Plum star Brendan Cowell on rugby league, poetry and getting sober
For too long Brendan Cowell had been the life of the party. The actor, writer and dedicated hedonist needed someone or something to help him through. He needed a hero – so he created one.
It’s a glorious, if absurdly warm, winter’s day at Sydney’s Cronulla Beach. By late morning, the mercury is surging towards the high twenties. The sky is an unbroken blue and the tide is so high the water seems within touching distance of the beachfront restaurant where Brendan Cowell sits, drinking mineral water, denouncing the “cruel” tethering of an anxious dog while its owner takes a dip, and baring his soul.
The Avatar and Love My Way star speaks in a loud, confident Aussie drawl, whether he is describing his latest television drama, Plum – which fuses his two great loves, rugby league and poetry – or his grandmother’s bizarre Grandchild of the Year competition, in which some of the pint-sized entrants never scored a gong, even after years of waiting for one. Or talking about his 26-year “arm wrestle” with alcohol and the benders that left him feeling listless, low and almost suicidal. The actor, screenwriter and novelist never uses that word, yet he reveals that while living in a basement flat in London he once asked himself: “What would happen if I wasn’t in the world? Who does love me? What’s the point? Can I ever beat this thing?’’
The man who says he turned his former Newtown home into a 24/7 party house in the early 2000s is now teetotal. Even hot chips and the sourdough bread your correspondent has been eyeing hopefully on the restaurant menu are eschewed in favour of a shared tricked-up cucumber salad and a broccolini dish.
The slimmed-down 48-year-old recently returned from New Zealand, where he was filming last-minute changes to Avatar: Fire and Ash, the third instalment in the blockbuster franchise, and he declares: “I’m out of the tunnel, I’m out of the nightmare … I haven’t had a drink in over five years and I don’t plan on it today even though we’re at a lovely restaurant eating fish.’’
As the lunchtime crowd of well-heeled retirees and backpack-toting day-trippers builds, Cowell remains in high confessional mode, talking with a remarkable lack of self-consciousness about everything from his battle with booze to being rejected by the nation’s leading drama colleges and his estrangement from his late father. He is witty, intense and often wonderfully unfiltered. “You can ask me anything,’’ he declares in a way that’s both matter-of-fact and disarming (although the strategies he used to kick his drinking habit, and a recent joke he made questioning Scott Morrison’s commitment to the Cronulla Sharks rugby league team, are off-limits).
Cowell was raised here in Sutherland Shire – or the Shire, as it’s known among locals. A sprawling suburban tract of idyllic beaches, bays, bush and spacious family houses, and the scene of the notorious Cronulla race riots in 2005, it’s a famously insular place. Aged 17, he shocked his mates by leaving to study drama and communications at Charles Sturt University in Bathurst, country NSW. He quips: “As we all know, leaving the Shire was like, you may as well have been leaving parts of Europe during the war. You’ve got to go in the dead of night and cross the border. My mates couldn’t believe it: ‘What are you doin’? It’s all here.’”
Cronulla is the home of his beloved Cronulla Sharks and the setting for his new drama, a six-part ABC miniseries adapted from his 2021 novel Plum, about a middle-aged former league star who refuses to admit he has a brain injury acquired during his illustrious footy career. Peter “the Plum” Lum – played by Cowell – could be facing dementia or death, yet chooses to ignore that reality. Episode one, which premieres on October 20, begins with a flashback to Plum’s football heyday. He is knocked out during a game, given smelling salts and promptly sent back on to the field. “It gives the viewer an insight into how it was,’’ says Cowell.
This suburban saga, which Cowell also co-produces, co-directs and co-writes, is not merely a drama about an issue increasingly on the public radar; the ghosts of poets Charles Bukowski and Sylvia Plath infiltrate the story as our flawed hero acts out in a way that alienates his son, his current partner and his loyal ex wife, the latter portrayed by Asher Keddie with a nasal twang and broad Shire accent.
