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‘You’ve got a brain tumour, you idiot!’: What Geoff Morrell’s drawings revealed
While filming the prequel to The Lord of The Rings in New Zealand, actor Geoff Morrell found himself sketching faces. Turns out, his brain was telling him something.
Geoff Morrell at his home in Mt Kiera.Credit: Wolter Peeters
“It’s like in the great stories, Mr Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end … because how could the end be happy?” J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers (as adapted by Peter Jackson: spoken by Samwise Gamgee)
It really hit him in New Zealand. Weird things had been happening for a while: his legs giving way when he got out of the car, strange dreams, headaches. But in quarantine in Auckland in September 2020, and during filming of Amazon’s enormous, and enormously hyped, The Lord of the Rings prequel The Rings of Power, things got really strange.
He began drawing faces: wide-eyed, staring at the viewer, sometimes (unbeknownst to him at the time, but clear enough if you look closely) with a slight swelling behind one eye – just above the eyelid and below the eyebrow. He’d been making art for more than 20 years, but he’d specialised in abstract collages made from tiny, pixelated pieces of old lino. Not faces; and especially not these faces.
Morrell playing Waldreg in The Rings of Power. During its filming, he found himself feeling unsettled and anxious.Credit: Amazon
Added to this, he felt unsettled and anxious on the Rings set – an experienced actor who’d worked on four productions a year for more than 20 years. But now his lungs were irritated by the smoke machines and the flaming torches of hundreds of orc-extras; his forearm was gashed by the thorn claw of bad guy Adar (aka actor Joseph Mawle); his feet got horribly sunburnt in a barefoot peasant scene.
“Lord of the Rings, Lord of the Shmings,” he thought, waiting for his scenes as publican-cum-servant-of-ultimate-evil Waldreg. One night he had a dream “like a movie cliché” in which he was at a train station, watching the train leave without him. “I’m not finished! I’m not finished!” he kept calling.
When he got back to Australia, he went to see his GP. By this time, his ears were making a kind of pulsing hum – Schm, schm, schm – and this, combined with balance issues, made him worry. He went for tests, then back to his doctor’s surgery. His GP sat down holding a sheaf of scans. Then he delivered the words that, in every single case, must change a life forever. “You’ve got a massive brain tumour.” Sam Gamgee was right. How could the end be happy indeed?
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
The myth in Geoff Morrell’s family about his birth is that his mother went into labour at a Labor party meeting. His father drove her home to Fairfield in Sydney’s west in the side-car of his motorbike, and it was there, on his grandparents’ chicken farm on Smithfield Road, that he was born on February 19, 1958.
He grew up surrounded by politics – his father, Ted Morrell, was Gough Whitlam’s first campaign manager – as the third of four children. “Mum always remembered Dad coming home with Whitlam and Tom Uren. They were both very tall men, and we lived in this tiny ramshackle house, and they both had to duck to get into the kitchen. They’d sit there talking politics all night.”
He and his younger brother Peter both suffered from asthma, and when Morrell was only a year old he was given the last rites during an attack. “The priest had actually left, thinking I was done for. And then I was saved by the new miracle drug – cortisone – rushed from Lithgow hospital.” Forever after, he was understood to be “the sickly one” in the family. “And when that’s your family narrative, you buy into it,” he says. “You’re the one who gets sick, falls over, has the accident.”
Nonetheless, at 14, it was he who witnessed the death of 12-year-old Peter in the living room of their home in Wollongong. “It was the night before the School Certificate, I remember. Petey and I were always the ones who’d get asthma in the middle of the night. We’d go into the bedroom, Dad’d get up, sit us by the heater, make us a cup of tea. That particular night, I heard a thump, and I got up, and – I’m not sure if Pete was gone or not, but I do remember trying to give him mouth-to-mouth. I remember the sound of it – the rattle of the lungs as you do it.”
