A year ago, Tim Minchin announced his intention "not to become an unbearable tool with a huge-tiny ego". He knows how dangerously intoxicating fame can be, how heady and addictive. "It's not that wankers become famous," he once said. "It's that fame makes you a wanker."
He had been that rare thing, one of the chosen few, who had traversed the divide from playing to an audience of mostly friends in a tiny club, and "rejected by pretty much every agent in Australia", to a star playing arenas with a 57-piece orchestra. The toast of London.
He loved it. It was all "so shiny". Ten thousand people rising to their feet to applaud him, being recognised in the street, the truly excellent wine, the smart, famous friends, the paparazzi and posh hotels, parties and premieres. The beautiful, "shaking and crying girls who can't believe they are touching me" in late-night bars in romantic cities. His face on billboards. "I mean dude, this is why you learnt the piano, so you could get attention, and here it is."
But he also knew that "none of that shit is good for a person". He tells Australian Story, "It's all about me, me, me. And it screws with your ego. It's like you are dislodged from yourself."
And he knew that he didn't want to lose his wife, Sarah. "You're away from home for a long time, you're jet-lagged, you're drinking. I think the times I got close to doing the wrong thing made me realise it wouldn't be worth it to blow my marriage. I wanted a family that was all together."
The 47-year-old has learned how ruthless show business can be; how casually and callously Hollywood can spit people out. In 2017, the animated film Larrikins, which he was co-directing, was cancelled after four years' work when NBC Universal acquired DreamWorks Animation.
It was a resounding crash from a dizzy height. "It just broke something in my Pollyanna-ish attitude to art. I chose to swim in those shark-infested waters. It happened just as I turned 40-ish and I just feel like I'm a little bit more cynical, which is a pity. You are going to be grumpy for a while."
Actually, he was furious. Deflated and back in Australia, he was forced to take stock. "You change after those sorts of experiences. And I have done things differently since. I took back control of my work."
Tim was 'a shining star' from a young age
Tim was the middle child in a "warm, close" family of four children who had migrated from the UK to Perth when he was a baby.
"My dad's a surgeon, very hard-working, pretty modest, not interested in money. Second-hand cars and camping trips, but very good schools and stability. It was middle-class comfort, I suppose."
The four kids played music together. Tim was always drawn to the piano. "I didn't think one day I'm going to be a star. It just wasn't in my culture."
Actor Toby Schmitz first met him at a youth theatre company. Even as a teenager Tim was gregarious and prodigiously talented. "Tim was a shining star," says Toby. "Sparks were coming off him, he was magnetic."
'I want to be loved for being a weird-looking ginger bloke'
Tim first met his wife Sarah when they were both at high school. On the first day of their arts degrees, they started sitting together, then spending all their time together. Tim admits he wasn't a very "engaged" arts student. "Mostly I fell in love and had sex and ate burgers."
"He was quite silly and funny," Sarah recalls. "He was always noodling away on the piano. Eventually he recorded some songs with a tape recorder. It was pretty raw at that stage, but I could definitely hear the tunes."
Back then, most of the songs he wrote were for her. "He wrote very passionate, romantic stuff early on," she says. They turned to angry songs when Sarah dumped him after three years together.
"We'd been together from when we were 17," she says, "and he was a lot. I was trying to figure out how I would fit, and if I would fit."
"It was awful; it was my first proper heartbreak," Tim says. "A lot of lying on his bed looking at the ceiling." But he understands why she did it. "She's a quiet, thoughtful person. I had all these actor friends and everything was huge. She felt overwhelmed and didn't know who she was."
He fell in love with someone else, but when that didn't work out, they were, Sarah says, "drawn back towards each other". It had been a two-year break. "I just needed that time because I could come into it going, 'This is the beast and this is who you are going to be with,' so I was able to do that more consciously and know that I had to find a place for myself in amongst that."
Back together, they were able to figure out a way forward to the relationship that they wanted to have. "Sarah is not hugely flamboyant and demonstrative, which is excellent if you're a needy artist partner. She is always supportive, but if I'm looking for someone to pat me on the back and just go, 'You're amazing', I don't come to Sarah for that. If I want to be loved for being a sort of weird-looking ginger bloke, then I go to Sarah for that."
Sarah is, Tim says, "the overarching relationship of my adult life". But his fame brings temptations. "I'm away a lot and I am in a really flamboyant industry and I'm really flirtatious and I really like women."
Resisting those temptations became the subject of I'll Take Lonely Tonight, a song about rejecting a woman's advances. "That's a song about my darling husband, like, not cheating on me," says Sarah with a mischievous smile. "Congratulations. Well done, Tim."
It's nevertheless one she lists among her favourites Tim has written, even if she's a little guarded with her praise. "I make a joke of that, that he shouldn't be praised for everything, including not cheating on me."
Sarah says she has had to learn to manage the kind of emotions that could have torn the relationship apart. "I couldn't live in a fury of jealousy all the time about where he was and what he was doing. So I just learned not to have any of that. That was a part of what I had to figure out."
They learned very early on that they hated arguing. "We almost tacitly decided we weren't going to shout at each other," Tim says. Adds Sarah: "I think we just trusted each other."
From now on I'm 'this guy': Tim transforms
Two months after they were married, they "got in the Holden Commodore and drove across the desert" to Melbourne. There Sarah worked as a social worker while Tim got rejected by agents. "I am made of my rejections and I am made of my years of non-success," Tim says. "I am built of the closed doors."
