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Kipan Rothbury signs with US management

Kipan Rothbury.

Actor and emerging director Kipan Rothbury has signed with high-powered US talent management firm Brillstein Entertainment Partners.

Rothbury’s Australian agent Morrissey Management helped engineer the deal with the company whose roster includes Bohemian Rhapsody’s Oscar-winning Rami Malek, Brad Pitt, Amy Adams, Michelle Williams and Adam Sandler.

“He is an extraordinary actor who has been making his own projects to critical claim,” Morrissey Management’s Fleur Griffin tells IF.

A finalist for the 2018 Heath Ledger Scholarship (which was won by Charmaine Bingwa), his credits including Jeremy Sims’ upcoming drama Rams alongside Miranda Richardson, Sam Neill and Michael Caton, and Kosta Nikas’ thriller Sacred Heart with David Field.

“Over the years I have spent visiting and living in LA, I gained a number of industry contacts, from producers, directors, film investors and acting mentors that I wished to work with,” he tells IF.

“My first intention was to find the best representation, someone I can trust will advise and encourage me to navigate the industry while recognizing my specific approach to screen work. I have found that in Morrissey Management and Brillstein Entertainment Partners.”

After beginning his career as a stuntman on The Matrix trilogy he spent two years as an environmental spokesperson for Greenpeace Pacific. He trained at Actors Centre Australia.

In 2009 he founded Tree Leaf Films to produce films and documentaries that have the greatest possible social and environmental impact.

In 2017 he completed shooting a nine-year project Significant Strangers, a series based on a true story in which he plays quadruplet brothers separated at birth, who reunite 25 years later.

The series follows the four brothers through a documentary team which locates the men living in Sydney and Texas, traces their divergent lives since separation and orchestrates a reunion.

Currently he is in Stockholm working with editors on the final cut before screening it for distributors that have shown interest in acquiring the rights.

He has also wrapped his first feature as writer-director, Road North, shot in the US and co-directed by Joonas Kent. The film deals with sexual assault and has echoes of the #MeToo movement in highlighting violence against women, he says.

Produced by Christopher Jakobsen and Rothbury, the plot follows dysfunctional couple Mike (Rothbury) and Kate (Roxanna Dunlop), who are driving across America’s mid-Western desert when they stop to pick up hitchhiker Travis (David Sullivan). They decide to stay the night at a run-down motel, Mike races to get cigarettes, leaving Kate alone with the stranger, and violence ensues.