Tim Minchin has come home, confronted his demons, and is ready to make art that matters.
Tim Minchin wants to FaceTime. We are scheduled for a phone interview, but he prefers face-to-face. Over the slightly pixelated web-stream, he explains that so many interviews become unnecessarily convoluted, and he just thinks this is easier. More personal. Besides, he’s used to it.
“I use it all the time ’cos I’m away from my kids all the time. So I just ring them and they prop me up and have breakfast and we don’t even have to talk.”
Minchin now lives in Sydney, with his wife Sarah and children Violet and Caspar; it’s the first time they’ve called Australia home for a while. After a crazy, charmed and sometimes crushing decade, he seems relieved to be here.
A lot of Australians would think of Minchin as the barefoot rascal who penned such comedic bangers as ‘Inflatable You’ (an ode to a blow-up sex doll), ‘Prejudice’ (with the lyrics “Only a ginger can call another ginger ‘ginger’”) and, perhaps most famously, ‘Come Home (Cardinal Pell)’, the viral song calling for the high-level Catholic to return to Australia and give evidence to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. But after touring the world as a musical comedian, Minchin moved to London to write the score for Matilda the Musical. He also dived into the acting world, landing roles on stage and screen, including ABC comedy Squinters and US show Californication.
Since his return to Australia, Minchin has been looking for something substantial to sink his teeth into. He says people were telling him he should do a comedy series based on himself, but he kept refusing.
“I don’t want to do a sitcom with a guy called Tim who plays musical comedy songs,” he says. “I think I’ve got more to give than playing myself. I was certainly not in the mood to do something flippant.”
Enter Upright – a darkly funny new Foxtel drama about two misfits (Minchin and teenager Milly Alcock) trying to get a piano across the Australian desert in the back of a ute. Minchin insists that serious acting has actually always been a passion of his.
“I’ve always been an actor,” he says, chuckling. “It’s just that you don’t get roles in telly when you look like this. And so I had to kind of get famous first.”
Talking to Minchin about everything he’s done in the past decade, you get the distinct impression that he’s still in a bit of shock.
“I cannot explain to you how ridiculous it is,” he says. “You know how people go, ‘I always dreamed of having my name in lights.’ I dreamed of playing in a piano bar. I went, I wonder if one day someone will pay me to play piano. Imagine that. That was my fucking dream.”
He explains the trajectory. He had piano lessons as a kid, but gave them up pretty quickly. It was his older brother who pulled him into music, making him join his rock band in high school. After studying English and theatre at the University of Western Australia, where he met Sarah, he became a cabaret artist – playing piano in bands, accompanying Eddie Perfect and Todd McKenney on stage, and recording an album in his Perth lounge room that record companies liked but didn’t know quite how to place. He wanted an acting agent but was getting nowhere. He liked writing comedy songs – satire and silliness – but didn’t give them much weight. After a while, he thought he’d just stick them all together in a comedy cabaret show, “separate the wacky stuff from the more sincere stuff”, then go back to his real career.
But then he did a show at Melbourne Fringe in 2003, “and people just laughed, much more than I thought they would”. He found he was more comfortable talking on stage than he thought he would be.
“Then the next year I called it comedy and everything went ape shit. Like just ape shit. And then within a couple of years of that, I got asked to write Matilda and then suddenly I’m fucking 44 and I just want to die I’m so tired.” He laughs, but also sounds like he kinda means it.
“I didn’t aspire to being a comedian, but it is such a joyous thing that I got to be. Sometimes I think, why didn’t I just stick to that? But I think in the end I’m a theatre guy. I really like making people cry.”
“I’ve always been an actor... It’s just that you don’t get roles in telly when you look like this. And so I had to kind of get famous first.”
It was his ability to make people cry that purportedly secured him the Matilda gig. In 2008, West End director Matthew Warchus had been tasked with finding a composer for the Royal Shakespeare Company stage adaptation of Roald Dahl’s 1988 book about an unusually smart girl, who also happens to have the power of telekinesis and decides to take revenge on the awful adults in her life.
Warchus went to a Minchin gig and was impressed, but not convinced. “A fantastic musician and an outstanding lyricist,” he told The Guardian, but he wasn’t sure he would be able to capture the heart essential to Dahl’s work. Then, as an encore, Minchin performed his surprisingly sentimental tune ‘White Wine in the Sun’ – a ballad about Christmas in Australia, homegrown traditions and effortless, familial love. “The whole audience cried,” said Warchus. Minchin got the gig.
