In this series, I meet extraordinary Australians...
This is what I do. This is who I am.
It's so exciting to be here.
(LAUGHS) (LAUGHS)
..who tell me their fascinating stories...
It was like someone had just given me gold.
..while I paint their portrait.
Like, I would sleep with my bat as a kid.
(LAUGHS)
My challenge is to capture their character...
That's not what you've got the power of the microphone to do.
..and put it on the canvas.
I was born this colour for a reason.
The portrait is theirs to keep, so I want them to like it.
Oh, my God! Heavens above.
Oh, my God! Wow!
Gee! That's incredible!
Wow! Oh, my God.
She's hot! (LAUGHS)
Welcome to Anh's Brush With Fame.
Tim Minchin is one of Australia's most fascinating entertainers.
His unique comic voice
took him from local clubs to sold-out shows in London and New York.
♪ I wrote a letter to Mr Sony
♪ Said, "Hey, S-Sony what's g-going down? ♪
He went on to conquer the West End,
with the hugely successful Matilda The Musical
and then, Hollywood came knocking.
I want to know how he formed his world view
and how it's helped him navigate both triumph and disappointment.
I've never met Anh, but I was quite excited to do so.
My kids were particularly excited.
I was only sort of aware of him in a general sense as a name
until my kids got to the point where they were reading his books.
I quite like the idea of my face being rendered
in large splotches of paint.
Be good.
Tim is an outstanding talent with a big bag of tricks,
but his ability to write lyrics that make us both laugh and cry,
I find incredible.
Tim. Hello, Anh.
How are you? How are you?
So great to have you on the show. Really good to meet you properly.
Take a seat. On this chair?
On this chair, Tim.
I love the no-shoes thing. I'm a big fan.
The no-shoes thing really belongs with my act.
It's not something I do all the time.
But then I thought, "What am I... I'm going to be sitting in a chair.
"I should... I'll be more relaxed if I have no shoes."
Sure! No shoes it is.
Anyway. Let's do it.
We'll go right back to the start, Tim.
Your father and grandfather were both surgeons.
Yeah. Any pressure on you?
No, actually.
I think my dad became a surgeon...
..under duress.
I'm one of four kids, and we all did arts degrees.
(BOTH LAUGH) And Dad never... never said a word.
I don't think I ever heard him say, "What about surgery?"
Not even that, you know. Yeah.
Because he could tell we weren't necessarily scientific-minded.
Although later in my life, I became very interested in all that.
What were you like as a kid?
I suppose I was an arsehole, you know?
(LAUGHS) That's not...
I was, um, little chubby kid.
Bit slow on the uptake.
Um... Didn't really know what was going on.
I spent my teens boogie boarding and playing hockey
and running middle distance, poorly. Yeah, right.
As a kid, Tim was fortunate to see Starlight Express,
a show about a toy train set that comes to life.
Take me back to that first Starlight Express event.
I've got this decade-based relationship with England.
'Cause I was born there in '75, I went back in '85 with my parents,
and, uh... yeah, we saw Phantom and Starlight Express and dunno...
It was bang in the era of Lloyd Webber's utter dominance
of the West End and Broadway,
and, yeah, I just remember, somehow we got tickets.
The original production of Starlight Express had the stage there
and a track that went round the front 8 or 10 rows of the audience.
We sat in that middle section. No way.
And it's loud.
I remember that being pretty impactful
but certainly not in a kind of like, "I want to do this one day" way.
I didn't really believe I was allowed to be a musician
until I was in my mid 20s and had already written a dozen scores.
I just didn't believe it, you know?
I just went to England to play the piano
for Lloyd Webber's 70th birthday.
It was quite freaky, and I was sweating!
Like, I don't get nervous much any more,
but Elton John's sitting there.
I didn't know he was gonna bloody be there!
Elton John's just... Andrew's there, Tim Rice is there,
and... and other scary people.
And, yeah, so I had to play this... absolutely crapping myself.
But anyway, it's weirdly that ridiculous musical
has this big arc in my life.
Amazing.
Maybe I'm done with it now, now I've done that.
Did you love piano from a kid, or...?
There was a piano in our house,
a 100-year-old pianola, actually, pedal piano,
which had more influence on me
than all the other musicals put together, by the way,
this player piano,
and we would sit around
and, like, in a slightly nauseous, nauseating way,
we'd all sit around and sing with this thing.
So the sound of this piano,
which was not a nice piano,
was kind of huge in my life.
So I took up piano... I can't remember. Nine?
And did four years of lesson.
Did up to Grade 3.
