For decades, he couldn’t afford a car. Then this Aussie checked in at The White Lotus

This story is part of the May 10 edition of Good Weekend.See all 14 stories.

I am sitting in a cafe in Bondi with The White Lotus superstar and Emmy Award-winning actor Murray Bartlett when, out of nowhere, a pigeon starts smashing itself against the window behind us. It’s a terrible sound, like someone repeatedly hitting the glass with a shoe.

Bartlett leaps to his feet. Wearing a loose green T-shirt that brings out the blue of his eyes, he manoeuvres around our table and holds out his arms, edging the pigeon towards the door. The pigeon flaps wildly, banging into furniture and walls. A nearby youth – tight shirt, bicep tatt – ducks behind a table to get out of the way, clutching his green juice. Bartlett’s arms are open, his whole body facing the pigeon. For a moment, man and bird stand motionless, looking at each other. Then the pigeon turns and flies safely through the door.

I think Murray Bartlett might be able to get anyone – pigeon, journalist, hapless bystander – to do whatever he wants, just by the sheer force of his niceness. Not niceness in a wimpy or annoying way, but in the full-hearted, unselfconscious way we all hear about in wellness guides and think, in our secret cynical selves, doesn’t actually exist. “I think Murray Bartlett might be the kindest human in the whole world,” says fellow actor Genevieve Hegney, who met Bartlett when she was 19 and he was in his 20s, appearing in a short film in Perth. “When I got to NIDA, he was the only person I knew in Sydney. He’d already graduated, but he really took me under his wing. He’d take me out to this cafe called Metro, pay for my dinner, just kind of look out for me. And then later, when I went to America for pilot season he was like, ‘Have my apartment in New York.’ ” She leans forward, eyes wide. “And he moved out! Of his own apartment!”

This is far from an unusual story. Later in the week, I will talk to Jonathan Levine, who directed Bartlett in the upcoming second season of Nine Perfect Strangers. “Normally, I would not [talk to a journalist] at the end of a long shooting day,” Levine confesses over the phone. “But I just love Murray Bartlett, and anything I can to evangelise him to the world, I will do. I know it’s very important to talk about what a great actor he is, but the thing I’m struck by most about him is just what a good dude he is. Honestly, it sounds like a cliché, but you’re just so happy and comfortable around him. He elevates everything and everyone, including me.”

In my own case, though our interview is scheduled to last an hour, Bartlett sits with me in the cafe from noon until 4pm. And by the end of it, I agree with everyone else. From what I can see, all of us – in the cafe, in the acting world, and in the vast global audience that has come to know him over the past four years – are just that little bit happier because Murray Bartlett is in the world.

NIDA graduate Bartlett turned down the offer of an extended contract on Neighbours. “In hindsight, it was kind of ridiculous,” he says.Credit: Ryan Pfluger/AUGUST

Confrontational scene

Let’s just deal with this upfront. Murray Bartlett’s breakthrough role came in 2021, in the first season of the international hit, The White Lotus. He played Armond, the manager of a luxury Hawaiian hotel hosting a gaggle of rich Americans. Armond – for which Bartlett won the Emmy for best supporting actor in a limited series in 2022 – wears a lot of rosy pink linen and spends most of his screen time in a series of death-spiral scenes with Shane, the ultimate moron guest, played by Jake Lacy. These scenes culminate in Armond (spoiler alert!) doing a poo in Shane’s suitcase.

For the record, firstly: Bartlett did not actually do a poo on screen. It was created using special effects (but was the subject of pretty detailed discussion between Bartlett and the props department, which actually created an “amazing” object made of chocolate bars and honey that didn’t end up being used).

Secondly: even Bartlett was initially shocked by the whole “human faeces in your après-pool-wear” vibe. “It’s not the thing you expect to see on TV,” he admitted at the time. “And it’s certainly not the thing you expect to watch yourself do on TV. It’s quite a confronting thing for me to watch … In my audience mode, [I] was like, ‘That looks so real. Did I actually do that?’ ” But at the same time, as a professional, he relished the scene. “There’s part of me secretly as an actor who’s like, ‘Oh my god, this is awesome. It’s a great scene, and it’s a great scene for this character.’ ”

Bartlett (with co-star Jolene Purdy) in his breakout role as hotel manager Armond in The White Lotus.Credit: HBO

Finally: personally, as a general rule, I’ve got no time for characters who do this sort of stuff, or storylines that involve it. I know it’s all make-believe entertainment, but I don’t care: the whole thing grosses me out, and I hate it. But in this case, I watched the poo, I nearly gagged, and yet I was still on Armond’s side. As an audience member, my sympathy was still engaged. And this, I think, is mostly because of Bartlett. (And also because of Lacy, who does a masterful job of making us loathe Shane with every fibre of our being.) Bartlett makes us care. He makes Armond likeable. Almost more important, he makes him believable.

