The wide open road ahead of Tim Minchin

Tim Minchin sits amid a suite of devouringly large lounges at Fox Studios in Sydney. He’s been speaking to media all day as he is soon to star in a new eight-part Foxtel series called Upright.

Tim Minchin: I was down. I was feeling battered. The self-loathing I was feeling, it was a selfishness. But it keeps coming back.Credit:Foxtel/Damian Bennett

Even before public screenings have started, Minchin has netted himself a Best Actor Award from the Australian Writers’ Guild for his performance in the final episode. His nomination fell into the comedy category, but it’s really a brilliant existential role in that mutant division that now gets labelled ‘‘dramedy’’. As a key moment in Upright, set to the classic You Am I song Berlin Chair, puts it: “If you wait, I’ll give all my aches to you.”

I’m last in line for the day’s media call-up, yet Minchin is fresh as a daisy. Lean and alert, hair swept back, the 44-year-old is dressed sharply in charcoal-coloured jeans and T-shirt.

The globally acclaimed satirist, composer and performer radiates good health and poise, along with a slow-burning energy that idles happily, for the most part, in second gear. Minchin’s acidic lyricism and willingness to provoke had led me to expect a more withering presence. Instead, he is considerate, self-questioning and somewhat quiet-spoken – with a darting intellect that can trip his vaguely stammered speech into assertive overdrive. Even then, the assertions have an invisible question mark hanging over them. The conversation is always open to debate.

Those familiar with Minchin’s on-stage appearances – all teased-up hair, kohl-ringed eyes and bare feet at the piano, as if some burrow creature from The Hobbit had been given a David Bowie makeover – might find his near-normality surprising. Interviews over the past few years have reiterated the value he places in “kindness”. “I just don’t want the bastards to turn me into a bastard,” he says with a self-censorious air.

The room we’re in reminds me of an address Minchin gave earlier this year to WAAPA, his old music and theatre alma mater at Edith Cowan University in Perth. Upon receiving an honorary Doctorate of Performing Arts, Minchin joked with students about the hotel he was staying at, and how he’d been upgraded to a penthouse suite that was “like a furniture store”.

Tim Minchin and Milly Alcock in Upright.Credit:Foxtel/Matt Nettheim

“It’s a room built for the sole purpose of making wankers feel like legends,” he told them. He then announced: “It’s not only lonely at the top, it’s filled with many chairs.”

Self-loathing and self-obsession have been integral to Minchin’s creative see-saw. It’s evident in a typically sly set of lines from one of his songs, Rock ’n’ Roll Nerd: “He has nothing interesting to say, so he writes about himself. But he doesn’t want to seem self-obsessed, so he writes in the third person.” Minchin formed an entire cabaret show around the idea of a wannabe rock star, not to mention a career. It reached its peak with his 2013 role as Atticus Finch, “the drug addict nudist” in the sixth season of TV series Californication. In song, Minchin could be equally savage on himself as he was in attacking Cardinal Pell or, for that matter, the double-edged way he wrote a love ballad to his wife that was really about the nature of probability and choice – If I Didn’t Have You (I’d have somebody else). But as Minchin admits today, “self-loathing can eventually become its own narcissism”. And that can get a little tired.

Perhaps ironically, Upright tells the story of yet another failed musician. Lucky (Lachlan) Flynn, played by Minchin, is driving across Australia with a battered upright piano in tow. The materials of Lucky’s story, however, are more tenderly evolved than Minchin’s usually barbed fair as a cabaret artist and satirical songwriter.

Lucky is on his way to Perth to visit his dying mother and to possibly come to terms with the bad decisions he has made in life – most of all, the unexplained events that caused him to exile himself from his Western Australian family eight years ago. Before any of this can happen, Lucky becomes involved in a car smash outside of Mildura that unites him on his voyage with a teenage runaway called Meg.

Tim Minchin: You see, I didn’t grow up thinking I was allowed to be an artist.Credit:Foxtel/Damian Bennett

This ‘‘two-for-the-road’’ redemption tale could well be the best thing Minchin has ever done. Upright also confirms Milly Alcock as a major young star in the making, her feisty and foul-mouthed Meg a classic foil to Minchin’s wayward and desperate Lucky. You know the drill: the hardened youth needs to find her innocence again; the immature adult must learn to grow up and forgive. When Lucky barks at Meg during an argument – “We’re not f—–g Thelma and Louise” – you nonetheless laugh and feel wounded at the same time, having come to believe they might become this century’s version, post #MeToo and all.

