Tim Minchin’s life lessons
The Matilda composer opens up on his bruising early rejection and the perils of fame as Netflix’s highly-anticipated version of his stage musical is unveiled.
When Tim Minchin was starting out as an actor in his twenties, he approached the country’s leading agents, but no one was prepared to take him on.
The Helpmann and Olivier Award-winning composer, comedian, writer and performer laughs good-naturedly as he looks back at his lean years performing in fringe and youth theatre and for a Burt Bacharach cover band. He says of being spurned by acting agencies: “I probably just wasn’t good enough. But you know I wouldn’t have taken me – I didn’t know who I was. Also, I hadn’t trained. I’d go in and say, ‘Oh, I’m an actor but I’m also a musician,’ and they’d go, ‘You and everyone else, mate’.’’
Now 47, with a CV that includes West End and Broadway musicals, a Hollywood sitcom role and live shows backed by symphony orchestras, Minchin reflects that more than two decades ago he didn’t have the look agents were after. “Everyone pretends that it’s not the case but the vast majority of people who succeed as actors are hot,’’ he says candidly. “I’m fine but I’m not hot. You’re not going to hire me because you think I’m gonna be a leading man. You’re not gonna put me on the beach as the stud in Home and Away. But also, I hadn’t trained (as an actor). I didn’t have the confidence to audition for theatre school.’’
Minchin’s vaguely punkish style – witty, profanity-laced lyrics accessorised with grand pianos, elaborately teased ginger hair, bare feet and kohl-rimmed eyes – would come later. Still, it comes as a surprise to hear him say he lacked the confidence to try out for drama school, given he went on to play Judas in an arena version of Jesus Christ, Superstar at Wembley Stadium in 2012, while his recent comedy comeback show, Back, which featured “Old Songs, New Songs, F--k You songs” has been seen by more than 260,000 fans in Australia, New Zealand and Britain.
He has also appeared in the David Duchovny vehicle, Californication and, with House of the Dragon star Milly Alcock, he plays a lead role in the quirky Australian comedy, Upright, which is screening on Foxtel.
The Perth-raised performer’s live shows may be edgy and sweary, but it was a fictional schoolgirl with telekinetic powers – Roald Dahl’s plucky heroine Matilda – “who kicked down doors for me” and cemented his reputation internationally as a brilliant composer and lyricist. The WAAPA contemporary music graduate created the songs and lyrics for the hit musical Matilda, an adaptation of Dahl’s children’s novel, which began as a Christmas show for the Royal Shakespeare Company 12 years ago.
Now, Netflix’s lavish, highly-anticipated movie version of the musical has landed in cinemas and premieres on the streamer on Christmas Day. It stars Oscar winner Emma Thompson as sadistic school headmistress Miss Trunchbull, an ex-champion hammer thrower who likes flinging little girls around by their pigtails, and Bond habitue Lashana Lynch as the kind but permanently terrified teacher Miss Honey. Thirteen-year-old Irish actor Alisha Weir plays Matilda, the bookish, pint-sized girl with superpowers who fights back against adult bullies and, like a diminutive Volodymyr Zelensky, inspires her classmates to do the same.
Speaking to Review over Zoom, and dispensing with false modesty, Minchin describes Matilda as “the most critically acclaimed family musical of the 21st century’’.
Directed by Tony award-winner Matthew Warchus and with a book by Dennis Kelly – both of whom worked on the film – the stage production has won more than 85 international awards including a record seven Olivier gongs and five Tony Awards. It’s been running on the West End for 11 years and has played to more than 50 cities around the world, including Australia’s mainland capitals.
Minchin says that when the RSC first approached him about adapting Matilda in 2009, “I wasn’t ever really in the mode of, ‘Is this the thing that’s going to put my name in lights?’ I never had grand ambitions.’’
He completed his first draft of the songs and lyrics in less than two months, as his second child, son Caspar, was weeks away from being born. “In the end it was turned around quite quickly, some musicals take years and years to develop. Really, we were just concentrating on what would make a beautiful Christmas show in Stratford-upon-Avon,’’ he says.
The film reprises the songs he wrote for the stage musical including the lyrical When I Grow Up, the elegiac My House and anthemic Revolting Children. He has also written a new closing song, Still Holding My Hand, while the orchestrations, devised by music supervisor Chris Nightingale, are new. Reflecting Netflix’s deep pockets, the film also features a troupe of 250 child dancers and a Soviet-style 7.5m statue of Trunchbull dominating Matilda’s school, Crunchem Hall.
Border closures and Covid restrictions meant that Minchin, based in Sydney, couldn’t travel to Britain to see the film being made. He was, however, involved in “really tough decisions about what gets cut and they needed me to solve the ending (with the new song)’’.
“The wonderful thing about this film is it was created by the original team that created the stage musical, and that’s uncommon,’’ he says. That team was determined to resist sentimentalising Dahl’s story about schoolkids being terrorised by their headmistress and the unloved Matilda, whose mother tells her she is “an ugly little worm” and “kids should be against the law’’.
