apologise for “freaking out”, explaining there’s “stuff behind the scenes you don’t know” and “I don’t want anyone getting hurt.”

Finally, on a balmy Melbourne morning, I jab the button of Ryan’s red-brick art deco St Kilda apartment. He buzzes me up, and after a warm handshake and cock-eyed appraisal, ushers me out to eat. Right now, Ryan, like Shoesmith, exists in a twilight zone between notoriety and normality. He gets spotted or selfied daily but doesn’t strut like the creator of a critically hailed television show. Today, in black jeans and bomber jacket, a cap pulled low over his bald head and sunnies hiding his piercing hazel eyes, he saunters along bandy-legged, hands jammed in pockets.

“Scott’s always been a great writer but a poor communicator.”

At his favourite cafe, The Galleon, we order his go-to: spanakopita and salad. It’s no sooner landed than fantastic stories are falling from his lips with flecks of pastry. His two decades on the dole and 12 years celibate (“I was happiest when I was broke and striving”). How he loves guns (“the feel, the smell, the look”). Why The Sopranos and Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl are his compasses. Why Roy Batty from Blade Runner pips Don Logan from Sexy Beast as cinema’s greatest villain (“By the end Roy is kind of the hero”). And how “all my bad habits appeal to me … especially the most unappealing ones”.

Given his reticence for interviews and reclusive nature, such open-hearted chat is a shock. “Scott’s always been a great writer but a poor communicator,” his sister Melissa warns me. Yet this habit of going very deep, very early with those he trusts is familiar to Ryan’s tight circle of friends. “He gets into serious subjects fast, does Scotty,” laughs Brooke Satchwell, his one-time housemate and on-screen girlfriend in Mr Inbetween. “There’s a hunger for truth that Scott is desperate to explore and share. He’s a gentle-hearted man with a ferocious will.”

Scott Ryan with Justin Rosniak, who plays Shoesmith’s best friend in Mr Inbetween. “Underneath his tough nut is a beautiful person,” Rosniak says.

Scott Ryan with Justin Rosniak, who plays Shoesmith’s best friend in Mr Inbetween. “Underneath his tough nut is a beautiful person,” Rosniak says.Credit:Joel Pratley

That dichotomy lives in Ryan’s smile. In Mr Inbetween, Ray Shoesmith’s wolfish grin is deployed to both heart-melting and marrow-chilling effect. Usually, it’s a sure sign he’s about to long walk some scumbag off a short pier or redecorate a kitchen with the guy’s precious bodily fluids. When he does it to me, I’m terrified and charmed. He smiles like a fox chewing on guts.

“Once his bullshit meter susses you out, Scott can get silly,” says Justin Rozniak, who plays Shoesmith’s bestie, Gaz. “He’s a mad eccentric, but underneath his tough nut is a beautiful person.”

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Scott Ryan’s flat is as sparsely furnished as his scripts. There’s a cherry-red fridge in the kitchen and old leadlight doors in the lounge leading to a sofa, hearth and small television. Over the bed is a framed poster of Steve McQueen’s 1972 film The Getaway, while a vintage Vladimir Tretchikoff print, Balinese Girl, hangs in the hall, gazing serenely at a table holding his AACTAs and Logie. Out the back is a second bedroom for Nathan, Ryan’s 13-year-old son.

From a dark nook beside the front door something glimmers. “Ray’s Hero Shovel” reads the tag. I recognise it as the everyday tool Ray Shoesmith digs his graves with and often uses to lethal effect in filling them.

It’s rare to be invited into a subject’s home, with all their intimacies laid bare. But they say a hunter is blind to his own peril. Ryan, for all his initial paranoia, seems unfazed inviting a stickybeak into his nest. He snatches up a lacy slip near the sofa, and makes tea. Then he sits and we begin at the beginning. And that’s when it all comes out and everything goes dark.

Ryan in a scene from the show’s second season with on-screen girlfriend Brooke Satchwell, who says he has a “hunger for truth”.

