“He actually did me a huge favour,” Draxl says of his workmate. “In hindsight, that moment of terror was the beginning of a new life for me because I was finally able to be myself on set. To see everyone else not really care about it meant, oh, I don’t have to worry about this anymore. It was such a relief and a weight off my shoulders, and since then I have never really looked back.”

WISH: Explore the issue

Australia’s LGBTQ+ game changers

From actors and athletes to politicians, performers and beyond, we take a look at some of the most prominent LGBTQ+ game changers.

There’s something funny about Rhys Nicholson

The out-there standup who faced down the hecklers with a camp bravura is finding new satisfaction as a ‘relationship comedian’.

The moment that set actor Tim Draxl free

Tim Draxl got outed on a film set in 2011, when a colleague unknowingly made a joke in front of the whole cast. The now 41-year-old still remembers his stomach dropping in fear, as the facade he had carefully maintained had just been demolished.

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‘I don’t need to lie anymore’

25-year-old basketball player Isaac Humphries blazed a trail when he came out as gay.

Meet the couple who left city life to start a remote island retreat

Nick Stead and Aaron Suine turned their back on corporate careers in Sydney to pursue the ultimate sea change: building a luxury lodge in the middle of Bass Strait.

The actor could not have had a more different experience on the set of his latest project, In Our Blood. The four-part ABC musical drama series – to air soon – is inspired by Australia’s radical response to the AIDS crisis in the early 1980s. Draxl plays a senior adviser to the Health Minister, and he says the show looks at how governments worked together with AIDS-affected communities instead of telling them what to do. The result was extraordinary.

“I had no idea about this incredible story,” Draxl says. “And the thing I really took from it was what happens when you empower people rather than dictating to them. When you empower people to take control of their own situation and then give them the support, they inevitably fly. The rate of success is so much higher, and that is what Australia did in the 1980s.”

The other great thing about working on In Our Blood, according to Draxl, was that it was exactly the opposite of his experience on television and film sets in the first decade or so of his career. “The directors, a lot of the crew, most of the cast, certainly anyone playing a gay role, were all gay, and it was just the most beautiful and liberating time,” he says. “It was completely the opposite of a being a minority on a film set. It was genuine representation of people who are actually living that experience. Gay roles played by gay people, non-binary roles played by non-binary people. It is so important that these communities see themselves authentically depicted.”

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Draxl knew he wanted to work in the world of entertainment since he was four years old and his mum took him to see The Australian Ballet’s rendition of Giselle at the Sydney Opera House. It was the experience of watching the magic on stage – the performers, the sets, the costumes, the music – that got him immediately hooked. Seeing Gene Kelly’s Singin’ in The Rain for the first time a few years later solidified his obsession and his determination to become a performer.

His family worked on the snowfields, and so they lived in Jindabyne in NSW for six months each year and then would head to Austria for the other six months. Draxl’s mum would drive him to dance and ballet lessons at nearby towns so that her son could pursue his dream. When he was a teenager he moved to Sydney to study at a performing arts high school. He won a Cameron Mackintosh-sponsored scholarship and by 16 had signed a recording contract with Sony.

“It was a five-album deal and I cut my first album when I was 17, and it was a super-cheesy Mother’s Day release; it was so naff,” he laughs. “I remember my friends and I – in our school uniforms – going to HMV in Pitt Street Mall the day the album was released and seeing all these big promotional posters of my album. It was just so weird, and very crazy.”

Draxl did one more album, recorded in LA, but decided he wanted to concentrate on film acting. He met the legendary talent agent Mali Finn and she helped him get his foot in the door in Hollywood. But it was also made clear in meetings with film studios that he “wasn’t sexy enough”.

“As I teenager I was struggling with my sexuality and I was in an industry where I was told I can’t be gay,” he recalls. “When I think back to then, it wasn’t really a question. It was just what I had to do and I knew that from the beginning. I knew being gay would be a problem because from a studio standpoint, back then at least, you weren’t sellable to teenage girls and they were the ones who were going to buy the tickets.”

He got his first – albeit tiny – movie role in the 2002 dark comedy Dirty Deeds with Tony Collette, Bryan Brown and John Goodman. He had no idea what he was doing and still remembers his first scene in the middle of the bush near Broken Hill in NSW. He was playing an unnamed policeman.

“When I arrived on set, the director came up and said ‘right, so you are going to drive the car down this dry river bed, then you are going to pull up, jump out, and draw out your gun and aim it at John Goodman’,” Draxl recalls. “ ‘Then you are going to handcuff him and you are going to push him face-first in the mud, and this is real mud and you need to land his face in the mud.’ I was petrified.”

He went on to do the 2003 movie Swimming Upstream with Geoffrey Rush and Judy Davis, and a number of other television and film projects (including A Few Best Men). He was cast as Dr. Henry Fox on the Australian series A Place to Call Home in 2015 and he played the character for three years.

Then came the musical based on Alanis Morissette’s 1995 album Jagged Little Pill, alongside Natalie Bassingthwaighte, and roles on ABC’s Summer Love and The Newsreader. And in the midst of all this and several Covid lockdowns, he also started painting. He is holding his second exhibition this year, as well as performing in the musical Into The Woods at the Belvoir St Theatre in Sydney in March.

Draxl is chatting to WISH during the fashion shoot for this issue (see preceding pages) and he is pretty excited about Sydney WorldPride 2023 this month. “We always call it [Mardi Gras] our gay Christmas,” he says, smiling. “It is the time when our community is truly celebrated and we get to be proud of who we are. But I think the important thing is we have to carry that pride throughout the entire year. And that is what I love about my own life, that I am able to talk about my partner and my sexuality with such openness in the hope that younger generations will see themselves represented, and that it’s okay to be gay and be an actor or basically do whatever the hell you want to do.”

This story appeared in The Pride Issue of WISH, which celebrates the game-changers who are shaping Australia into a more diverse and inclusive society.