Morrell, left, with siblings John, Peter and Judy, and mother Joan, around 1961.Credit: Courtesy of Geoff Morrell
Peter’s death was both a defining event in his childhood, and a moment that was never, somehow, fully acknowledged by his family – except by an even more heightened sense of physical fragility, a greater fear of death, a more immediate sense of panic at illness.
“I’d talk to my mum on the phone and she’d be like, ‘Are you okay? You’ve got a bit of a wheeze.’ She used my little brother’s death to underline how vulnerable I was.”
Despite this personal uncertainty, Morrell’s professional life was blessed for many years. His parents – who both loved the theatre – thought acting a wonderful career, and while studying arts at Wollongong University, he made his stage debut as Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest.
He went on to become one of the founding members of Wollongong’s Theatre South; he ran his own short-lived theatre company offering absurdist and German Expressionist works to the steelworkers of the Illawarra (apparently with some success); and was a regular in Sydney Theatre Company, Belvoir, ABC and commercial TV productions. Indeed, his most famous roles – Grass Roots, Changi, Blue Heelers, Cloudstreet – made him one of that handful of Australian male actors whose face is instantly recognisable, though his name might escape you.
“I’d talk to my mum on the phone and she’d be like, ‘Are you okay? You’ve got a bit of a wheeze.’ She used my little brother’s death to underline how vulnerable I was.”
He also worked on his pictures, and played music – tenor guitar, banjo, mandolin, clarinet. As with acting and art, he was never formally trained in music; he picked it up as he went along. He married his (now amicably ex) wife Megan in the early 1980s, and they had two daughters, Rosheen and Minerva. He and fellow actor Caroline Brazier then married, divorced and also remain friends. For many years he had a happy, contented life in Wollongong and, later, Sydney.
Morrell with his two daughters, Rosheen, left, and Minerva in 1987.Credit: Courtesy of Geoff Morrell
And then, slowly, something began to change. He became doubtful about his creative value: afraid of being hurt, of failing, of looking like an idiot. At the same time, he became interested in First Nations people and their history, which fuelled his unease. “Eventually I thought, ‘I’m just not that interested in white people and their problems. I’m an old white man: the world’s been listening to my story for hundreds of years. And I don’t know about the world, but I’m kind of over it.’ ”
Even among the old white-man roles, moreover, all the good ones were taken. “I just wasn’t being offered anything interesting any more. I mean, it was Bryan Brown. Or, if it was a slightly more educated and whimsical character, it’d be Sam Neill. Or a hard nut, Anthony LaPaglia. But if it’s one episode of a series where it’s a father, who maybe has a bit of a cry; he’s maybe a schoolteacher? That’d be me. And it got to the point where I just didn’t want to do it any more.”
There was another thing wearing him out: fear. “I think I am an artist,” he says. “I am a storyteller. But it can be hard to stick your head up and do something creative. And even though it looked like I was working in a creative field, I think I became more and more afraid of failing, of being criticised. Artistic expression has an incredible power to shame us, and I think as the years passed, and I wasn’t being challenged, I became afraid to challenge myself. I got the yips.”
Of course, The Rings of Power, released last September, was different. “It was pure make-believe, pure dress-ups. And it was great to be on that big stage. Still, the whole time I was in New Zealand I just didn’t want to be there.”
He thought it must be just his professional ennui, rising up despite the big budget and the picturesque rag costumes and the friends he made on set (many of whom he painted in his new face-obsessed artworks). Looking back, of course, he knows now that there was also something else on his mind. Literally.
Morrell, right, playing in a band with fellow actor David Field at a charity event in 2018. Credit: Courtesy of Geoff Morrell
“I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.”