He played keyboards for cover bands and cabaret and even auditioned to be a receipt in a supermarket ad. "It was literally like a receipt with a face, a receipt costume. I didn't get it so we will never know whether I would have nailed that role. There were years where I earned no money and wrote five things for free. I was always doing wedding bands and piano bars."
For a while he played keyboards in performer Eddie Perfect's band. "He believed in himself when no one believed in him," Eddie says. "Where do you get that kind of confidence from? I think you get it from working harder than everybody else and from failing and picking yourself back up and putting yourself out there again and trying over and over again."
And Tim was working on his own material, honing his craft even though no one came to hear the dazzlingly profane comedy songs that would soon make him famous.
He wasn't earning any money, and he and Sarah wanted to have a baby. Tim got to the stage of giving it one last roll of the dice. He would give it one more year, put everything he had into that year, to the next show, if that didn't work, he would get a job.
It was while he was in Sydney in 2004 writing songs for a fringe musical that he realised he needed to create a theatrical image to attract attention. He lost weight and slapped on makeup. "It was the first time I straightened my hair and teased it and did eye makeup and played on a grand piano. And I went, 'From now on, I'm this guy.'"
For the Melbourne Comedy Festival in 2005 he created the Dark Side show. "The idea behind that show was to put everything that Tim could possibly do into this one act," says friend Rhian Skirving, who had started filming Tim and Sarah for what would become her feature documentary Rock 'n' Roll Nerd.
Rhian says that the character Tim created — "this crazy haired, wild, chaotic rockstar-looking guy with the self-deprecating, downbeat persona" — was incredibly appealing to audiences. "They fell for him."
It was a hit, and he was invited to take the show to the Edinburgh Festival, the biggest comedy festival in the world. He went into Edinburgh unknown and came out a star.
Eddie Perfect remembers there was "an audacity" about the way he rolled into Edinburgh. "What happened to Tim at the festival was sort of unprecedented for someone to make that big an impression so quickly and, you know, kind of like conquer that festival in the way he did."
In 2006, he and Sarah moved to London. He was a touring comedian and would leave Sarah in a freezing cold winter with a baby. But after the privations of Melbourne, "we were safe". In fact, he was on a stratospheric rise. "I was on the telly and I was winning awards. It wasn't long before we were talking about orchestras and arenas. It was huge."
And then the offer of Matilda came along. "It was the Royal Shakespeare Company and it was Roald Dahl, my childhood hero." He would write a musical of the beloved children's book. "It expanded my understanding of myself. I realised I had a responsibility to not screw it up and that if I did a good job it would probably go to the West End. I loved the process, I loved the collaboration."
But those years were hectic. "I opened the first night of my orchestra show with the 55-piece symphony orchestra in Birmingham in front of 8,000 people. I had tour buses of string players touring England, and I was writing material on the fly. I opened that and then my brother came and we got on a train the next day and went to Stratford for the opening of Matilda. And then I went back on my bus and joined my tour again. I didn't feel it as pressure, I felt it as adventure."
Matilda would go to London's West End and Broadway, and has been running for 11 years, making him rich.
Tim would play Judas in Andrew Lloyd Webber's arena tour production of Jesus Christ Superstar. "That was the most excited I've ever been about anything." He would play the drug-addled, sex-addicted, profane rockstar Atticus Fetch in the US television show Californication.
Tim was working in LA a lot, and when Larrikins came along, he and Sarah relocated there. He moved among the biggest Hollywood stars. But when the film was shelved in a corporate takeover — dismissed as a tax write-off — Tim Minchin seemed to have lost his stardust.
"I had this big, big reality check where if you want to play up there in the big leagues you can't passion your way through stuff. There are other forces at play."
Hollywood is about business, bottom line. "I think it was a necessary lesson and quite naive of me to think that it would come down to how we treat one another."
At the same time, Groundhog Day: The Musical, which he had written the music and lyrics for, and which had won a slew of awards in the UK, had a disappointingly short Broadway run, "for lots of reasons". A film he was in, Robin Hood, tanked.
And so a more circumspect, philosophical, but "still driven". Tim Minchin moved back to Australia.
He did what he has always done, wrote clever songs at the piano. "I made an album of my own non-comic stuff and I created a show and toured it for four years, stretched out over this little pandemic. I was very, very blessed to be able to come back to Australia with the reputation I now have."
The songs on the album Apart Together are more heartfelt these days, more sophisticated, but still brilliantly funny. And still he is busy; a machine. There is a Sydney Opera House steps gig, the film of his Back show going into cinemas in the UK, the film of Matilda going into cinemas in the UK and New York and Netflix "and there's a bunch of other shit as well going on".
And there is a much-anticipated season two of Upright airing later this month, of which Tim is the executive producer and lead writer. He also stars alongside House of Dragon actress Milly Alcock.
On the album Apart Together, there is the song If This Plane Goes Down. He is on a plane, scratching lyrics on a napkin, praying the turbulence "will spare my wine". If it goes down, he sings, "remember me as someone who tried to find the balance between self-loathing and pride".
Tim Minchin has navigated the heights of fame and found maturity. "I'm proud of my marriage and my family and I'm proud of how boring I am basically. I want to have a lovely, normal, hard-working, honest sort of version of what is basically just a Bacchanalian fantastic romp of a career. Boring Keith Richards. That's me."
Watch Australian Story's A Star is Torn on ABC iview.