Cowell says he wrote the original novel as the debate about rugby league and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) – a brain disorder linked to repeated head trauma – was gathering momentum. “I was reading a lot about CTE and concussions and head knocks and it was in that 2018-19 period where the opinion was changing. Those same journalists on television who said, ‘Oh toughen up, it’s not ballet, it’s a contact sport’ were now saying, ‘We need to protect the players’.”
He maintains that rugby league is “the greatest game of all … [but] sometimes you have to make a big change to make sure something lasts forever. I’d rather people stopped hitting each other in the head so rugby league can be around in 2246 rather than be taken away from us in 10 years because CTE is real.’’
He explored brain injury research with medical experts for his novel; the sport’s culture is playing catch-up, though. “I was watching NRL 360 last night and they were making CTE jokes, so it’s still not being taken completely seriously,” he says. “Right now league is in a very confusing spot as to whether to send a guy to the sin bin for hitting a guy in the head at all, or does it have to be intentional and harmful?’’
The actor and writer is a lifelong Sharks supporter and played in an old boys’ mini-game three days before this interview. “What I love about the sport is the clash of brutality and beauty,’’ he says. As a teenager Cowell played fullback for his school, Caringbah’s De La Salle Catholic College, figuring it would give him badly-needed street cred, given his reputation for liking poetry and drama.
Cowell’s 80-year-old mother, Yvonne – who plays a punk poet with a pink mohawk in Plum – says he also copped a ribbing as a younger child after being cast in TV ads for pavlova and vegetable oil. The former nurse, who worked until she was 75, says with knowing humour that he was cast because he could “smile with his eyes when he was opening his mouth’’.
While he has always been a multi-tasker, taking on writing and acting roles in era-defining shows including Love My Way and The Slap,Plum is Cowell’s first outing as showrunner – the person with overall creative control. Just don’t ask ifhe wrote his second novel with a TV adaptation in mind. Suddenly he leans in to the table, raises an index finger on each hand and responds emphatically: “No. No way! And you know what, f..k those guys who do that. I had someone say, ‘Oh very clever, you wrote your book to get your show up’, and I felt sick. I write a book for the bloody reader … if anything, I wrote this show so maybe people would buy the book.’’
Serial Logie winner Asher Keddie (Offspring, Paper Giants, Strife) is TV drama royalty, and Cowell says her interest in his novel marked the first time he saw its screen potential. Keddie’s character, Lum’s ex-wife Renee, is also the mother of their son and next of kin for medical purposes. She carries the medical secret Lum refuses to reveal to other family members.
Cowell says: “Asher never really signed on, she was just Renee.’’ She had endorsed Plum the novel and she was “just going on about the women [characters] … I said, ‘You are Renee. She goes, ‘I am Renee’. ’’ He laughs, pleased with himself at how organically this evolved. “I hadn’t even thought about the TV series until that point.’’
He admits that when Jemaine Clement (another Avatar star) and Keddie joined the cast, “I was overwhelmed, because I suddenly realised I was making a serious television show’’. At the time, “I hoped they didn’t realise I had no idea what I was doing as a showrunner”. But he has always been full of ideas; he talks about having a “circus” going on in his head.
Keddie says of working with him: “To watch Brendan juggle the challenges of writing, showrunning, producing and performing in almost every scene of the show was brilliant, and he delivered all three with a great deal of confidence. I love the ‘circus’ in his head – it’s always been there, even as a young artist; it’s just more focused now.’’
She adds that Cowell has “always been a really honest actor, which can be disarming when you’re his scene partner. He tells the truth, and demands the truth in return. So it’s exhilarating, really, to work with him as there’s nowhere to hide. It has to be authentic”.
There is a further parallel between Cowell and the former football legend he plays on the small screen: both initially ignore the demons they are battling, and that threaten to overwhelm them. In Lum’s case it is CTE; in Cowell’s case it was going on drinking binges that could leave him dangerously depressed. “I kind of am Peter Lum,’’ he says simply.