Eventually, after three years of Mum going, "Are you gonna practice?"
I went, "No, I... No."
And she went, "Well, quit."
So my piano teacher, Mrs Craig,
Jean Craig who I now, you know, know,
she always says, "I can't believe I didn't notice that you had..."
You know, I didn't display any particular talent for it.
So when I quit, she went,
"Oh, well, that's disappointing, but you should just know this."
And she took me through harmonising a C major scale.
So C major, D minor, E minor, F major, G,
which then becomes a dominant, A minor, B minor flat 5, C.
She went, "That's a harmonised scale. Good luck!"
And that changed my life. Eventually.
It came back to change my life,
because the patterned nature of music, I got, eventually.
Wow. So... I quit.
Um, and I think I probably didn't play for a year?
Mm-hm.
And my brother was like, going, "Can you work out...
"You know, we should play Light My Fire,
"can you work out that... (SINGS RIFF)"
And I went, "Yeah, I can work that out."
And I think I just started playing things a bit more by ear
and with that little hint,
it opened the door just a crack,
which then took me 15, 20 years to properly walk through.
In 1993, while studying at the University of Western Australia,
Tim meets and falls in love with fellow arts student Sarah.
After nine years together,
they decide to pack up their lives in Perth and move to Melbourne,
hoping for a career break.
Before they leave, they get married.
Leaving Perth's hard.
It never got harder than leaving Perth.
'Cause you just, the psychological sense of how big that is...
Perth is...
It's just its own world.
There's no sense that you belong to anywhere else.
There's no... If you grow up in Melbourne,
there's, "Ohh, Sydney rivalry and..."
But at least you have a sense of a connection,
that you're part of a group of cities.
It's its own thing, isn't it? It's its own thing.
And especially coming from a family like mine,
you know, my cousins were four streets that way,
my grandma lived up the road,
and, you know, it was just a real sense of belonging.
We packed up and drove to Melbourne.
The best bits were just stopping on the side of the Nullarbor Plain
and driving off, sitting on the Bight,
and, like, cooking some dinner
and going to sleep with a mosquito net over the back, the open back,
and just, you know, watch the sun go down over the Bight in the west,
and go, "Oh, it's 7:00, let's just go to bed."
And go to bed and wake up at 5:00 the next morning
to see the sun coming up the Bight over the east.
Amazing. It's just so good.
The move to Melbourne was challenging.
The newlyweds struggled financially.
Tim had hoped the east coast move would deliver career success.
Instead, he was being battered by rejection.
It was tough, though,
'cause we didn't know how that was gonna work out.
Just money-wise.
By then I'd done a few... a lot of stuff,
played a lot of piano for a lot of people and...
But I...
I was still sort of thinking,
"Maybe I'll go and get a teaching degree or something?"
Yeah.
When did you and Sarah decide to have kids?
In my late 20s.
Sarah and I wanted to have kids,
and I came to a place where I thought,
"Well, we'll just be poor and have kids."
Because I think I had...
..somewhere around there probably come to the conclusion
that I wasn't really gonna do anything else.
'Cause somewhere in all that not getting record deals
and not getting an agent and not getting acting jobs
and not looking like the thing that gets you on Home And Away
and, in amongst all that rejection,
every time I did anything,
someone or some group of people would be like, "That was amazing!"
People would have this reaction that just kept me thinking,
"I think this is what I'm good at."
Mm. "Stick in there."
And it wasn't stick in there like, "You're gonna make it!
"You're gonna be a star one day!"
It was "Stick in there, because this is what I do. This is who I am."
In 2004,
Tim's decision to reinvent his stage persona had incredible results.
Tim, I've seen footage of you early in your career...
Yeah. ..and your hair's really different.
Yeah, yeah. And you look different.
And was that a conscious choice?
To try and look like a rock star?
(LAUGHS)
(PLAYS BRIGHT TUNE) ♪ Oh
♪ This show's about me
♪ Baby. ♪
I saw some photos and I thought,
"You just look like a bogan, you know?"
(LAUGHS) Like, who is this guy
who has these ideas, you know?
As soon as I put the long coat on and had the wild hair,
I realised he looked a bit...
And that suddenly allowed me
to be high status and low status at the same time, right?
So I'm a big-haired, big-coated guy playing a grand piano,
and I insisted on a grand piano.
I looked all around Melbourne for a venue with a grand piano in it
'cause I just thought, "I've gotta give myself some status."
I can play in a way that's...
..if I frame it right, will look impressive.
I wasn't very good. I got better, but I was pretty good.