Following that smash success – the musical went on to win seven Olivier Awards, the most such awards ever won by a single show at the time, and has toured all over the world – Minchin wrote the lyrics and music for a musical adaptation of Groundhog Day. It was a hit in London, and flew over to Broadway. The Minchins soon followed, moving to LA so Tim could continue to work on an animated musical film starring Hugh Jackman. And then…
After four years of work, the film was scrapped – a casualty of the NBCUniversal takeover of DreamWorks. Not long after that, Minchin found out Groundhog Day would be ending its run on Broadway after just five months. Needless to say, despite his formidable success, it was still a huge blow.
“It doesn’t matter whether you’re a plumber or a fuckhead like me,” he says, “if you’ve built something over four years with matchsticks and someone sets fire to it, it hurts.”
He and his family moved back to Australia not long after, and Minchin says he felt pretty close to being depressed, like someone had stolen his “mojo”.
“It was like someone had just sucked it out of me, like a Roald Dahl character with some sort of vacuum pump had just stolen my sparkle-arkle. And that’s all I’ve got!”
The transition was hard for the whole family, but a couple of years on Minchin says things are on the up and up. And he puts a lot of it down to making Upright. As the show travelled across breathtaking and quintessentially Australian landscapes – watching it, you can practically smell the eucalyptus and feel the red dirt on your skin – Minchin felt like he was having a homecoming.
“Given that it’s a show about resolving your shit and coming home and breathing out, the making of it has been utterly healing for me. I got to meet [co-star] Milly and she’s like this miracle, and meet these Australians whose craft is as good as anything in the world, and work with people I love with big brains. It was just rejuvenating. It’s good to be home.”
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“If anything in my life other than my family means anything to me, it’s my piano,” says Minchin, who will perennially be perched behind a shiny black piano in my mind, his characteristic ginger mane poking out over the top. He first learned to play on his great-grandmother Lilian’s old pianola.
“I guess it’s a hundred-and-something years old now, it’s still in my parents’ house and, it’s a battered thing. It was always a battered thing.”
A big drawcard for doing Upright was that it’s a show centered on one guy’s strange obsession with an upright piano, a concept Minchin says was “immediately seductive”.
“Things like musical instruments and homes and theatres...they accumulate the stories of what’s gone by. They carry the reminders of everything, of everything dropped on them, of every stain, every scratch. And it gets imbued with what you could call a spirit.”
He’s obviously uncomfortable with talking like this; he speaks in stutters and half sentences, struggling to find the right words.
“My loathing of the clichés of the language around inspiration and music is because it means so much, not because I think it doesn’t,” he explains. “[Playing piano] is the closest thing I have to church or meditation.”
The whole time we chat, Minchin is funny and witty and verbose but surprisingly, and endearingly, earnest. It makes me think of the 2013 commencement speech he made at his alma mater, University of Western Australia, when he was awarded an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters. He cracked plenty of jokes like, “Happiness is like an orgasm: if you think about it too much, it goes away.” But then he added: “I am no nihilist. I am not even a cynic. I am, actually, rather romantic.” He insists that, despite appearances, he is an optimist.
“It is hard to be optimistic at the moment – because of the world, I mean – really hard,” he says to me with a sigh. “It’s a weird time. I was up between three and 4am this morning with my brain going, what do we do about Donald Trump? As if it’s my fucking problem to solve. It’s just desperate anxiety.” His train of thought is interrupted by his mobile buzzing – he tells me it’s his dad, but he’ll call him back in a sec. The call seems to have helped break him out of the anxiety tailspin.
“I think in terms of my art I’m an optimist. I don’t believe that art can cure the world, but I do believe my job is to uplift. And sometimes that means making people cry and making them think about stuff. You know, Matilda, Groundhog Day, Upright, they really are all addressing how you can be in the world. How do you tread gently and act kindly? I’ve never been interested in politics politics. I’m not going to talk about the Labor Party versus the Liberal Party or those false binaries. I want to talk about why we believe what we believe.”
He stops and looks straight into the screen, and gives a little laugh.
“Well there you go, there’s a highfalutin end…”
By Katherine Smyrk (also a proud ginger)
This article first appeared in The Big Issue Australia.
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