10 Questions: Eddie Perfect, performer, 35

THE seasoned performer on why the performing arts are not fair.

Is Perfect a stage name?

It's my real name. Terrifyingly, some of my friends are still surprised to learn that. How could you actually be friends with someone you thought had deliberately changed their name to Perfect?

What was it like growing up with such an unusual surname?
Our family's answering machine in the '90s had my dad saying, "You have rung the Perfect household" without any self-awareness or irony. I think it's just my cross to bear. Along the way I meet people with fantastically strange names and so we have a beer and commiserate. But because I'm a performer people are more likely to assume I changed it to Perfect. If I was willing to change it, I'd have gone all the way to F..king-Brilliant. Hyphenated.

When did you know you wanted to be a performer?
I originally wanted to be a visual artist. Then I started training musically, found a love of theatre and discovered composing. I wrote a show and found half of it was funny, so I cut out half that wasn't and put it in a comedy festival.

Doesn't failing as a performer scare you?
It's not as bad as everyone thinks. You learn more from a gig that failed. You've got to ask: am I intrinsically bad at what I do or did I just write a shitty show? Once you decide you are a performer, you have to roll with the punches and not take a setback as being some kind of sign from the universe to give up and become a car-washer.

What is the balance between luck and hard work in becoming successful?
There are lots of people who spend a lot of time becoming highly skilled - then lose out to people who've been on a reality TV show. But the performing arts have never been fair. The notion that the most talented person at the audition gets the role has always been a complete fallacy. I don't tend to let it stop me. I started out by creating work for myself.

Do you have role models?
Yes, people who are courageous in the way they approach their artform and who rewrite the rules. I admire Barry Humphries, and I love Miles Davis. Stephen Sondheim is a theatrical hero of mine.

What do you do in your downtime?
Read a lot of biographies. Reading is fundamental to living. If you are unable to read it is usually symptomatic of the fact that you are too busy, your attention span is too short, or you are drunk. Drunken reading is not easy, I've tried it.

Do you plan to become an author, too?
No, my form of self-expression is composition - words and music - and I'm not through exploring it yet. Maybe when I'm older, but for now I'm content to leave it to the experts and enjoy their work.

When co-hosting the Helpmann Awards in July you had to get through a long break in the live broadcast. What was that like?
We hadn't planned on filling six minutes. Everyone has to deal with that stuff, and no one actually dies. It's the eternal battle between televising a live event and honouring the audience.

You've played Mick in Offspring over four seasons and picked up a large fanbase - "hot" is a word used about you. What's that like?
I don't believe it but it's nice. It never happened in real life before TV. It's been an incredible experience, especially getting to live with the character over the whole four series.

Eddie Perfect's black comedy The Beast has just opened at Melbourne's Southbank Theatre