To play the titular Aussie tent boxer in “Kid Snow,” British actor Billy Howle spent six months physically training, then learned bits of obscure Australian history.
A versatile stage-screen-TV veteran, Howle, 35, obviously loves variety. He shared a honeymoon fiasco with Saoirse Ronan in “On Chesil Beach,” proved heroic in tracking a Bangkok serial killer in the true-crime “The Serpent” series and was just seen as Nicole Kidman and Liev Schreiber’s aimless son in Netflix’s “The Perfect Couple.”
“Kid Snow,” on streaming platforms now, begins in 1970s Outback Australia with a bitter reality about a traveling, low-rent tent boxing show. One that immediately turns into a life-altering tragedy.
Asked who exactly is Kid Snow, Howle, in a Zoom interview, explained, “He works for a boxing troupe that travels around the Outback. When we first meet him, he has to throw a fight — because his dad is in cahoots with various other people in a money-making scheme.
“Kid does that, and then he ends up driving and crashes his truck. The crash maims his brother and kills his father.
“We jump ahead about 10 years and we meet him, still boxing. But he’s now working for his brother, who’s running this boxing tent.
“I suppose Kid is trying to find his place in the world again, trying to find a way out of this.”
As to how Howle would classify “Kid Snow,” “I don’t know. People want to say that it’s a sports movie, since it’s boxing. But it doesn’t do that, you know? I mean, it does. It is still discussing aggression and a hyper masculinity.
“But it isn’t a boxing film in that sense. It’s something much more than that. He just so happens to do that as a job. That’s how they survive and make a living.
“In some sense, it is a redemption story. There are also elements of romance. It’s quite poetic and existential, really, because it forces you to ask a lot of questions.
“And within the historical context, you’re looking at something as idiosyncratic as tent boxing, which not many people will know very much about.”
Physically? It was transforming.
“I’ve had to train for films before. Mainly, I’ve had to change my physique or something. But this was very specific and, luckily, I had some background in boxing,
“But I certainly wasn’t as good as I needed to be to play those scenes convincingly.
“Although it was going to be choreographed, we were going to shoot the fight stuff in a very small, very intensive, two days. So in terms of stamina, I had to be on my feet for upwards of 10 hours just doing the same fight sequence over and over again. Which was something!”