From pop idol to swim star to leading man: ‘Annoyingly gifted’ Cody Simpson’s new gig

This story is part of the April 5 edition of Good Weekend.See all 13 stories.

In the Surry Hills basement of Opera Australia’s Sydney HQ, Cody Simpson is having a wardrobe fitting behind a cream curtain, and he’s singing, too. Not song lyrics, but a playful, tuneful question about his costume. “Plea-heese!” he croons. “Do I haaave any creative controolll?”

He’s joking, of course. But when the former teenage pop star and retired Australian swimmer – also songwriter and aspiring actor – steps into the light, it’s also easy to see that he cares a bit about his threads.

Standing in his civvies, the boy is put together well, with bright blond hair and brilliant teeth against black slacks, T-shirt, shoes and cap. The theme continues down his arms, too, with black sticker tattoos, a black Omega Speedmaster watch, and a dark, sparkling skull ring designed by jeweller David Yurman.

Oh, and a big black Stanley drinking cup in his hand, to stay hydrated on our drive to Homebush for the first day of rehearsals in a new production of Guys & Dolls.

We meet when Simpson, who is 28, is at the beginning of an extended road trip from his home on the Gold Coast, preparing to play the lead role – Sky Masterson – in a big bells-and-whistles musical on a stage built specially for it above Sydney Harbour. His Mercedes G-Wagon (matte black, naturally) is crammed full of clothes and guitars.

“It’s exciting. It’s also a little chaotic because it’s early days, and you don’t feel as in control,” Simpson says, gripping the wheel and careening down streets. “There’s always that slight worry: am I prepared? I think I am.”

We’re rolling west when Simpson changes lanes abruptly, veering onto an exit ramp at the last second, then down the wrong tunnel. The accidental detour is probably my fault – too many questions – but there’s so much stuff to ask him about his journey so far.

Simpson says his Guys & Dolls character Sky Masterson relishes “putting himself in a position where he doesn’t know if he’s going to make it out or not – and I can relate to that”.Credit: Tim Bauer

About moving to America and becoming a heartthrob at 13. About touring with Justin Bieber and dating Kylie Jenner. (And also dating Gigi Hadid and Selena Gomez and Miley Cyrus.) About trying to distance himself from the Tinseltown scene and become a more authentic troubadour. Then stunning everyone by dropping out of that life at 23 to give swimming another shot – qualifying for the 2022 Commonwealth Games team but missing out on the 2024 Olympics – before leaving the pool once more. Oh, and finding love with the winner of more Olympic gold medals than any Australian in history, the great Emma McKeon.

Our missed turn, says Simpson (graciously), was a mere moment of split focus, which happens when you’re always juggling some grand new goal – an album or a movie, a race or a role. “When I can channel it, I feel like I have a superpower. But if I’m scattered, I’m in complete turmoil,” he says, laughing. “This is exactly what I’m talking about: I can’t do two things at once!”

A jack of all trades and a master of some, Simpson is blessed with musicality and athletic talent, good looks and charisma – it’s a bit sickening, to be honest – but also cursed with constant choice, leading to questions like the ones he’s asking while peering through his windscreen.

“What have I done? Have I gone the wrong way?” he wonders, smiling. “Where am I? Where the hell am I?”

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Simpson is a long way from the Gold Coast, where he grew up by the canals in Mermaid Waters. He was almost always destined for the spotlight, too, telling his nanna as much – “I’m going to be famous one day, I just don’t know what for” – at age seven, no less. He begged for guitar lessons that same year and his instructor quickly called his parents in for a chat.

“He faced Cody away from us, towards the wall,” remembers Angie, Simpson’s mum, “and this guy played all the chords individually and Cody would just yell out the notes – ‘G! F sharp! B minor!’ – within seconds. I asked, ‘Is that good?’ He said he’d never seen anything like it before.”