He wrote Plum while living alone in a basement flat in Notting Hill, London, during the Covid pandemic, and he wept while working on the novel. “I cried a lot because veiled in the tale of an ex rugby league player confronting a brain injury is my story. So I was trying to work out through him if I was going to get there … I thought that Peter Lum had to change, or else – and so did I.’’
Cowell describes in vivid detail the years from age 16 to 42, when he was a self-admitted party animal who could go on drinking binges and then front up to work the next day. “I’d had every party, in every city, in every town,’’ he announces, sounding as if he is channelling the opening line of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. “I’d tried everything. I’d had a bloody good time.’’
In the restaurant, he tells me – and whoever happens to be listening in – that in the early 2000s, “my house became a kind of 24-hour warehouse party ... I had a lot of artists and dancers and bands and people staying there constantly, and I cooked a lot. It was an incredible era but a very indulgent one”.
At times, he has admitted, drinking cost him relationships and job opportunities, but despite this “I didn’t want to stop because I loved it and it very much defined me … I was a fun guy to be around. I just didn’t know when to wrap the night up, that was my main problem”. Even before he left to try his luck in the UK in 2016, he was pushing 40 and finding that at parties and pubs “suddenly everyone was very young. All my friends got their act together and I was kind of left there thinking, ‘What am I doing?’
“Again those dark thoughts come back.’’
He first had those thoughts as a teenager clambering his way out of adolescence. “For me when I was 13, 14, struggling at school, being bullied, parents divorcing in Cronulla, having some dark and ominous thoughts, I found poetry. I’d hide out in a little cave on Gannons Road [in Caringbah] and I’d write these poems and then I’d start reciting them and making little pieces out of them. That gave me a voice … and made me feel less like an imposter with myself. It improved my relationship with myself.’’ He still believes in the healing power of words, and this is another of Plum’s themes.
After graduating from uni in the late 1990s, success came quickly. In his twenties he won a clutch of prestigious theatre awards (the Patrick White Playwrights Award, Griffin Award and Philip Parsons Young Playwright’s Award). He wrote for and starred (as Claudia Karvan’s substance-abusing flatmate) in Love My Way, which won the AFI Award for Best TV Drama Series for each of its three seasons (2005-2007).Ruben Guthrie, his semi-autobiographical play turned film about a “man not only battling the bottle but the city that won’t let him put it down’’ opened the 2015 Sydney Film Festival.
Cowell’s international acting career took off in 2016, after Australian director Simon Stone cast him in his Olivier-Award winning Young Vic production of Lorca’s tragedy Yerma, in which he played opposite Dr Who star Billie Piper. He subsequently performed the title role in Brecht’s Life of Galileo in a Young Vic production; the Guardian reviewer, a Brecht sceptic, wrote that Cowell’s muscular performance “showed me that Brecht really can make the Earth move’’. Then came a barnstorming turn as John Proctor in The Crucible for the National Theatre in 2022. On the back of his stage work, he landed the role of big game hunter Captain Mick Scoresby – who represents “everything that’s wrong with the world in one man’’ – in James Cameron’s Avatar franchise.
He was a high-functioning drinker, he says; at the same time he would go on benders, “I’m performing theatre on the West End stage and I’m having this incredible time. I’ve always been able to do that, maintain this career whilst maintaining this lifestyle. I can have a massive bender and then write 5000 words of a book or go and do a matinee. But that was starting to wear thin as I got older ... something was going to give.
“When I moved to England I thought it would all be better – but wherever you go, there you are really. And I started to think, ‘What would happen if I wasn’t in the world?’” It was, he says, “just a kind of tortured feeling that I was having, of hopelessness, really”.