Ryan in a scene from the show’s second season with on-screen girlfriend Brooke Satchwell, who says he has a “hunger for truth”. Credit:Mark Rogers


Scott Ryan grew up in Hallam, “a tough little town” 34 kilometres south-east of Melbourne at the foot of the Dandenong Ranges. He spent his boyhood ducking the spurwing plovers that dive-bombed local kids, walking down the railway tracks until he saw the train. “The driver would be madly blaring his horn, and I’d be pissbolting down the tracks screaming!”

He is the youngest of four kids born to Ted and Betty Ryan, an army ordnance officer and a homemaker. Ryan’s two older brothers are “very different” and “I’m a mish-mash of both,” he surmises. “Adam was a natural sportsman, did a pre-season with Richmond in the AFL, even finagled a tryout for the San Francisco 49ers. Paul’s a gentle soul, kind and sensitive.”

Scott is closest to his sister, Melissa, seven years older, an effervescent redhead with a mop of bouncing curls. “Scotty was a self-contained kid, cute and fun but shy and ill-at-ease – a real paradox,” she recalls. “Looking back, there was always an undercurrent to him … but I never realised it was the bullying until it showed up in Mr Inbetween.

Ryan’s childhood is where he learnt to act. “If you’re a sensitive kid in a working-class area, there’s always a predator who’ll sniff your weakness and take advantage of it,” he explains. “So I acted cool and calm to fit in and disappear. That’s how I survived.” Ryan’s eyes are shining, but he doesn’t blink. “It was f—ing horrible, but that struggle made me who I am.”

It’s also what makes Mr Inbetween the show that it is. Ryan’s “brutal” childhood is all on screen. “When I was 10 or 11, this kid went after me, verbally, then physically. Next thing, he’s against the wall, I’m killing him and the teachers are dragging me off.

“Another time I got a razor and went down to the local swings. Do I want to die? Or am I afraid to cut myself? So I cut my hand open. That’s when I knew I didn’t want to kill myself. I was just in a lot of pain.”

The Ryan family in the 1970s (clockwise from back left), Adam, Melissa, Scott and Paul.

The Ryan family in the 1970s (clockwise from back left), Adam, Melissa, Scott and Paul.Credit:Courtesy of Scott Ryan

On the rare but powerful occasions Shoesmith lets a tear slip its salty moorings, audiences relate. Ryan is often contacted by survivors of bullying, self-harm or other trauma. “I didn’t expect that, but it’s great that people respond. I mean, if you suffer you might as well share it. Otherwise, what’s the point? Speak about it, illuminate it, help people realise, ‘I’m not alone.’ I’ve been through a lot and my greatest achievement is turning myself into the person I am now. If my talking about it can help people in the dark find their way back to the light, great.”

Ryan’s friend Wendy Squires says female viewers feel deeply for such raw vulnerability. “Ray is a rare deep-dive into complex masculinity that is beautiful, honest and real,” she says. “He’s a serial killer, but women still want to hug Ray and show him the love he craves.” Criminal psychologist Tim Watson-Munro, a fan of Mr Inbetween, says it’s a familiar theme. “Women want to fix guys like Ray, but he can’t be rescued. Like most professional killers, Ray is a chameleon. He blends in, loves his mates and family, and is incredibly loyal. But he’s a psychopath desensitised by trauma in his past, forever torn between good and evil.”

“I got cocky and decided I was going to improvise an interview with the Invisible Man from behind a curtain. It bombed, and my career was over. I didn’t write again until my 20s.”

Storytelling was always how Ryan escaped his pain. “If I had a talent it was writing,” he says. “In primary school, everybody had to write a story and the teacher asked me to read mine aloud. Nobody else, just me.” He still glows at the memory. “That inspired me to start writing plays. Every Friday I’d act out a script I’d written in class. People started to notice me. Then I got cocky and decided I was going to improvise an interview with the Invisible Man from behind a curtain. It bombed, and my career was over. I didn’t write again until my 20s.”