At age 11 with siblings Alli and Tom – Simpson (left) wrote his first song at age 8.Credit: Courtesy of Cody Simpson

Little Cody wrote his first song when he was eight (about putting a nappy on a chicken) and at 10 begged his folks to purchase the codysimpson.com domain name, which they did, almost as a joke. (He still uses it.)

At 11, they allowed him to post a few videos online, albeit with tight parental controls, and he began by uploading performances of Bon Jovi and Justin Timberlake songs. Soon he was receiving messages from producers and record labels (who thought they had found the next Timberlake). “I thought it was all fake until we had phone calls,” says Angie. “Within a few months, he had offers.”

‘[At age 16] any airport I flew into, there were people on the ground waiting for me to land … it was surreal.’

The whirlwind became very real at 13 when the entire family relocated to the United States to help further what was now a nascent career as a (barely) teenage recording artist. His debut single – iYiYi, featuring the rapper Flo Rida – became a worldwide success. Soon he was touring America, Europe and Asia, with a manager he shared with Justin Bieber and a performance trainer who worked with Beyoncé. His travelling entourage included a full-time merchandiser, home-school teacher and even a personal bodyguard (called “Ice”).

“I needed one,” Simpson says now, “because there were people sneaking into my dressing room and waiting there. It got to a point when I was 16 and any airport I flew into, there were people on the ground waiting for me to land. Which is what I had worked for and wanted, but it was surreal when it happened.“

He was too young to care about the financial side of his stardom, and his parents struggled with the finer points of the industry, too. “We had to take people’s word on things,” Simpson says, “but there were all these sharky people. We really had to weave our way out of some scary situations.”

That’s a reference to a specific episode in which one manager tried to litigate to emancipate Simpson from his parents and gain control of his money. “They were trying to prove that we were bad parents to make money from this young boy,” says Angie. “Apparently it happens a lot over there, but we weren’t having a bar of it. It was a bit frightening.”

Still, fame wasn’t all bad. I ask Simpson what he enjoyed about it and he’s frank about his wild ride, which included everything from performing on Good Morning America to becoming an “ocean advocate” for the United Nations and the release of a Cody Simpson doll.

With fans at in his early teens, when he needed a personal bodyguard.Credit: Getty Images

“Sure there were some downsides, but it was also fun as f---!” he says. “People are sheepish about fame – ‘I didn’t want this’ – but it’s like, ‘Yes, you did.’ ” The worldly education he got was unparalleled. “You’re a teenager in some random German city, doing a show then going to bars and realising how big the world is so young. A lot of people don’t get to find that out until later. It blew my mind and opened my mind.”

He doesn’t feel like he missed out on any of the regular rites of passage, either, whether hanging out at the local shopping centre or going to the high school formal. Instead of dating the captain of the netball team, Simpson was dating global celebrities because those were the kids he was hanging out with – and with whom he felt a kind of kinship. He’s pragmatic, too, about the trade-offs, like the public exposure of his personal life.

“I’ve been able to maintain a certain amount of privacy, but when you’re with someone and you love someone, you want to share it and feel proud of it, so I’ve not necessarily shied away from being proud of my partner,” he says. “I’m that way with my partner now.” (We’ll get to McKeon later.)

He partied (relatively) hard – “I’ve always been a seeker of stimulation” – and there’s even a nod to that in one of his tattoos, which reads, simply, “old man river”. Heath Ledger had the same ink, which Simpson considers a kind of memento mori about the fleeting and fragile nature of life.

Simpson’s pop-star years spawned a namesake doll.Credit: WireImage

“Growing up, I had this strange fear that I was not going to be around very long,” he says. “It’s faded as I’ve gotten older – I’m still here – but since I was very young, even 11, I would say to my mum, ‘I don’t think I’m going to have a long life.’ I thought I was going to go hard and fast and do a lot of great things.”