“We were adamant we were going to stay in control, especially because of the old Americanised version from the ’90s,’’ says Minchin. (He is talking about the 1996 Hollywood adaptation, which departed significantly from Dahl’s book.)
“It’s very easy for it to get Disneyfied and for it suddenly to become all about Matilda’s superpowers and not about her heart,’’ he says. “We’re trying to honour what Roald Dahl was a genius at, which is not holding back on talking about how scary the world was to kids.’’
The film’s producers searched widely in Europe, America and Britain before they found their Matilda in Weir. Says Minchin: “I’m just gobsmacked by her. She’s just got this insane maturity behind her eyes and that’s what Matilda has to have … She’s also got this fierce sense of moral clarity. Matthew is an extraordinary director and he’s spent 12 years casting Matildas and he knows what to ask of them.’’
Thompson as headmistress Trunchbull is “proper scary’’. Her Trunchbull evokes a concentration camp guard with her downturned mouth, hair scraped into a bun, shelf-like bosom and lead boots. “Emma’s a genius,’’ says the composer. “She has this ability to sit on a line of comedy and genuine drama. She’s not playing her for jokes. She’s playing the truth of Miss Trunchbull.’’
What did he think of the controversy over Thompson’s casting, with demands the role should have gone to a plus-sized actor? “I don’t get involved in that stuff,’’ he replies, quipping that Trunchbull is “not plus-sized; she’s a hammer thrower … We did look around the world for six foot two, hammer-throwing women. There are just not many out there who are very good actors.’’
The film also reveals Lynch, known for her Marvel Universe and Bond roles, is a wonderful singer. “I think she’s a beautiful vocalist,’’ he says, breaking into song as he imitates the emphatic way the actor sings the phrase “small but stubborn fire” from her big solo number, My House, which he, of course, wrote.
While the rejections he encountered years ago spurred him to do better, the Upright star remains wary of the pitfalls of fame. In 2021, he wrote in The Guardian: “It’s not that wankers become famous, it’s that fame makes you a wanker.’’
His career took off in 2005 when his live show, Darkside, won awards at the Melbourne comedy and Edinburgh fringe festivals. But he soon realised how easy it was for the feted and famous to lose their marriages or succumb to substance abuse. “I’m not interested in fame,’’ he insists. “Some famous people are lovely and some aren’t. I am a family man. I’m deeply conservative in my life choices.’’ (He is married to his childhood sweetheart Sarah and has two children, Caspar and Violet.)
“I don’t take drugs and I think a lot about the future; I’m not spontaneous. I have a really fucking amazing life.’’ Just don’t call him a celebrity. “I’m not a celebrity,’’ he says firmly. “You’ll never see me taking advertising dollars or turning up on red carpets with a different woman on my arm or getting free clothes. I just make shit.’’
Along with the “very high highs”, there have been bruising career setbacks. He has written that “our musical, Groundhog Day, despite awards and five-star reviews, took a bit of a battering on Broadway … I spent four years in Hollywood working on an animated film (Larrikins) that was shut down when the studio was sold.’’
On the upside, in November, he performed at Sydney Opera House for its 50th anniversary and is working on two new TV shows, including The Artful Dodger, an Australian Disney+ production set in the 1850s. “That’s why I’m looking why I’m looking,’’ he says, gesturing towards his hair, which is dyed jet-black for his role “as a bad guy mob boss”. He adds he is “so happy” to be playing a small role in a production “that isn’t my f--king problem”.
The second season of Upright, which he co-wrote and in which he and Alcock play an unlikely double act looking for the latter’s missing mother, is screening here on Foxtel and in Britain and Canada. Since this comedy debuted to favourable reviews in 2019, Alcock has found worldwide fame with her lead role in HBO’s House of the Dragon. “I think she’s got better, which is no small thing because she was already incredible,’’ he says.
Filming season two of Upright in North Queensland “was really tough. We had floods and Covid and we came up with this incredible bonkers storyline that cost a lot of money and we didn’t have much time.’’
In October, he flew to Britain, where Netflix’s Matilda opened the London Film Festival. It has earned strong early reviews, with British and US critics describing it as “immensely enjoyable” and “adorable”.
“My main involvement (in making the movie) was fighting for the story,’’ he says. “There’s a film that costs tens and tens of millions of dollars. Everyone has their own jobs, from advertising to how are we going to make sure no one gets cross with us for any political missteps? … I just care about: Are my characters’ wants and needs being represented and is my and Chris Nightingale’s music being respected? Like, is anyone shitting on our work?’’
Evidently, no one has. He says the movie is “completely stunning”, adding: “I’m so impressed by it.’’ He jokes that while the pandemic prevented him from being on the film set, “I get to sit back and take the credit’’.
Roald Dahl’s Matilda The Musical is now showing in cinemas and will be available on Netflix on Christmas Day.
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