“Murray’s incredibly truthful as an actor,” says Anna Torv, who worked with him on The Last of Us, in which he played Frank, one half of a couple (the other half was Bill, played by Nick Offerman) who fall in love and make a life together in the midst of, yes, a zombie apocalypse. He and Offerman were both nominated for Emmys (Offerman, who had the larger role, won). “In that beautiful episode, you just bought them,” says Torv. “God, you bought everything: there was no part of you that didn’t believe every word. The same with White Lotus. Murray has that ability. He can bring everything down to a centred place. Which means he can be as over-the-top as he likes, and it still feels truthful.”

In The Last of Us, Bartlett (left) and Nick Offerman played a post-apocalytic couple.

Sexual charisma

Anna Torv first saw Bartlett on-screen a decade ago, when he was in iconic US gay drama series Looking. “I was like, ‘Who the f--- is this guy?’ I had such a crush on him, to be totally honest. He was just so sexy. The moustache; the whole package!”

This opinion – shared, like his niceness, by everyone I speak to – is best summed up by producer Emily Gordon, who cast him in Welcome to Chippendales (for which, you guessed it, Bartlett received yet another Emmy nomination, in 2023). “We need[ed] someone who both men and women want to have sex with,” Gordon told the Los Angeles Times. “And nobody fit the bill better than Murray.”

In person Bartlett really is, I can confirm, a good-looking guy – some combination of bright blue eyes, a full head of thick hair and unfeasibly excellent skin. He’s not perfect – he’s 54 and spent his childhood in Perth, Western Australia, which, as I know from personal experience, means he grew up in devastating heat while almost certainly not wearing sunscreen. But he still looks a million bucks. It might be his very white teeth and the fact that he smiles a lot. And of course, there’s the niceness. He reminds me of the immortal Roald Dahl line: “If you have good thoughts, they will shine out of your face like sunbeams, and you will always look lovely.”

With his 2022 Emmy for The White Lotus, one of three awards Bartlett garnered for the series.Credit: Getty Images

Bartlett certainly seems to have always looked lovely – even as a skinny teen in his first TV role, a 1987 episode of The Flying Doctors – though, thanks to two accidents as a little kid, he spent several years with no front teeth. (First he caught the back-swing of a hammer his older brother was wielding to crush a spider; then he slipped mid-twirl while wrapped in a rug in the family basement.) It was during his subsequent lisping period that his mother, Anne Sinclair, organised for him and his brother to have speech and drama lessons. It was the first proof that Bartlett was not only cute as a button, but talented.

“It was really wonderful for Murray because that teacher introduced them to Shakespeare and other great poets, and he just loved it,” Sinclair recalls. “And in primary school he did a few drama courses in the school holidays, and they’d do these shows at the end – you know, 20 parents in the audience checking they’d got their money’s worth. Of course, I’m his mother, so I always thought he was pretty great. But other people would see him and be sort of stunned by how good he was.”

When he was 12, he auditioned for the highly competitive theatre arts program at John Curtin College of the Arts, a public high school in Perth. “There was one free piece they could do: they could choose a song and sing it,” recalls Sinclair. “Well, of course Murray wrote his own song, didn’t he? And sat and played it on the piano.” She shakes her head, smiling. “In the car park afterwards, the music director from John Curtin called out to me and said: ‘I just wanted to tell you, your son is really talented. Whatever happens, I hope he goes very well.’ ”

Seven-year-old Bartlett in 1978.Credit: Courtesy of Anne Sinclair

Bartlett spent a happy high school career at John Curtin, in which, as he puts it, “you were really encouraged to be creative, and it wasn’t weird. It was actually kind of cool, just to be yourself.” He came out at about 14: his mother asked him one day, “Do you think you might be gay?” and he said, “Yeah, I think so.” She was always “amazing and incredibly supportive”, says Bartlett, but affirmation from his father, who has strong religious beliefs, was “a bit of a complicated road. He’s a wonderful man, but it’s tricky to navigate through different frameworks and different ideas about spirituality and life. But there was always a lot of love there.” (Bartlett’s parents divorced when he was young, and they shared custody of him and his brother.) “I was incredibly fortunate,” he says now. “There still some societal things that I had to navigate, but I always felt loved, and I always felt like who I am is who I am.”

At 17, he was accepted into NIDA (which rarely takes students so young) and moved to Sydney. Director Adam Cook, now the head of acting at Actors’ Centre Australia, worked with him when he was in his second year. “People like Murray – or Cate Blanchett, Jeremy Sims, Miranda Otto – they’ve all got something that you cannot teach, which is watchability,” he explains. “Charisma. Even in a tiny role, that feeling of ‘I cannot take my eyes off this person’. He had that. And he also had an appetite for the work. Not ego – not look at me – but the sense that he wanted to engage with the process, with these collaborators. He was hungry for the work – excited to do it.”