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High school was a fresh hell. Ryan was “asked to leave” both his alma maters. “Scotty was a smart kid,” Melissa Ryan says, “but it didn’t show up at school.” What did show up was what Ryan reckons might have been oppositional defiant disorder: “Unco-operative, defiant and hostile behaviour toward peers, parents, teachers and other authority figures.” Ryan says teachers slapped him, hit him with an umbrella and dragged him across the floor by his hair.

The final straw was when one barked at him to stop dragging his feet. “He was rude about it, so I told him to f— off and started high-stepping to goad him,” Ryan seethes. “I had piss running down my leg, I was so scared, but for some reason I felt compelled to do it. So, this bloke dragged me into a classroom, said, ‘Ryan is a bit of a smarty-pants’, and made me walk up and down as kids threw stuff at me. It was completely humiliating, and I never forgot it.”

At 17, Ryan moved in with his brother Paul in inner-city Richmond. “My mental health at that point was really starting to decline. Luckily, I was never much of a drug-taker or a drinker. I was already damaged enough, and I kinda realised that would suck me further into the pit. I was on the dole, trying to get jobs, but I’d have panic attacks or anxiety going for interviews. My relationship fell apart, and I became agoraphobic, only leaving the house once a week to shop, or sneaking out at night when the streets were empty to feed the possums in the park.”

Ryan’s salvation came in an unlikely form. “I was getting worse. Then I met a guy called Dr Richard Liu, a master of medicine and martial arts. He gave me these Chinese herbs to cook up in tea. They tasted like shit but they worked for me. He also taught me how to be a decent human being, a good friend and a man of your word. For 12 years, I lived like a monk: no meat, no sugar, no sex, no alcohol. Only yoga, vegies, tai chi and meditation.”

Deep in his 20s, Ryan finally had his epiphany. “I had no job, no prospects, not many friends. I was on my own, living in a rooming house with alcoholics and junkies, locks on the door, looking out a window onto a brick wall. That’s when it hit me. Writing. It’s what saved me.”

Scott Ryan is often contacted by survivors of bullying, self-harm or other trauma. “If my talking about it can help people in the dark find their way back to the light, great,” he says.

Scott Ryan is often contacted by survivors of bullying, self-harm or other trauma. “If my talking about it can help people in the dark find their way back to the light, great,” he says.Credit:Josh Robenstone


We’re walking in the rain on an old fire trail in the Dandenong Ranges. The bush is where Ryan writes his scripts – alone in the wilds, with only his laptop, a pouch of Champion Ruby tobacco and a fly-swatter for company. Out here he talks to himself as he taps the keys, testing words for weight and cadence on the birds and bugs. “It took me a long time to learn how to write dialogue that sounds real, not written,” he says. “Out here, in the middle of nowhere, I can rant and rave like a madman.”

Today, he talks in tangents again – music that makes him cry (Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel), stalkers (“I get calls late at night. They ring my bell”), a thwarted ambition to join the SAS (“With the trauma in my past, it’s probably best it never happened”), how Ray Shoesmith might address a transgender person (“Ray is fine with killing, but he doesn’t want to offend people”), and women (“I was engaged when I was 20, but I’ve never been married or in a relationship longer than two years. I’m single now and it’s great. I like to go where I want, when I want”).

Ryan uses such flights of fancy exquisitely in Mr Inbetween. He calls this device “talking shit”. “At first I thought, ‘Do people want to listen to this sort of dialogue?’ Then I saw Reservoir Dogs again and was, ‘Yes, talking shit actually works!’ ” Many of the show’s most bizarre riffs were written in the campervan we’ve driven up in, Ryan hunched over a table the size of a pizza box, making scenes in which Shoesmith chops up bodies or hurls “prison napalm” segue seamlessly into blokes riffing on “Would you root an alien?” or “What’s a vajankle?”

His co-stars love him for it. “Half the time as an actor you’re fighting the dialogue because it doesn’t flow like real conversation,” says Justin Rozniak, “but Scott’s stuff – even though the ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ are scripted – it’s so natural you barely have to think.”

From Nicholas Cassim, who plays Ray’s brother: “Scott’s a man of few words, so his writing is laconic, almost effortless. It’s not so much what’s said as what’s said between the lines.” And according to Brooke Satchwell: “He agonises over every word and syllable trying to calibrate raw experiences into scenes that resonate.”

