‘I grew up under the shadow of a serial killer’: this Aussie novelist and actor is drawing on personal experience in his new works

Actor Toby Schmitz on the history that influenced his debut murder mystery and the truth about his critics.

Toby Schmitz stars in Grief is the Thing with Feathers at Belvoir St Theatre. Picture: Brett Boardman

I’ve never planned my career ... I’ll do a margarine commercial tomorrow. I’m off to do an audition for four lines in an indie horror film this afternoon. If someone says to me tomorrow they’d like me to play Captain Hook on stage or Robber #3 in a bank heist movie, I’m going to be equally tempted by both and horribly sometimes, as one gets older, it’s a financial decision. The fabulous Joel Edgerton once said that he must learn how to say no to things. I don’t know if I’ve learned how to do that yet …

I believe everyone’s an actor ... We do it all the time, we’re always modulating some level of performance. You speak to the chap at the supermarket in a different way than you speak to the tradie. However, when it comes to the profession of acting, it’s a totally different thing. Some actors will say they’re incapable of using their private lives as motivations for a character. In Grief is the Thing with Feathers, there’s no way I’m not drawing on my own experience as a father – whether I like it or not. But if I’m playing a corrupt cop or serial killer (as I did in Boy Swallows Universe), then that’s more of a fun dress-up scenario.

Schmitz adapts and stars in the Belvoir St Theatre production of Grief is the Thing with Feathers. Picture: Supplied

I’d grown up under the shadow of a serial killer ... but didn’t discover this until long after the fact. In the 1990s girls in my neighbourhood were disappearing at the hand of the Claremont serial killer (in Perth), who was only apprehended decades later. I recently came across boxes at my Mum’s that had the missing girls’ posters in them. It was around the same time as the Jeffrey Dahmer stuff so I remember it being very affecting.

I find it very hard to believe ... that other actors don’t read their critics. Oscar Wilde once said don’t roll in the muck with the critics, but I think most people do read the reviews and then say they don’t. I’m the guy sitting up till midnight waiting for the papers to come out. I want to know if everyone coming to see tomorrow night’s show has read a one star review or a fiver. However, putting a novel out into the universe is a wholly new thing so I’ve had little experience with these kinds of critics.

As I get older I recognise more firsts ...You don’t think too much about your first kiss when you’re young ... or the first time you play Hamlet, you just move onto the next. But as you get older, you start to think on the grimmer side of things – my first big health scare or fall. The other day I registered that I will never have a first novel out again. Recently I’ve been almost anthropologically aware about how I feel.

The thing about my family’s second-hand book store ... Elizabeth’s (which now has four outposts across Sydney and Perth), is that I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t working there. I remember a time where I wasn’t an actor or published author but my earliest memories are from the late 70s being in the back room of my parents’ first store in Perth. The smell of National Geographics, dust and eucalyptus oil have always been part of my life.

My fear is that sooner rather than later ... someone’s going to come up to the counter of the bookstore and say “How much will you give me for this?” And it’s going to be my book, I’m going to be able to tell it’s unread.

The Empress Murders by Toby Schmitz. Picture: Supplied

Schmitz has also recently starred in the television show Boy Swallows Universe, the Netflix adaptation of Trent Dalton’s bestselling novel. Picture: Brett Boardman

I took it as a challenge ... when my publisher sent back my manuscript with a rejection note and reasoning why. I licked my wounds for a couple of weeks then rewrote the novel again over six months and sent it back. They responded basically saying that was a rejection the first time, not an invitation to have another crack. Then they agreed to have a conversation and I only just stopped tinkering with it a few months before its release.

It was only later in my acting career ... that I realised there’s joy and fun to be found in playing the romantic lead. But I was never going to be cast in that role. So it’s probably been self-preservation that’s had me going towards moodier roles. In the same way a good villain will have some humanity in them, it’s rare a romantic, loving, funny character doesn’t also have their darker moments.

Toby Schmitz’s debut novel The Empress Murders is out now; Grief is the Thing with Feathers is on a Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney, from July 26 to August 24.