As well as starring in Upright, Minchin has written some surprisingly beautiful and very un-ironic songs. He co-produces and shares creative credits on the scripts, directs a few episodes and plays a stunningly unplugged version of Under the Milky Way from a beat-up piano on the back of a ute. He also carefully and adamantly points out that Upright is a collaborative project in every way.

The series’ qualities emerge out of the best of all the voices behind it. Minchin’s, of course; but also The Chaser’s Chris Taylor, who came up with the original concept; fellow writer Leon Ford, whose previous work on Offspring suggests a little of this new show’s flavour; director and co-writer Matthew Saville, whose work on Please Like Me, Friday on My Mind and Rake hints at the commercial tones; and actor, director and co-writer Kate Mulvany, whom Minchin knows from their formative years back in Perth, and with whom, he says, he has “a huge history of shared grief and shared joy”. “To be in a writing room with Mulvers, trying to beat out these episodes, was a joyous thing,” he declares.

Tim Minchin and mother Ros, wife Sarah and father David arriving on the red carpet for The Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Matilda the musical at the Princess Theatre in Melbourne. Credit:AAP/James Morgan

“It was like dancing. I already knew when I came on board that Upright had the potential to not just be a sitcom, to not be too broad in its humour. We had references like The Trip. Kate brought other little influences. A real heart. We knew that the comedy would just come from all of us being in a room together. What we needed to create was a drama. Looking at it from start to finish now, at the movement from light to dark comedy to tragedy, we did all right.”

Moments occur when you can’t tell the difference between Minchin and his fictional character. Minchin says, “Lucky is someone I could have been if I’d made the wrong choices myself.” But there’s more to this. Minchin says in the lead-up to developing Upright, “I was down. I was feeling battered. The self-loathing I was feeling, it was a selfishness. But it keeps coming back.”

He changes tack across this thought. “I get rather twitchy when I am asked for advice,” he says. “But I do often say that I take everything I am into everything I do. The good and the bad. The fact I am this middle-class, privileged, old, white guy. That I don’t think anyone really wants to hear about my shitty little life. I drag it all along. You need to be authentic. You have to bring everything you’ve been through. And believe that it will do.”

Tim Minchin is running along a beach in Broome. He is not feeling too good. In fact, he is feeling “quite squashed”. It’s early 2018 and he has only just returned to Australia. Previously a resident of Los Angeles, he was slated to write and direct an animated Hollywood musical called Larrikins. Things have not gone well. By Minchin’s reckoning, he was three-quarters of the way towards completing Larrikins. $US40 million had been spent on development. Script and songs were written, art design done, animated sequences prepared, “hours and hours spent getting the colours of a feather and the reds of the Kimberleys right”. In keeping with the film’s Australian themes, Minchin had gathered Hollywood’s Aussie royalty around him: Hugh Jackman, Naomi Watts and Ben Mendelsohn. With everything ready to go, Larrikins was binned as a “risk project” during a corporate takeover of Minchin’s film studio, Universal.

Tim Minchin, left, as Tuck and Taron Egerton, right, in Robin Hood.

In the meantime, Minchin’s stage musical, Groundhog Day (based on the 1993 Bill Murray film), closed on Broadway after a five-month season. Minchin’s musical adaptation won an Olivier Award in London, then a string of Tony Award nominations in the USA. It was not the disaster that Larrikins was, but, in terms of Broadway ticket sales, Groundhog Day was a fizzer – and certainly not in Minchin’s plans for world domination. After the early success of his role in Californication, a feature film part as an underweight Friar Tuck in a badly done reboot of Robin Hood (2018) only added to the sense Minchin was going backwards.

He says he left Hollywood after five years feeling an act of “soul vandalism” had been wrought upon him.

“My confidence and my ability to create really took a knocking. I felt America had taken away my magic abilities. I know that sounds silly, but I really did.”

Minchin returned to Sydney to live by the sea with his wife Sarah (they met when they were 17) and their two young children, Violet and Caspar in early 2018. He felt it was important to make a quality-of-life decision rather than another career-oriented one. “To find some peace; to just calm the f— down.” He recognised his laments were “the first-world problems of a white, privileged male”, a phrase Minchin repeats in our interview like some self-correcting form of checkmate.

