Jeremy Sims, still wild about story.

Jeremy Sims readily admits he isn’t in the position yet of being able to sit back and work whenever he pleases, but as actor, director and producer, working in TV, film and theatre he’s nothing if not versatile.

Playing the lead in ABC’s new telemovie Dangerous Remedy was a passion project. He canvassed director Ken Cameron for the role as the Scottish-born doctor who uncovered an abortion racket in Melbourne in the 1960s. He joins Susie Porter and William McInnes in the true life story of a doctor fighting the establishment to legalise abortions.

Aside from the Mad Men-like design, Sims was drawn to the script.

“It was complex, adult and layered. We don’t make that much TV here that isn’t of a particular genre or fairly broad in its appeal and this feels like a grown-up, old-fashioned telemovie and I was really thrilled to play a character that was given enough time on screen for an audience to get to know their complexities,” he says.

“It looks gorgeous and Susie looks fantastic with her hair and amazing frocks and things.”

Script is integral to Sims signing onto a project and there are times when he knocks back TV work because it doesn’t engage him.

“It’s not as if I am in a position to pick and choose, I’m not implying that. But a lot of things I get asked to audition for I read and I think ‘God, what a lot of codswallop.’ Whether it’s Reef Doctors or any other of new projects on commercial networks. They’re not very inspiring and you know the formula they’re going to work by. There’s so much great television coming out of America at the moment, and even on cable, but here it is a bit disheartening,” he says.

“Having said that The Slap seems to have raised the game for a lot of television producers in this country. I watched a bit of Rake and that was pretty good, so there is a bunch of much better television being made now and I hope this will contribute to that trend in Australia.

“They just seem to have forgotten that audiences do appreciate a complicated story. They worked that out in America 20 years ago.”

Playing Dr. Bertram Wainer is the largest TV role Sims has played in some time. He was able to research the doctor thanks to an earlier ABC documentary and news footage. He also got the approval of some who had been close to the doctor.

“Ned (Lander, producer) had been working on this project for 10 or 15 years or something stupid, and it had been a doco at one stage. Bertram Wainer had written a book about it so there was a lot of archival footage, the doco that Ned made, so there was plenty for me to hunker down and get involved in all the material,” Sims explains.

“I had (Bertram’s) ex-wife standing next to me for great portions of it. So it was an incredibly personal and complex process. Jo Wainer, who heads Women’s Studies at Monash University, sat next to me at the first screening  and bawled her eyes out. She said to me, ‘After a while I forgot you weren’t him.’

“I got stories from Rory, his son, telling me about all the awful things his dad did to him. He was a tough-love dad who expected his kids to grown up very quickly and be self-sufficient.”

In trying to expose a secret police approval of the abortion ring, Wainer was subjected to attempts on his life. In the telemovie he is the target of shootings and an arson attack.

“He was an incredibly physical bloke and prided himself on boxing and judo and he was in the army for 20 years. So he was a bit of an action man in many ways.

“But he had no idea what he was getting involved in. He just had young girls coming to his clinic. But he’s a fighter so he already had disenfranchised people and those sorts of things. So he was already on the fringes of respectable medicine. They were already dying of septicemia from backyard abortions. He certainly wasn’t expecting to discover that the police were involved in all of this.

“But when he did they discovered he was looking and they just assumed  they would scare him away like everybody else had. Unfortunately they just picked the wrong bloke. He was incredibly argumentative, stubborn, quick to anger.

“As soon as they told him to go away that was it. He wouldn’t go away.

“His life was threatened, his house was burnt, he was shot at –all those things were all true.”

Abortion was not legalised in Victoria until 2008.

Next up for Sims is Secret River, a play for the Sydney Theatre company, and his next directing feature, a $4m film currently seeking funding at Screen Australia. Sims admits that juggling family commitments, and development funding is a big ask.

He is also developing a drama series with producer Ned Lander.

“It’s a 6-8 part drama that we’ll bring to the ABC next year, so we’ll see what happens with it. It’s roughly based on the true story of Nigel Brennan’s abduction and kidnap and ransom in Somalia in 2008-09,” he says.

“It’s mostly based here. It’s the story of the family back here.”

Right now his focus is on Dangerous Remedy, his most profile TV role since Seven’s short-lived Wild Boys. Sims is equally frank about the project not meeting his expectations.

“I was really excited about doing Wild Boys but it disappointed in the end. It didn’t become the show we all hoped it would and it wasn’t a lot of fun towards the end, doing that. On the other hand acting on Dangerous Remedy was a total joy. Ken (Cameron, director) is an extraordinary and experienced director who I can sit and learn so much from while I am acting.

“There are times on stage or screen or anywhere that are awful if the project is awful and the people aren’t having fun, so really I don’t have a preference either way. Best case scenario is when I am directing work I have developed from the ground up.

“That’s really when I am happiest.”

Dangerous Remedy airs 8:30pm Sunday ABC1.