And if I can say to people, I'm a slightly mad genius,
they'll fricking believe it, even though I'm pretty crap.
(LAUGHS)
(PLAYS COMPLICATED JAZZY RIFF)
(CHEERING)
And that also allowed me to start talking about ideas
that were a little bit, um, sort of high falutin',
and a little bit critical of the way people think and believe,
but because he was a bit, like, slightly... mad,
you could get away with it more.
In 2005,
Tim found out he would be performing
at one of the most prestigious comedy events in the world -
the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
He would also discover that his relationship with Sarah
was about to change forever.
We've just put a pregnancy test in to boil.
We are.
(LAUGHS)
Sarah got pregnant before... my first Edinburgh,
which is when everything really changed.
And, yeah, it was quite full-on, that few months.
I mean it... Our lives tipped on a single 12-month period, really.
And then you're over there, Tim, and you get a phone call from Sarah.
Yeah. Tell me about that.
Yeah, I was a long way from Sarah
and when she rang me and said that she'd had her 12-week scan
and that it wasn't viable anymore...
A miscarriage? A miscarriage, yeah. Um...
So I don't know what they call, what the difference of a miscarriage is
but it was still there but no longer... no longer growing,
no longer a heartbeat.
Failure to protect is probably pretty, um...
..programmed pretty deep.
I had a huge amount of empathy for Sarah,
and it was upsetting.
I think maybe, actually, if I'm being harsh on myself,
I was probably a little in my own head,
probably wasn't quite empathic enough.
I don't know if Sarah would say that, but...
Did you feel that, at any stage,
that you wanted to be there for your wife?
Yeah, I did, but my brain just overrides that.
It's just in my nature. I'm my father's son.
I'm just like, "Well, of course I want to be there but...
"you know, I have to be here,
"because I'm changing our lives, you know." (CHUCKLES)
And my God, I mean Edinburgh, the emotional... that whole thing,
which doesn't compare, in any way,
to having a miscarriage on your own in Melbourne,
but I was... I was...
You know, never had anyone really take interest in my stuff.
Suddenly journalists were competing to be either lauding of my work
or contemptuous of my work
and people are starting to write about me, and it change...
That moment, um...
..being... a public figure
that people feel they have a right to comment on and stuff,
that's a big transition,
so I was going through my own crazy shit
and probably, it put me in a quite self-centred space.
So it was this dissonant thing where I was going,
"Oh, God, this has happened at home, and that's thousands of miles away
"and I'm going through this here."
But it is one of perhaps the most traumatic,
but one of many times
where Sarah and I have had to go through big things
without each other.
And the fact that we can do that,
and then we come back together and reflect on it, and move forward,
is part of why we are that very, very rare thing in my industry,
which is a surviving first love, you know?
Tim is passionate about his career,
but family is very important to him,
and he's confident,
but he's not blind to his own flaws.
He's a fascinating bloke.
So Tim, you're kind of struggling, you know,
and then within 12 months,
you're a massive hit in the UK.
What's that like?
It wasn't like being a nobody who suddenly gets cast as Thor.
It was a slope, but it was pretty steep,
and so every year...
Suddenly, we moved to London.
Suddenly I was doing 500-seat theatres.
And the following year, it was almost exponential, you know -
1,000, and then suddenly it was 3,000 and suddenly it was arenas.
And suddenly I could afford to buy a flat
and then suddenly I realised
that money wasn't really a thing we had to worry about for now.
Can you imagine that?
I mean, you've had it too,
to have so much stress about, "Am I good enough?
"Do I deserve a career?
"How are we going to live?"
And to have all that suddenly sort of solved,
you'd think you'd just be going like this in the kitchen, right?
(LAUGHS) But it's hugely stressful.
From that moment, to now,
it's just been a totally nuts progression
of just having the coolest career.
Talk me through Matilda.
How did you come to be involved in the project?
Actually, only a couple of years after I moved to England
and things were going pretty well with the touring.
You know, my agent said,
"There's someone at the RSC wants to meet with you"
and I kind of went in blind.
I didn't really know what it was about.
I just turned up, and he asked me if I knew anything...
You know, had heard of Roald Dahl
and, "Do you know this book Matilda?"
And I'm like...
"Yes."
Um, I'm a huge Dahl head from my youth.
We made this plan
and then I went away
and Sarah was six months pregnant with Caspar,
and so I had about six or eight weeks before Caspar was born,
and I wrote, like, 10 or 12 songs.
Wow. And got 'em demoed up.
But then, you know, rewrites and workshops
and two years of on and off working on it.
And it's been massively successful.