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Often, as we walk, Ryan stops and swivels to confront me with a hard truth or challenge a twisted bit of logic. At one stage, he tells me about a childhood dream. He’s dead in a coffin. People mill around his grave, then move away. It’s the start of Scott Ryan being forgotten. “That was a driver for wanting to be somebody, to matter,” he says. “When people tell you all your life, ‘You’ll never amount to anything’, part of you digs in and says, ‘We’ll f—ing see about that.’ ” He jabs at his heart, then his head. “It all goes in here. My revenge is proving you wrong, being successful, living a good, happy life. That’s how I beat you.”


Back at Ryan’s apartment is a pile of books like the ones he was reading in 1998 when Ray Shoesmith twinkled into existence: paperback noir like Joey the Hitman: the Autobiography of a Mafia Killer, Chopper 2: Hits and Memories, The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer, Autobiography of a Murderer.

Reading pulp and writing pap, Ryan hit the keys until an idea took hold: The Magician, a mockumentary about a Melbourne hitman he called Ray Shoesmith, stalking while talking. “One day it grabbed me by the gut. ‘I’m gonna make this a feature!’ By then I was out of options and down to 59 kilos. I needed a purpose.” Closing in on 30, Ryan applied to a TAFE course in filmmaking at RMIT.

“One lecturer sneered, ‘Writer, director, producer and lead actor? You’re not Woody Allen!’ I said to her, ‘How do you know?’ ”

At the time, he was living in a condemned mansion in South Yarra. “Everyone else moved out when it was slated for demolition, but it took ages to knock it over so every week I stashed $80 of Austudy. When I had three grand, I started shooting.” With the Sony DCR-TRV900 camera his grandma’s inheritance afforded him, Ryan corralled his brothers and friends and filmed for 10 days over 13 months, with himself playing the central character, Ray Shoesmith. He then began editing.

“One lecturer sneered, ‘Writer, director, producer and lead actor? You’re not Woody Allen!’ I said to her, ‘How do you know?’ ”

Ryan with Mark “Chopper” Read, the inspiration for The Magician and its first fan.

Ryan with Mark “Chopper” Read, the inspiration for The Magician and its first fan.Credit:Courtesy of Scott Ryan

Ironically, “Chopper” Read, the primary inspiration for The Magician, was also its first fan. “He was head judge at the Melbourne Underground Film Festival,” Ryan recalls. “So we won virtually every category!” But its true champion was stuntman-director Nash Edgerton, who saw a sawn-off version at the St Kilda Film Festival in 2005. “My first thought was, ‘There’s something amazing about this guy [Ryan] in front of a camera,’ ” Edgerton tells me. When he offered to show it to some distributor mates, Ryan offered him a producer credit. “I said, ‘Okay, but if my name’s on it, I want to re-cut it,’ ” says Edgerton. “Next thing Scott was at Australia Post mailing the masters!”

An alliance was born. Edgerton’s feature-length edit of The Magician, with producer Michele Bennett’s help, found $450,000 in funding and a theatre release. It was nominated for a Film Critics Circle Award and toured to positive reviews (although The New York Times called it “a yob-filled slog of hard-man posturing bathed in an oppressive testosterone funk” and decried its “hairy buttocks”). Ryan had his breakthrough. He even had his Ray Shoesmith TV spin-off to pitch next.

So began the epic saga of getting Mr Inbetween made. “We tried a lot of pitches with all sorts of different people at various networks: SBS, Movie Network, HBO, here and overseas,” Edgerton recalls. “But streaming services weren’t the force they are now and no one wanted half-hour episodes. And some people didn’t want Scott in the lead. He was unknown, not a trained actor.” So Edgerton went to the US, where he made video clips for Bob Dylan.

Ryan (right) on the set of Mr Inbetween with director Nash Edgerton, who saw “something amazing” in Ryan at a 2005 film festival.

