Playing Ned Kelly with a stick-on beard just wasn't an option for Steven Rooke.

The actor has grown the big, bushy beard for the title role in Kelly twice - firstly for the 2012 run in Brisbane and again for the national tour which started in March.

"I'm one of those silly performers who needs things to be as real as possible," Rooke says.

"I don't thing I would have felt right donning a fake beard, I would have felt like a bit of a fraud. I had to put the long game in and grow it myself."

Even if it puts other acting jobs at risk. Late last year he was cast in a play but the role required him to be clean-shaven. He told the director that wasn't going to work as he needed to start growing his Ned Kelly beard again.

Fortunately the pair were able to work something out and the beard - and the role - stayed.

Once the touring production finishes at the end of June, Rooke plans on keeping the beard, in the hope it might help him snare a movie role as a prisoner of war, a bikie ... or even a bushranger.

The play is set in Kelly's cell in Melbourne jail the night before his hanging. He ends up having a long conversation with his brother Dan, who has slipped into prison disguised as a priest.

While the official record says Dan Kelly died in the siege at Glenrowan, playwright Matthew Kelly's work is based on a tale that he escaped and moved to Queensland.

"There were four people in Queensland who claimed to be Dan Kelly late in their lives," Rooke says.

"There's one particularly intriguing character who went by the name of James Ryan; he's buried in western Brisbane. He had burns all over his back that he claimed were from the siege, he had 'DK' branded on his butt cheeks, which was apparently from his dad Red."

Rooke says Ryan set up a stall at the 1934 Brisbane Exhibition and told the Kelly story and answered any questions from the crowd.

"No one could ever fault him on it," Rooke says.

"This is in a day where there was no internet or TV and he knew all these details of friends, family members, cousins and supporters."

To prepare for the role of Kelly, Rooke read a lot of books but avoided seeing any of the movies about the bushranger so they didn't influence his performance.

For those people who have read those books and seen those films, Rooke says they're still in for a surprise with Kelly.

"I think people are expecting one version of the story but when they come and see the show they get something different," Rooke says.

"This is an imagined conversation between Dan and Ned. This version of Ned has never been portrayed before, as far as I know; the guy who's been sitting in a prison cell for five months with dozens of bullets in him, slowly dying and about to hang the next day.

"It allowed me a bit of freedom to create the Ned that I wanted to create because no one has attempted to show him in this particular light before."