I mean, we knew we were... we felt like it was gonna be cool.
We didn't necessarily think we'd do seven years.
Seven years?
Well, so far, and it's not slowing down,
so it'll probably do the decade, which happens every now and then.
How does it feel to create something that's touched so many people?
To have put Matil... Helped put Matilda out into the world,
to do my little bit, and to watch thousands of kids,
thousands and thousands of kids every week,
have that be their first theatrical experience.
I mean, to have been able to give kids what I got out of Starlight,
and hopefully more, 'cause I'd like to argue,
Matilda is richer in ideas than Starlight,
but... no, well, no, um...
That's the unbelievable thing. That's unbelievable.
Yeah, yeah it's huge. That's fantastic.
In 2014, Tim and his young family
would find themselves moving continents yet again
so that he could embark on the most incredibly creative
and most challenging career experience of his life -
his first Hollywood film.
Tell me about the big project that you've recently...
Yeah. So I had... I moved to LA to direct an animated feature film,
an Australian outback, going across the desert...
A bilby. A bilby and a kangaroo.
Yeah.
So this is a $90 million DreamWorks animation film,
singing animal, Aussie outback movie
and we had Hugh Jackman and Damon Herriman
and Jacki Weaver and Ben Mendelsohn. Wow!
It was...
..epic, you know?
Naomi Watts, Margot Robbie doing voices,
and you know, we have meetings, a half hour meeting
about the sheen on the surface of a feather of a minor character.
Every speck of dirt, we'd have whole meetings
about what the colour of red is in the north-west.
And then Universal took over DreamWorks and everything changed.
I got a call from the head of the studio
who had started that day and so they just said,
"Oh, we didn't know whether it was gonna be a hit or not."
So for them, it was like, "These are all our assets, Shrek, da-da-da.
"This is liabilities.
"This question mark Australian thing by this...
This mad-genius-looking dude.
"this kind of guy that is quite stubborn."
And how was that for you to spend three and a half years of your life,
and then now it's all gone.
On a personal level, unfortunately, selfishly,
I couldn't stop thinking about what I had said no to in that time.
I decided I was gonna step behind the camera
and be a better dad and...
You know, I was getting paid well to be at DreamWorks,
so it's not... it wasn't a great sacrifice.
It's just that I'd made this decision
and then the film took longer than I thought
and I got sort of sucked in and then I realised that I was trapped,
but I thought, "Even if it takes five years,
"it'll be something I've done."
So now I can't help but look over those years and go,
"I said no to all these tours and all this..."
And my comedy career just... I mean, I retired basically.
Yeah. You know?
It's an interesting time. I had a bad year last year.
My first real bad year,
where I really struggled to shake off a couple of setbacks.
It sort of dug something into my brain
that might... that I might never get over,
of that real feeling of being... of someone... someone external...
..being able to take your art away from you,
which was, again, a massively privileged problem to have, but...
There was some down periods and it was hard to shake, was it?
Yeah, hard to shake,
but also I wrote... co-wrote a musical,
which is the best thing I've ever made,
but it went to Broadway and didn't do very well for lots of reasons.
It did six months, but it didn't land like we hoped it would.
But yeah, you... you bloody...
You know, doesn't take much to knock you off your zero point.
Did you ever have a moment of self doubt?
Oh, always.
Always, always, always.
The external world doesn't really change your beliefs about yourself,
does it? Mmm.
Like you're kind of... your self-esteem,
your sense of who you are,
they're done by the time you're finished your teens, really.
I don't suddenly not doubt myself. Mmm.
That's done, man.
Me as a self-doubting being is locked in.
Yeah. You know?
I could probably go to counselling every week and work on it,
but being self-doubting doesn't hurt.
Just makes me work harder.
At the end of 2017,
Tim returned to Australia and performing,
appearing in TV events and local comedy series.
Well, if everyone knows that psychos drive white vans,
then a real psycho wouldn't buy a white van, would he?
He also used his talent to shine a light on some hotly debated issues.
♪ We all just want you to
♪ Come home, Cardinal Pell
♪ I know you're not feeling well
♪ And being crook ain't much fun
♪ Even so we think you should come
♪ Home... ♪
Tell me about the song Come Home (Cardinal Pell).
There's something about...
You know, I'm very interested in religion
and there's something about people claiming moral authority
from a position of magical thinking...
..just makes me furious.
That's why I wrote it. Ah.
Because that's exactly what the point of satire is,
is to make sure...
..that people that cloak themselves in authority that is undeserved
don't get treated differently.
It's BECAUSE he's a cardinal that you need to write that song,
because this pomp and ceremony is meaningless...