Ryan (right) on the set of Mr Inbetween with director Nash Edgerton, who saw “something amazing” in Ryan at a 2005 film festival.Credit:Mike O’Meally

“After a decade of knockbacks, Scott was over it,” says Edgerton. “He said, ‘It doesn’t have to be me in the lead, let’s just get it made.’ By then I think a part of him was ready to give up.”

Little comes easy to Scott Ryan. “I’m a very unlucky person,” he deadpans. “Nothing falls in my lap. I’ve had to bust my arse for everything. See, I believe in reincarnation. We’re like Formula One drivers pulling into the pits for new tyres, then we’re off in a new life. But the past carries through with you.

“Ray doesn’t believe in karma – he wouldn’t do what he does if he did. But I do, and if I break karma it f—s me. So I do the right thing, treat people well …” He shakes his head. “But for all the luck I’ve had I must’ve been a serial killer in a past life.”

“I’m a very unlucky person. Nothing falls in my lap. I’ve had to bust my arse for everything. See, I believe in reincarnation.”

Ryan’s karma was dealt another blow in 2009. A young Hollywood director had seen The Magician and cast Ryan to star in Hesher, the story of a heavy metal-loving lout who squats in the house of a boy whose mother died in a car accident. “I auditioned and got the part,” Ryan recalls. “They flew me to the US and I started rehearsals with Natalie Portman. Then John C. Reilly pulled out, Joseph Gordon-Levitt got my role and I got f— all.” His sister Melissa says he was devastated. Today, he shrugs. “It would’ve been my big break. In the end, it was Mr Inbetween a bunch of years later … at least it came.”

In 2017, after 20 years in gestation and 12 in limbo, pay TV channel FX Australia began filming Mr Inbetween in Sydney. “I was shitting bricks,” Ryan confesses. “By then I was driving cabs in Echuca. I hadn’t acted since The Magician 14 years before. That first day on set I had a panic attack and ran to a public toilet shaking like a shitting dog. It took me 45 minutes to get it together but no one knew I was freaking the f— out.”

Ryan had more cause to freak out when FX Australia went bust in 2018, leaving the show in flux. Luckily, FX US swooped. After millions of Americans watched its debut season, the US channel commissioned two more series and promoted them on Sunset Boulevard. Karma.

Ryan in The Magician, his first feature film and the inspiration for Mr Inbetween.

Ryan in The Magician, his first feature film and the inspiration for Mr Inbetween.

Although Ryan says writing is “the love of my life, sad as that sounds”, he considers acting “a searing pain in my arse”. Yet his performance in Mr Inbetween is frequently staggering. “Even when he’s giving you tumbleweeds, Scott is giving you an awful lot,” observes Brooke Satchwell. It’s a style critic Doug Anderson says is incredibly rare. “It’s the gift of stillness,” he tells me.

“That blank mask seldom fails those with the chops to employ it properly. Even when Shoesmith’s eyes are as cold as razor blades, Ryan gives him warmth. His laconic acting is a rare kind of honesty that needs no embellishment or trickery to maintain momentum.”

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In 2021, after 26 episodes, Ryan called “Cut!” on Mr Inbetween. “This’ll sound weird, but after one 16-hour day dragging bodies around and burying them, I wasn’t me. I was Ray. It wasn’t good.” There were other factors in stopping the show, but they’re complicated. “Scott and Ray have lots in common – humour and darkness – what you see is what you get,” Melissa Ryan reminds me. “They’re also incredibly loyal, and there are people Scott has been loyal to who have treated him badly, and it’s left scars.” Ryan will tell me his most valuable mistake in life is “trusting people” and that the talent he most covets is “the ability to spot bullshit from a distance”.

Beyond three little words on how Mr Inbetween series four might have begun (“Ray in LA”), Ryan has moved on. Right now, he is deep into his new project, a road trip-serial killer-bank heist tale provisionally titled Everybody Dies. “I’m three drafts in, and it’s getting better and better,” he enthuses. “If it gets picked up, I’d like to direct and star in this one. First I thought I’d play the bank robber … but now it’s the serial killer.” Ryan flashes me that smile. “It’s pretty much who I am anyway.”

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