Writing Plum was, in the end, the circuit-breaker. In 2018 and 2019, living alone in that Notting Hill basement, “I changed my way of life, I guess. I had stopped drinking altogether. It wasn’t incredibly spectacular what happened. It was just I got sad enough to go, ‘Come on mate, you’ve got to do something about this’.”
When the pandemic struck, “my girlfriend at the time left and went back to Australia, and I was told that Avatar was moving [back] five months and that I’d just be in my basement flat and I thought, ‘Holy shit, if I start drinking now it’s gonna go bad. What am I gonna do?’’’ Did he see himself as an alcoholic? “That stuff’s really my business,’’ he says, suddenly defensive. “The fact is there was an arm wrestle – I wasn’t gonna win it. How I’ve gone about it is no one’s business. I keep that to myself. The point is, I’ve done it for me.’’
Rejections are part of the Brendan Cowell mythology: the writer, director, producer and actor who grew up in the Shire and went on to work on Game of Thrones and at London’s National Theatre “got rejected from NIDA, VCA [Victorian College of the Arts] and WAAPA [Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts] three years in a row.’’ It’s a story he can now afford to dine out on. So he does.
He recounts how one NIDA call-back audition came down to a choice between him and a female actor. He was asked to perform Shakespeare “across a chasm’’. He was a teenager and he recalls: “I had no idea what a chasm was, because I was from Cronulla. I was like, ‘Mum doesn’t chasm, dad doesn’t chasm, I never saw my sisters chasm’. So I thought maybe I would just go with a spasm. And then they said, ‘That’s enough Brendan!’ and I was kicked out.’’ Five years later, while he was playing a lead role in Love My Way, NIDA asked him to take a masterclass in screen acting. “I sailed in there and they paid me my $2000 and I waved and I said, ‘Chasm!’ I don’t think they understood the potency of the word.’’
Plum explores the escalating tensions between Peter Lum and his son Gavin (Vincent Miller), a future prince of the game. Is Cowell drawing on his relationship with his own Dad for those scenes? His father Bruce – who split up with Yvonne after 25 years of marriage – died shortly after Plum (the novel) was released. “We weren’t in touch at the time, so I never really knew if he read it,’’ Cowell reveals. The estrangement “was a sad but necessary separation of myself and my siblings from Dad, something we had to come to peace with”.
What caused the estrangement? He pauses before answering. “It’s complex. My siblings [two sisters] wanted to change how we related and Dad wasn’t up for that. About 10 years ago, we decided if there wasn’t going to be a change … it was very painful.’’ While his father “wasn’t one to say ‘I loved your performance of Hamlet’ or ‘I loved your book’ … Dad was present for us and very generous and loving and stuff as kids”.
Interestingly, he feels he wasn’t what his father, an accountant, expected in a son: “I think he may have expected a son who was into rugby union and married young and was into the stock exchange. Instead he got this mad bastard who wrote plays about men who become chickens and boy bands and sexual assault and rugby league and rabbits and then Love My Way and The Slap … But I know he loved me.’’
He credits his sisters, Belinda and Jacqui, with giving him the “licence” to feel that he, a league-playing boy from the Shire, could have a career in the arts. His sisters took dance lessons as kids, and later Jacqui was in the 1990s pop group Girlfriend, whose song Take It From Me was a number one hit.
When we meet, Cowell has just finished “pick ups” – filming final extra scenes – in New Zealand for Avatar: Fire and Ash, which will be released next year. “Filming on Avatar may never [finish],’’ he jokes. He has spent six years, on and off, working on Avatar: The Way of Water and the forthcoming instalment of the hugely lucrative franchise. “We had to rush to get [part] two out before Christmas 2021 and then they had a year of post-production. Jim [director James Cameron] had some ideas, some changes, some reshoots, so he brought us all back. That same thing with Avatar 3 – ‘We just need you for a few days’, and you end up there for a few months. But it was incredible because it was a little family.’’
