Pooling his talents

Growing up in Melbourne, Australia, Jesse Spencer loved to swim freestyle and the breaststroke.

“Swimming is very close to the national psyche,” explains the engaging 25-year-old. “It is really rare to meet an Australian who doesn’t swim.”

In the Australian import “Swimming Upstream,” which opened Friday, Spencer plays a famous 1950s Australian backstroke champion named Tony Fingleton.

“When I read the script for this film, I thought, ‘This is great,’ because it’s swimming,” Spencer says. But the fit wasn’t perfect -- “I hate the backstroke.”

So Spencer trained “hard-core” to become a believable backstroker.

“Originally,” he says, “they told us they were only going to need us for close-ups in the water, but they ended up using us all the time because we trained quite well, plus you can’t use a swimming double during the backstroke.”

Out of the water, Spencer is one of the stars of the Fox medical series “House.” He plays Dr. Robert Chase in the series that stars Hugh Laurie as a gruff doctor who heads a medical team investigating infectious diseases.

“I come from a medical family,” Spencer explains. “My father is a GP, my brother is an ophthalmologist, my second-oldest brother is studying surgery and my youngest sister is in her fourth or fifth year of medical school.”

Spencer was heading toward a career in medicine during high school, but “at the same time I was also acting,” he says. “Then I got into university and decided to leave it and try acting instead because it was actually what I liked to do. If I did medicine it would be because I was following the sheep, so to speak, and now I am playing a doctor. It’s hilarious! It is fate saying, ‘You can’t get away from us.’ ”