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
Before his tumour operation, Geoff Morrell, now 65, took his two granddaughters (he also has a grandson) to the beach. He gave them pieces of pounamu stone – a sacred stone to Maori people – and sat looking at the water while the girls ran around. “I still remember thinking, ‘Am I never going to experience the feeling of diving under a wave again?’ I had the feeling that it might, really, be all taken away. I was pretty calm on the surface of things, but underneath I was going, ‘F---! F--- f--- f---!’ ”
The operation, on a Thursday in September 2021, took nine hours, twice as long as normal for such procedures. They had to move his body three times, which meant unfastening the clamps holding his head motionless, moving him, then repositioning and reattaching the clamps. There was a lot of bleeding, a lot of swelling. He woke with a dressing punched into his head by 27 staples and the miraculous news, subsequently confirmed by testing, that his tumour – 44 millimetres in diameter, as wide as a lime – was benign.
“I still remember thinking, ‘Am I never going to experience the feeling of diving under a wave again?’”
It was a meningioma, a class of tumours that develop on the tissue covering the brain and spinal cord. Morrell’s was just behind his right eyebrow – “which must be why those eyes in my paintings are swollen,” he says. “I was replicating what I saw in the mirror, but didn’t realise what I was seeing. My body was trying to tell me, ‘You’ve got a brain tumour, you idiot!’ ”
Grade 1 and 2 meningiomas are benign: Morrell’s older sister has had a grade 1 tumour for four years that doesn’t require surgery; Morrell’s own tumour was grade 2, also benign, though fast-growing and subject to a 20-30 per cent recurrence rate. All grade 3 meningiomas are malignant, and people who have them have a median survival rate of less than two years.
Morrell at home after his operation to remove the tumour.Credit: Wolter Peeters
Four days after his surgery, Morrell came home to his cheerful house on a rising road in Wollongong. He put on some Matthew Halsall trumpet music, went out to his deck, and burst into tears. “I cried and cried. It was just fantastic,” he says. “And all that fear I had had? All that worry that I was just an old white man with nothing to say; all that fear of death, that fear of performing and being creative and getting hurt? GONE.”
“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
Here’s a list of some of the things Geoff Morrell has done since his brain tumour. Been to London for three months for an exciting work opportunity on a big international production (ahem). Been to Spain with his partner and her son for a holiday, where he learnt to cook paella, and utilised his one Spanish phrase, Yo también te quiero (I love you, too). Begun making an album with his band, Thieves’ Oil, and well-known producer Tony Buchen, on which he plays guitar, mandolin and clarinet, and sings. (The music sounds like a cross between Chris Isaak and Johnny Cash and, um, Geoff Morrell.)
Two of Geoff Morrell’s artworks, which he painted while filming The Rings of Power. Unbeknowst to him at the time, a brain tumour was growing behind his right eyebrow. Only after surgery did he notice he had painted these faces with a slight swelling above the eyelid – exactly where his tumour was.Credit: Geoff Morrell
Had a successful solo show of his sometimes swollen-eyed faces, The Body Keeps the Score at Clifton School of Arts, north of Wollongong.
He’s also organised a website for his art, renovated his house, and begun working on lots of “little collective” collaborations – writing songs, developing TV series, making pictures. He’s hoping to act more, too. “I don’t want people to think I’m out of the picture: I’m all guns blazing, more than I ever was! It sounds a bit ridiculous, but that thing of facing death to really feel alive? It’s true! I have this visceral sense of ‘What are the possibilities? Let’s do them all!’ ”
His grandchildren are reaping the benefits of his new philosophy. “As I say to them: ‘I am now the yes guy! Can you do that? Yes! Yes you can.’ ” As well as this Obama-esque attitude, another victory has been overcoming his long-held fear of death and physical vulnerability. “Now I feel like ‘No, go and get f---ed!’ ” he says. “I am not sickly and weak – actually, I’m really robust!
Sometimes I do think, ‘Am I allowed to be this creative?’ But what is there to be afraid of? I’ve been down into the vortex of death, I’ve faced it, I’ve looked it in the f---ing eye, and it’s said, ‘No, not yet.’ So now I’m open to anything.”
Bring on the food and cheer and song, in other words. Bring on a merrier world.
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