Meeting Ivar Kants

Meet Josh West’s killer! We sat down with Summer Bay's newest criminal!

Coming face-to-face with Josh West’s murderer, we were expecting Ivar Kants to be as serious and stern as Summer Bay’s fiercest school principal, Barry Hyde! Instead Ivar Kants has such a friendly smile and gentle manner it’s hard to believe he’s the same person as two-time killer, Mr Hyde!

"I was so lucky to get such an enigmatic character as Barry Hyde to play," Ivar remarks. "Barry Hyde was a damaged man who never opened up. He was an autocratic head master who would pick up little kids by the scruff of the neck."

"I would get mail from little kids saying: 'Leave the children alone!'," he chuckles. "Barry Hyde was a character who was not meant to be liked, but in the process of the series he has become less awkward and more human, especially with his son Kim [Chris Hemsworth]. The irony is that the one person Barry Hyde couldn’t control was his son!”

On the topic of the younger actors, Ivar comments on one of his favourite things about the profession - the interaction between generations. “It’s weird when you first encounter it: you’re working with people your parents’ age – and because you’re young and have your eyes and ears open, you can learn a lot,” he says. “ If you’re older being in the company of young people, you learn a lot too. So both benefit. You wouldn’t get that in say, a bank or corporation - there’s a hierarchy. In acting, everyone’s on the same level.”

Ivar’s parents fled from Latvia to Australia in 1948. Like so many other children of immigrant parents, Ivar grew up in Australia with the knowledge there was another country on the other side of the world their parents ached and longed for. Because of the Iron Curtain years, Ivar’s parents could never visit their homeland, but Barry was able to visit Latvia while on a film shoot in the early ’90s.

“I was terribly moved for the people there and for the hard life they’d had,” Ivar says. “For the first four weeks I was shellshocked: this was the place I had heard so many stories about as a child. I stood at the house from where my mother had fled in World War II. I was standing there on a sunny afternoon – it could have been anywhere, it was just like the suburbs of Adelaide where I grew up. You just can’t believe that once there were tanks rolling down the streets, people shooting one another, mothers with babies in their arms, running in fear. But I realised I am who I am because of what happened there.”

These days Ivar, his wife Jenny and their four children live amongst the gumtrees and crisp air in Sydney’s Blue Mountains. “Thirty years ago my children started us on living an alternative lifestyle, caring for the environment, saving on energy,” he explains. “We put in a combustion stove, we grew out own vegetables, we shop at the Co-op in Katoomba. It’s a good lifestyle.”

But after two and a half memorable years, you'll be sad to hear Ivar is leaving Home and Away at the end of this month. “The last scene I did for Home and Away will stay in my mind,” Ivar recalls. “As I’m driven away, Colleen stands there with her hands on her hips, Beth is sympathetic and tries to communicate, and Irene is angry. It’s lovely, there’s humour there for me in each character.”

Farewell Barry – we’ll miss you!