He’s built better habits now, exercising frequently with weights and running. But he gets high on his work mostly, always occupying himself with another project. “If more than three days go by and I’ve done nothing, I feel awful about myself and guilty for not moving forward in some way,” he says. “It’s dumb. It’s not real. It’s self-imposed. But I’m addicted to that cycle of setting a goal and achieving it – big or small – or I feel like I’m wasting my time.”

That led in part to a retreat from his commercially curated identity at 17 – a classic late-teen rebellion against type. Like a kid who wants to go from goth to grunge, or ghetto to emo, Simpson wanted to a try on a new style but felt trapped and misunderstood by his record company, while also craving more creative control over his work (similar to challenges faced by the likes of Bieber and Cyrus as they aged out of childhood stardom).

“It’s a common issue with people who start young and are thrust into things and jump on the ride and then realise later they’re on a roller coaster they don’t like, but they’re strapped in and have a little freakout,” he says. “I’d had my fill.”

Simpson with brother Tom, parents Angie and Brad, and sister Alli in 2019.Credit: Courtesy of Cody Simpson

Basically, he wanted to figure out who he was as an artist by playing his own guitar tracks and writing his own more soulful music. Less Joe Jonas, more Jack Johnson. In 2014, he left Atlantic Records to form his own label – Coast House Records – and in 2015 released an album with an intentionally apt title. He called it Free.

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We haven’t really mentioned swimming yet, but it’s obviously central to Simpson’s story. Turns out sluicing through the water is in his blood. His mum, Angie, was a 200-metre breaststroke champion – once in the world top 10 – whose dreams of competing at the 1988 Olympics were dashed only by injury. His father, Brad, also swam for Australia at the 1994 Commonwealth Games.

Simpson grew up in the pool and had clear and abundant talent. Close family friend and Australian Hall of Fame coach Denis Cotterell earmarked the 2016 Rio Olympics as a realistic goal for Simpson, so it’s no surprise that when Simpson actually went to the games in Brazil – as a spectator, watching former childhood teammates such as freestyle sprinter Cameron McEvoy – he felt the pull of the pool keenly.

“I hadn’t been around swimming for a while, and I felt that buzz,” he says, nodding. “It really sparked those thoughts: ‘This is possible for me.’ That was the trigger.“

At the 2022 Commonwealth Games, where Simpson won gold and silver in relay events.Credit: Getty Images

He thought about it more in 2018, while preparing for a six-month stint in his first Broadway show, Anastasia. There was just something familiar about the regimentation and discipline required for performing on stage. “The nerves are very similar to racing,” he explains. “You get the one shot, and if something goes wrong you have no choice but to adapt and keep going and not let it shake you. There are a lot of parallels.”

But the idea of returning to swimming became unshakable in 2019. The “princeling of pop” was preparing for the inaugural season of The Masked Singer and watching the world swimming championships, in which US star Caeleb Dressel – five months older than Simpson – broke a world record. All Simpson could think was: “Why am I not there?”

He started looking for pools the next day and began training in 2020 under former Australian Olympian Brett Hawke. Hawke initially sent Simpson sessions to complete alone, then moved to Los Angeles to train him – even flouting a few COVID-19 restrictions along the way. “We were literally jumping fences to swim in empty pools,” says Simpson, “getting in as much training as we could before someone saw us and a security guard kicked us out.”

He began leaning on famous friends, too, looking for tips on technique from Michael Phelps and calling Ian Thorpe for training advice. By 2021, he was back in Australia and training full-time. His mum was bemused: “‘Oh Codes, why would you wanna go from being really successful in your world to looking at a black line six hours a day?’ ” she remembers asking him. “It surprised me that he was happy to do a 360, but once he said he would regret it one day if he looked back and didn’t give it a shot, I was with him 100 per cent.”

‘I just enjoyed the pain of [swim training] – it made me feel alive … I was searching for some self-imposed adversity.’