Mmm. ..to me.
Is it true you even got death threats over it?
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Got a little death threat or two, but...
I mean, a death threat these days, what does that mean,
someone on the internet under my piece Anthem for Palestine
saying, "I'm gonna kill you, you... Jew-hater, Jew-lover,"
whatever they interpret it as.
You really do care about issues, Tim,
and you put it out there, you know?
You get in the fight.
Yeah, well, I try to be very careful about what fights I get into
simply 'cause it's draining.
I've been accidentally quite good with timing. Um...
As in, there's a moment when a little bit of funny agitation
can actually act as a catalyst.
And that's our job, as comedians to the extent that we are,
is to say, "Look, here's an awful thing.
"Let's just have a moment of laughing at it."
And that's quite hard to do these days, in the current climate.
We are in a strange time where the idea of laughing at something,
someone will always say, "This is not to be laughed at."
And I understand that because most jokes...
..have a victim. Mmm.
You hope that they're - the victims - are the meanies.
But... people find that hurtful.
2019 is a busy year for Tim,
with not only the launch of a new TV series, Upright,
but also his first national tour in seven years.
I'm in a slightly reinventing myself phase
and I'm trying to record an album,
trying to write songs without impetus.
I'm not writing for a musical,
I'm not writing because I'm angry about something politically,
I'm not even writing for a comedy show, I'm writing for a record.
And I find that very hard.
I don't think I'd find it hard if I was locked away somewhere,
but I wake up in the morning and deal with our new puppy
and the kids crying about their French homework
and you just... By the time you get the kids out to school,
you don't feel like an artist anymore -
you feel like a rattled middle-aged father.
Dad! (LAUGHS) You know?
And suddenly you're like, what am I meant to write about now?
And so that's my struggle at the moment. (LAUGHS)
You once said,
"Define yourself by what you love, not what you hate".
Yeah. What do you love?
I love playing piano and making stuff and being with my family
and swimming in the ocean.
I love the idea of never getting predictable.
I love the idea
of constantly slightly changing what I'm aiming for,
which is tiring, but...
Mmm. You're brilliant at being unpredictable.
I-I love that about you
and I've loved painting you today.
I'm nearly done.
Um, I'm just gonna need another 20, half hour, to finish off
and make it really good.
So we're gonna take a break, and I'll bring you back, Tim.
The narcissism of this feeling of looking forward to seeing it
is quite interesting.
But I don't usually look forward to seeing my face,
but seeing you make my face is pretty exciting.
Wonderful, wonderful. OK.
(LAUGHS) Nervous.
I better be beautiful. (CHUCKLES)
I find the experience of watching Anh be able to paint and listen
and compose questions
sort of miraculous.
I'm intrigued by how he will see me.
Tim's a hardworking creative powerhouse
who's not afraid to be vocal
when it comes to something he feels strongly about.
I'm also trying to show his self-confidence and strength,
while tempering it with his vulnerability.
I've tried to put all of that in here.
Let's see what he thinks.
Alright, Tim, I'm all done. Alright.
Come on back in.
So you've got great hair and you've got amazing eyes,
so they're features I had to get in there,
but I also wanted to convey your intelligence
and, uh... your sort of sense of, "Here I am. I'm Tim Minchin".
Right. So with that, close your big eyes.
(LAUGHS) Don't open them until I tell you.
Alright, Tim, open your eyes.
Oh, man.
How do you do that?
It's absolutely incredible. It's incredible.
I thought it would be more an interpretation
but it's actually incredibly... accurate, isn't it?
Like, that's what I look like.
You've got this sort of lovely untamed quality about you.
(LAUGHS) And I wanted that.
I wanted that in there, you know?
It's so amazing.
You're a freak. (LAUGHS)
Proper freak.
I'm really glad you liked it. Yeah, it's so cool.
It's been a joy to have you on the show today. Thank you.
It's an absolute pleasure. Thank you. Loved meeting you.
My director said to me, when Matilda opened,
that art is an artefact of something you made in the time you had.
It's never perfect, it's never finished,
and this is such an extraordinary version of that.
It's just astounding.
Tim Minchin has a strong sense of what he stands for
and throws himself into everything he does with humour and gusto.
I look forward to seeing what he does next.
Next time, award-winning writer and actress Leah Purcell
shares the secrets of her past.
If I can bring understanding of a heart...
..the heart and soul of those stories, then I've done my job.
She radiates both a fierceness and light
that I need to reflect on canvas.
Oh, wow!
She's hot! (LAUGHS)