Tim Minchin: ‘I’m obsessed with this question … am I allowed to enjoy my life?’
Every now and then, someone describes Tim Minchin as a Vegemite artist: people either love him or hate him. And he hates that. “I don’t want people to fucking hate me,” he says, bewildered. “They don’t have to give a shit about me. Shouldn’t we love art and be not that fussed by other art? Who the hell hates art?”
Child abuse, homophobia, racism, religion, cancel culture: Minchin is not known for shying away from speaking about topics that might cause people to hate him. Just this week Minchin reportedly got on stage in Canberra and criticised a group of Sydney Theatre Company actors who showed support for Palestine by donning keffiyehs during curtain call. There was no audio of Minchin, no direct quotes, just reports from punters generating plenty of headlines claiming Minchin had railed against “leftie bubbles”. When I ask him about it on Thursday, six weeks after we met for this interview, he declines to say more.
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That night he posts on Instagram: “I thought if I ever got cancelled it would be for something I actually said.” Vomit emoji.
We meet in Melbourne on a blustery day in late October. The 48-year-old has an intensity that would surprise no one familiar with his brand of rapid-fire, wry, incendiary lyrics. Just asking, “how are you?” gets: “Really well. No, I’m feeling weird. We’re drowning in everyone’s suffering. It feels impossible to be happy right now.”
Do world events weigh on him and his ability to perform? “You can’t live in the world that way,” he says. “We can’t all suffer for everything all the time. But it does require a switch off that feels brutal. You need to not be consumed by the world to be able to give people joy, to contribute to the other side of the ledger.”
He adds, smiling: “I’m obsessed by this question, if you can’t tell. Am I allowed to enjoy my life?”
For all that he’s happy to say what he thinks, he is less inclined to engage in public debate than he used to. He is both fascinated and frustrated by “the incuriosity behind some of our outrage. Simple answers are very rarely true.” As he has become older and more famous, he asks himself more often now: “How does my message help?”
“I have a big old microphone and I’ve always been strategic with it,” he says. “The Pell song was divisive but I had absolute clear intent. Same with my gay marriage song. Though I might not have done that one now.” Really? “Well, it turned out fine but I don’t think calling conservative Australians bigoted would behoove me now,” he says lightly.
Did he consider writing a song for the yes campaign for the Indigenous voice to parliament? “No. Tim Minchin, well-known lefty arty long-haired eyeliner-wearing pseudo-intellectual preachy cunt, telling no voters to vote yes – that would run the risk of backfiring.”
We settle on a vague tour of the city’s clubs and bars where he used to perform. It’s the most Melbourne day possible: rain, a glimpse of sun, a barrage of hail. Plane tree pollen comes down almost as furiously as the weather, making us both cough. “Shall we repair to somewhere that is not raining?” Minchin says, shaking out his brolly. “KFC?”
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Pollen, wind, rain, hail, cars: nothing will stop Minchin once he’s engaged in a thought. As we dodge traffic and roadworks, he starts walking backwards in the road to face me while talking. “I’ll finish with my obsession about binary thinking,” he begins, squinting against rain.
He despairs at the nature of debate online: when he calls for people to listen to each other more, he feels people interpret this as him becoming conservative. “And I’m not! I’ve been saying it for 20 years. We are getting further and further apart. No one asks, what am I doing? It is always, what are they doing?
“Ask yourself: how often is my mind changed by someone angrily asserting their position on the internet? And if the answer is sometimes, I bet my fucking left testicle that it’s not because someone called you names.”
We head into a bar and order wine. “Now we’re gonna have a chat,” he says.
It was to Melbourne that Minchin moved when he left Perth in 2002, and it is where he developed his cabaret-style act at the Butterfly Club. His breakout show Dark Side won big at the Melbourne international comedy festival in 2005, before being whisked off to the Edinburgh fringe and bagging him a Perrier award.
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These days his famously wild hair is sleeker and his eyeliner is softer. He still gets recognised around town but that doesn’t faze him: cover up the wild hair with a beanie and the bright blue eyes with glasses and he is mostly left alone. “It is a gentle fame,” he says.
He often jogs to the Yarra and back, past the suburbs he once couldn’t imagine being able to afford. “I used to look at those houses in Edinburgh Gardens and think, who the hell could live in those?
“Me!” he says delightedly. “Musicals mean I can buy myself a house on Edinburgh Gardens, who would have thunk it?”
Minchin was born in Perth, has lived London and Los Angeles, and is now in Sydney. “I have broken what ‘home’ is, which is quite an interesting feeling,” he says. “Every time you move, you leave behind the version of you who stayed. I have no long friendships like my siblings do, no sense of continuous community. But you get used to it.”
In conversation, much like his songs, Minchin veers between caustic and startlingly sweet. It’s that part of him, not the man who forensically picks over arguments, that comes through when he talks about Groundhog Day: a guy who cries at romcoms, who leaves films and plays wanting to be a better man, who wants to be the one who writes that thing for others. “A beautiful story can change your life,” he says. “I love that I get to contribute to that. That sounds like a good job.”
Groundhog Day the musical, based on the 1993 comedy starring Bill Murray as a man cursed to repeat the same day over and over, almost seemed cursed by recurring misfortune. When it left the West End in 2016 for Broadway the show’s producer, Scott Rudin, suddenly pulled out over creative differences. Three days before opening night in 2017, the show’s main star, Andy Karl, badly injured his knee. The choreographer had a stroke. The show lasted only five months on Broadway before closing, which was, Minchin says, “so heartbreaking”.
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Groundhog Day returned to London this year. Whether it was post-Covid restlessness, or some indefinable alchemy, audiences were suddenly ready for it. After a run of sold-out shows and glowing reviews, West End theatres are now lining up to stage it – but there’s no space until 2025 because of the post-Covid backlog. For now it is heading to Melbourne, where it all began for Minchin.
“There is so much irony in having another chance to get Groundhog Day right,” he says. “The idea of redemption, the idea of growth, the idea of wisdom that comes from grief – and there was so much grief around this project.”
He’s so genuinely excited that he sings me some of the songs (“There’s a whole song about the inevitability of death!”), talks me through the intricacies of the tunes (“Musically, it’s like a clock – there are 12 counts and 12 semitones for the 12 hours of the day.”) “You’re going to love it,” he says. “It’s way better than Matilda.”
It isn’t boastful, I realise; Minchin has the energy of a happy child recounting a very good day. “The lesson of Groundhog Day is, see the beauty in everything,” he says. “And I am learning to do that. Sometimes I find this industry distressing. I find being judged as Vegemite very distressing. I let myself believe that half of Australia hates me. But I am overwhelmed by gratefulness for what I’ve got to do.
“I did not ever think that life could be like this”
Groundhog Day is on at Princess Theatre, Melbourne, 24 January to 21 April 2024