Swimming was harder mentally than he remembered and certainly more physically intense than what he had experienced in entertainment. But it also led to a simplified, streamlined, newly domesticated life. He found pleasure in knowing exactly what was happening from Monday morning to Sunday night, down to the hour. “It doesn’t make sense, does it?” he says. “But it tickles two different sides of my brain.”

Mostly he enjoyed testing his limits and settling in with his discomfort. In the early part of his return he would train until he vomited, then train some more. He talks about loving that hurt.

“I wanted to find parts of myself that I didn’t know were there, and you do that when you’re in the trenches,” he says. “I just enjoyed the pain of it – it made me feel alive. It sounds a bit privileged to say life was too easy before swimming but in a lot of ways it probably was, and I was searching for some self-imposed adversity.”

He joined the Gold Coast squad coached by Michael Bohl, whose team eventually included Emily Seebohm, Kaylee McKeown, Lani Pallister and Mack Horton. The latter saw stories about the Simpson comeback and could only think “good luck” because he was going to need every ounce of it.

“I’d been in the sport 17 years and I know how much it takes to get anywhere, but Cody is annoyingly gifted,” says Horton. “It wasn’t until you were alongside him that you’d see he was having a very, very solid crack. You think of a normal athlete’s progression from 10 years old – building up their weekly sessions from three to four to five to 10 – and he’s gone straight into an Olympic level without that bridging pathway. It’s impressive.”

The other notable member of the squad, of course, was McKeon. The pair became friends quickly but were both spoken for at the time. It wasn’t until 2022 that they were freshly single and couldn’t deny or ignore the connection. “It was hard, though, because you don’t want to cross that line with someone you’re training alongside because if something goes to shit, you still have to see each other every day,” says Simpson. “But I just got to that point where it was, like, ‘What harm could it do?’ ”

The partnership became a source of support for both. They were even on the same training program, gearing up for similar events. He loved her diligence and grace. “And I thought it was really interesting how softly spoken and reserved and shy she was, and yet super-gnarly and competitive. I was like, ‘That’s complex – I like that.’ ”

The work was all worth it in 2022, when Simpson was selected to swim at the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham. Whatever else happened from then on, he had tangible vindication of the choice to return to the pool. Naturally, he got a new tattoo – the coat of arms, with his swim team number (838) – on the inside of his left bicep. “People train their whole lives and never make an Australian team. It wasn’t lost on me how special it was and still is. It’ll always be a highlight of my life.”

Simpson is now dating “reserved … yet super-gnarly” champion Olympian Emma McKeon.Credit: WireImage

The flipside came two years later when he missed out on the 2024 Paris Olympics team. “What goes up, must come down,” he says. “You’re so vulnerable, but you get up there knowing two outcomes are possible – success or failure – and you have to be OK with either one.”

Simpson worked extensively with a performance coach and a sports psychologist to be ready for that moment – content with whatever outcome after giving everything to the effort. “In a weird way there was also a layer of relief because – win or lose – something is off your back. But you couldn’t deny the sadness and disappointment.”

I wonder whether he regrets not coming back to swimming a year or two earlier. “All the time,” he answers. “I also have the thought of ‘What if I never did any of the entertainment stuff, and just swam? How far could I have gone?’ But it’s sliding-doors stuff. I could keep myself up all night with that shit if I wanted, but at some point you have to accept that you’ve made decisions when you did and the dice fell where they did.”

He wasn’t jealous of McKeon. After all, she had her own struggles, not so much booking a trip to Paris but competing in the specific events she wanted to defend from Tokyo. “We felt the same way at trials, actually,” Simpson says. “We had different goals and both fell short, so we confided in each other about that a lot.”

If anything, the shoe is on the other foot now that they’re living together and both retired from swimming, because his transition was so much smoother than hers. McKeon has enjoyed her downtime, and knows what life looks like sans serious swimming schedule. But she’s also ready to find what’s next, which is tricky for a 30-year-old who’s been a professional swimmer half her life. “I’m like, ‘You’re gonna have to suck at stuff for a bit,’ ” Simpson says. “And if you’ve been the very best at something, you’re not used to that.”