Tim Minchin in Californication.

In Broome, during a working holiday to kickstart his songwriting and storytelling again, he recognised his persistent self-doubts as “the maggots of regret”. On the beach, he had to stop. A long-time fan of distance running thanks to fitness practices instilled by his surgeon father in Perth, Minchin thought back to his father’s wisdom that “races are won when you’re going uphill”.

Here in Broome, he was barefoot in paradise. The earth was flat and sandy; the water a wonderful blue. Minchin had no hills before him yet all he felt was weak. He bent over. From a distance, you might have seen a small, muscular man in a knot of tears and rage – and something that looked like hopelessness. If you came closer, he may have told you he was only trying to breathe.

Tim Minchin stares back at you like his life is just beginning. It’s the final scene from Upright, but that face in steady close-up doesn’t look like someone that is acting. I tell Minchin that I think his recent failures were the best thing to ever happen to him. And that Upright restores a humanity and depth to his creativity that the stridency and increasing savagery to his satirical song work was deadening.

After I speak, Minchin’s first worry is for his new stage show, as his most recent songs are pretty much in the vein of what I am criticising. “You make me think I should not go that way.” It takes another moment for him to absorb what I’ve said. Then he tells me, “Your thesis is correct. But the turn happened for me earlier than you say, long before Upright.”

Minchin correctly speculates the brashness I’ve identified comes from watching a film of his 2011 Royal Albert Hall Show with the Heritage Orchestra. “I insisted on the laughs being mixed down, so it didn’t feel as warm as it did in the room,” he says. “I prioritised the sound of the orchestra. For me, too, on stage, it was stressful and not as joyous with all those musicians and things going on.”

Tim Minchin performing in 2018.Credit:LEXIMAGERY

These days, he admits, playing a song like Inflatable You (a love song about a sex doll) can “feel a bit twee”. He thinks his atheist anthem Thank You, God might be “withering in its power, but it’s catchy and everyone’s favourite”. I can almost hear Minchin’s mind ticking over as he talks, dissecting the songs, analysing his craft and his choices. “There’s a pressure in satire that will always lead the way you’re speaking of,” he says. “A Darwinian pressure that makes the most edgy stuff the most successful. You can see a market-driven force that leads the song-writing towards evisceration.”

Minchin’s first musical comedy show, Darkside, took him from the Melbourne Comedy Festival to winning the Perrier Award for Best Newcomer at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in the space of a single year. He went from playing in rooms for 150 people in 2005 to filling stadiums with a symphony orchestra by 2010.

The rise was ferocious, but Minchin never really saw himself as a comedian. From his boyhood days in Perth, it was music, theatre and performing that broadly interested him. His influences were “the playfulness with form” he could hear on The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; the wit in songs by The Kinks; the grandiloquent music of Queen; and, by the time he was a teenager, his older brother’s fondness for piano pop by The Whitlams and Ben Folds Five.

Whether the young Minchin was trying to set T.S. Eliot’s The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock to music or playing the part of Hamlet in a student production, there was always a serious side. Much later roles in the Sydney Theatre Company’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and a television adaptation of The Secret River only confirmed Minchin’s acting chops, which are so powerfully on show in Upright.

I just don’t want the bastards to turn me into a bastard.

It’s not comedy that drives him, it’s questions around being human and what it means to be ethical, rational, decent. Minchin dates the forces that led him to make Upright to well before any American failures. The new depth goes back to his musical translation of Roald Dahl’s Matilda for the Royal Shakespeare Company in London (now one of the most successful musicals of all time). Writing a song like When I Grow Up showed him how to be less self-consciously clever with music and lyrics, “to stop standing between an audience and a song. To just get out the way’’.

Minchin draws in a breath and lets it out again. “You see, I didn’t grow up thinking I was allowed to be an artist. I wrote archly. I didn’t feel authentic. I hadn’t suffered. That’s what Rock ’n’ Roll Nerd was about, mocking the paucity of my experience. Matilda gave me permission to go on and call myself a songwriter. This middle-class, mostly self-taught guy who thought he was not really that. It’s still going on. The giving myself the permission to be authentic and make art now.”

Yeah, Tim Minchin is Lucky alright.

Upright will premiere on December 1 at 8.30pm on Fox Showcase and can be streamed on Foxtel. Minchin will perform at the Enmore Theatre in March 2020.

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