Swimmer, actor, singer: This unusual triple-threat brings it all to a new lead role

Four years after putting his singing career on hold to chase a spot in the Australian Olympic swimming team, Cody Simpson is set to return to the stage, with one of the lead roles in next year’s Opera Australia production of Guys and Dolls.

And fittingly for the 27-year-old, who quit competitive swimming earlier this year, the show will be presented on the massive over-water stage at Mrs Macquaries Point as part of OA’s annual Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour series.

Out of the pool and back on the stage, Cody Simpson is taking on the lead role of Sky Masterton.Credit: James Brickwood

Simpson, who began his successful pop career at just 14, says he was “over the moon” to learn he had landed the role of Sky Masterton, made famous on screen by Marlon Brando, in the new production of the award-winning musical.

Simpson has been a fan of musical theatre in general, and Guys and Dolls in particular, since he was a youngster growing up on the Gold Coast.

“I fell in love with the crooners - Dean Martin, Sinatra etcetera,” he says. “And then I found the Guys and Dolls movie through my exploration of anything and everything Sinatra had done in his life.”

Repeated viewing of the movie stood Simpson in good stead when he came to audition this year. “I knew all the songs pretty much top to bottom already,” he says.

Simpson’s previous experience in musical theatre came in 2018 when he played Dmitri in a Broadway production of Anastasia. But, although he loved the experience, he subsequently quit the stage for the pressure cooker world of competitive swimming.

Cody Simpson at this year’s Australian Swimming Trials.Credit: Getty Images

“I felt I had unfinished business as a competitive swimmer, having grown up in that world but having to stop short because I signed a record deal when I was very young,” he says. “It was my dream to swim for Australia and I gave it absolutely everything I had and got a lot further than I originally expected.”

Simpson qualified for the 2022 Commonwealth Games and won a gold medal in the Australian Short Course Championships that same year before announcing in June that he was quitting the pool.

“I gave myself the chance and can live with no regrets, but I’m excited to be finished,” he says. “Swimming is so all-encompassing that you don’t have time to do anything else.”

Marlon Brando and Jean Simmons in the 1955 film version of Guys and Dolls.Credit:

And while swimming and musical theatre might initially appear strange bedfellows, Simpson says his sporting career has taught him many lessons he can apply to the stage.

“Swimming is a beautiful teacher,” he says. “It has taught me a whole lot of patience, persistence and perseverance. It teaches you that you have to do things even when you don’t feel like it so you become able to pull things out of yourself in moments you feel like it’s not possible.

“The demands of a show like this are different but not dissimilar in the fact that you have to be able to go and deliver something time after time.”

Guys and Dolls on Sydney Harbour, March 21 to April 20, 2025