For Simpson, this was a golden opportunity to look at his career with objectivity and a little perspective. “You know how you look back at old Facebook photos, and you’re embarrassed by them? That was almost like me looking at songs and stuff from when I was younger,” he says. “But now I feel like an accumulation of everything I’ve been, rather than rejecting any phase I’ve been through. I’m the full whole sum of my parts.”

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This rehearsal space for Guys & Dolls is not your usual theatrical stage. It’s actually a vast back room at the Quaycentre arena in Sydney Olympic Park. Simpson’s first intimate reading takes place on folding chairs beside a basketball court. But before that, director Shaun Rennie wants to know how he’s feeling, and what scares Simpson most on day one.

“What are you thinking?” Rennie asks. “Talk at me. Say things.”

Simpson as playboy Sky Masterson in Guys & Dolls.Credit: James Brickwood

“Honestly,” says Simpson, “I feel nervous about getting on the floor because I’ve just done so much rehearsing in a tiny room by myself. I’ll just say candidly I’m nervous about getting up there and trying to fill that space.”

Rennie doesn’t think that will be a problem, although he tells me later that he was initially “quite sceptical” of a celebrity joining his show. “I didn’t want to do any ‘stunt casting’, but Cody walked into the room and without a doubt he has star power,” Rennie says. “And he’s come with this idea of ‘I want to be good at this, help me be good at this,’ so there’s no resistance or defensiveness to ideas.”

Annie Aitken, the co-star who plays his love interest, first met Simpson at a “chemistry read” and knew straight away they would be casting him – for his charm and presence and crooning voice. What she probably didn’t expect was his preparation. “He memorised the entire piece – line for line by day one – which I can’t say anyone else in the company had done,” Aitken says. “He was so prepared at every turn. It was like he had brought his sporting background to the task.”

Indeed, in this informal read-through, Simpson puts his copy of the script on the floor so that he won’t be tempted to lean on the printed dialogue. (He learnt every word using an app that takes a screenplay and reads out everyone else’s lines while muting his own, eliminating the need for a reading partner: “I just did that over and over until I didn’t have to look at the script. It’s as simple and boring as that.”)

Despite living in America for almost as long as he has in Australia, he did need help from a dialect coach for that specific 1920s Noo Yawk accent. After that, it was just a matter of embodying Sky Masterson: a transient gambling playboy and risk-taker with a soft side.

“Sky’s addicted to the game, and that’s where he gets his kicks – putting himself in a position where he doesn’t know if he’s going to make it out or not – and I can relate to that. But he’s also a dickhead,” he says, laughing. “He’s a worse guy than me in general.”

Simpson’s looking forward to bringing him to life on stage – an early review declared his performance a “deadset charmer” – and after that? He’ll be back in the recording booth and also on screens, including a small part in an Australian limited series dramedy for Stan, and a fun cameo he just filmed for a new Netflix movie, Zombie Plane, alongside Vanilla Ice, Sophie Monk and Chuck Norris.

Ever the chaser, there’s always something new. His mum has the same circular conversation with him every few weeks. “I have to give him the ‘stop and smell the roses’ talk,” she says. “He’ll do it for a few days, but then gets antsy and needs to get back amongst it. He’s just not a guy who can sit still.”

If he did though, he knows exactly where that would be. Right now, Simpson lives near the Gold Coast Aquatic Centre, close to his former training base, but in the future he sees himself creeping down to some leafy coastal corner of northern NSW, and splitting his time between there and the hustling heart of Los Angeles. He’s happy to sing and dance and prance and act wherever he goes.

“It’s a juggling act, but I feel lucky to be able to do it all, even if I do get a bit stressed and frantic sometimes,” he says, rolling his eyes. “I’m a bit of an all-or-nothing person, but that’s OK. I’d rather be all-in than half-arsed.”

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