Cameron, who has directed three of Hollywood’s four top-grossing movies (Titanic and the two Avatar films) is famously obsessive. “I don’t have a bad word to say about him,’’ says Cowell. “He’s just another level above. Near enough is not good enough. There’s not a shot in his films where he’s not incredibly happy with every detail. And until it’s that – even if it’s a second and a half – it’s not gonna happen. I just call that passionate and thorough.’’
Cowell’s character in Avatar, Mick Scoresby, once loved and lost a mermaid, “and since then all he’s given a f..k about is money and power’’. “He was a fun character to play,’’ Cowell says, “because often playing a bad guy you have to try and locate some empathy for the audience. But playing Mick, Jim never pushed me to make him likeable. He’s pure evil.’’
In contrast, “I really enjoyed the full symphony of Plum. I adapted my novel, produced it, was showrunner and played the lead. There’d be some days where the shit would hit the fan and I’d think, ‘I don’t know if I can do all these five jobs right now and then go into a very sad scene with Sylvia Plath”. While he collaborated on Plum with Love My Way screenwriter Fiona Seres and co-directors Wayne Blair and Margie Beattie, he says showrunning “was just intense. And I slept five hours a day. I was coming off a break-up and it was hell. But I don’t know if I’ve ever been that alive or that happy in my life”.
As he approaches his half-century, he says he feels “pretty content’’. Since he stopped drinking, “my work has improved and my relationships have improved and life’s got a lot simpler … It [drinking culture] sells you this myth that you’re being more connected. Really it just separates you from your own feelings. I like my feelings now, even the bad ones.’’
He goes to therapy when he feels the need: “I’ll jump in for six months ... when there’s something coming at me that I can’t seem to move through. Now, the storm has passed and I’m calm inside and I’m no longer looking at the externals – you know, ‘You gotta get the girl, you gotta get the awards, get the notoriety, get the drink in’. I’m no longer reaching.’’
From 2003 to 2010, he dated the Hollywood star Rose Byrne, before they parted amicably. He isn’t currently in a relationship. “That’s one side of things I haven’t seemed to have an incredible amount of success with,’’ he says philosophically. “I’m a good friend. I’m good to work with.’’ He laughs in a self-deprecating way. Is he hard to live with? “I think I’ve got incredibly good at being on my own. I’ve come to terms with solitude. And I love my little apartment [in Kingsford, in Sydney’s east].
“I also think as you get older you get a little funny … the person you’re after becomes more specific. Because I don’t want someone who drinks and vapes and I don’t want someone who hasn’t been to therapy. And also [I need] someone who can deal with me. Because I’m mad. There’s a circus going on between my ears and it’s loud and it’s happening. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea and I’ve had to accept that.’’
He is now writing his third novel, about a 14-year-old boy with a phone addiction who is sent to a village: “It’s kind of about the beauty of old things and connecting with old things.’’ He is also working on an idea for a new TV series called Grandchild of the Year, inspired by “a competition my grandmother ran. Coz there were 23 grandkids and she’d give one of us an award”. Some of the grandkids “never got the gong”, he adds. “I won twice, three nominations, one special mention. Nan liked the spotlight, so I figured that if I invited her to the Opera House or some big film premiere I would probably do well. But I was up against a lot of doctors and mothers, and they do well.’’
He gazes towards the ocean, and rattles off the names of the beaches where various rugby league teams train in the dunes. He jokes: “I told my sisters and my Mum, ‘I’m done with the Dad story now. I’m no longer angry at the Dad. I’m not tortured about the Dad … so I’m coming for you ladies’.’’
He reflects how, just a few years ago in London, “I didn’t know if I’d make it out of that basement flat and into the light, and it was so hard. It’s not hard at all now. Mum’s always like, ‘It must be hard being around all of us drinking all the time.’ Drinking was hard. This is easy. This is beautiful. That life was the one that was killing me. This is sweet.’’
Plum premieres on October 20 on ABC TV at 8.30pm, and on ABC iview
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