It seems extraordinary, given these qualities, combined with his good looks, that Bartlett didn’t immediately take the Australian acting world by storm. But after graduation, he struggled to get regular work. Part of this might have been his own fault: he was offered an extended contract on Neighbours – now a classic path to greatness for young actors – and turned it down. “In hindsight, it was kind of ridiculous,” he says. “I could have learnt so much; I could have got a mortgage much earlier – I could have bought a house! But I was in drama school mode, and I had all these idealistic ideas about what I wanted to do. So I worked in pub theatre and theatre and did bits of TV.”

He was also grappling with his self-confidence.

“I was so naive,” he says. “I’d always just felt really good acting: I really loved it, and I felt very free in it. And NIDA was incredible and very, very valuable. But I was pretty raw, and young, and I think in a sort of a headspace where I didn’t have a strong enough sense of myself to receive all the things that the course was giving. And I just kind of lost confidence.”

Bartlett in his 20s with his mum, Anne Sinclair, who organised speech and drama lessons for him.Credit: Courtesy of Anne Sinclair

Ironically, being ridiculously attractive didn’t help. “He’s a character actor – meaning an actual actor – caught in a god’s body,” says Genevieve Hegney. “He’s the guy who goes, ‘I’m not the person they keep casting me as. I’m not the hot guy in Sex and the City [his first notable role after moving to the US]. I am an actor: I’m Armond; I’m Frank; I have all of this inside me.’

“But Australia’s a country where you’ve got a few casting agents and if they make a decision about you – ‘You are the young, nervous, really good-looking guy’ – it’s very hard for them to change their minds. He was like, ‘I can’t get auditions.’ ”

Bartlett certainly wanted more work. But he was also looking for a new scene, new inspiration, a new idea of himself. In 2000, aged 29, he flew to New York.

Nivea man

Murray Bartlett has dedicated almost 35 years of his life to acting. And yet, until a few years ago, he’d never made any money. He rented for 20 years; he didn’t own a car.

“Not that you need a car in New York,” he says swiftly. “I had a great life. But yeah, every four or five years, I would have these kinds of existential crises and think, ‘I’m going to give this up; maybe this is it, blah, blah, blah.’ ”

There were good moments: that episode playing Sarah Jessica Parker’s gay shoe-importer buddy in Sex and the City; a two-year stint as a handsome conman on America’s oldest soap opera, Guiding Light. (“I was offered that contract, and I was, like, ‘I’m not going to make the same mistake twice!’ ”)

But there were also less-good moments – periods without work, or jobs that didn’t seem like they added much to the sum of human happiness; though Bartlett, being the person he is, made the best of them. Such as the advertising gig he landed in the early 2000s as something his mum calls “the Nivea Man of the World”. “He got that contract for five years,” Sinclair explains, “and rather than thinking, ‘Oh my god,’ he put as much passion into it as he would into any other role. And it paid his rent for five years!” (You can still see these ads on YouTube today; Bartlett actually does look like he’s having a genuinely good time – proof of both his acting skills, and the fact that there are worse fates than being trapped in a body beautiful enough to spearhead a global skincare campaign.)

Still, none of this stopped him having periods of frustration with an industry that seemed largely immune to his charms. In 2012, he went to Egypt for a few months with his then partner. “And I was having, you know, my standard career crisis moment when we arrived,” he recalls. “But it was the second wave of the Arab Spring in Cairo; everyone around me was in the midst of a revolution. And I just looked around and realised, ‘You spoilt little shit. What are you complaining about? You get to do what you love. Yeah, it’s patchy; yeah, you don’t own a house, but you’ve got an amazing life. Just suck it up.’ ”

So he did. He tried to learn Arabic, and grew a moustache to blend in better in Egyptian daily life (which contains “a lot of facial hair”, as he puts it). It was a full-lip Freddie Mercury special, but even so, “it didn’t really work,” he says. “But it did mean I had this whole classic San Francisco gay look happening. And I think that’s what got me the role in Looking.”

Looking – HBO’s first series (2014-16) to focus on gay male characters – followed the lives of three homosexual friends. Bartlett played Dom, the laissez-faire heartbreaker of the trio. He became something of a gay sex-symbol in America (and in Anna Torv’s living room) as a result, and it was this role that reminded him of the “pure joy” he found in acting. In 2019, he followed this with a central role as Mouse in the Netflix revival series Tales of the City. Both were roles that gave full play to his warmth and sensitivity; as he later told The Guardian, he has always loved this aspect of portraying gay characters: the chance to “[try] to show intimacy, especially between men, in a way that feels authentic and feels loving and feels connected, in a way that I feel we don’t see enough”.

Bartlett (left) in 2014’s Looking, HBO’s first series to focus on gay male characters.Credit: Alamy Stock Photo

As the years have passed, he’s also come to terms with his nerves as an actor. He prepares exhaustively for roles, building an emotional backstory for all his characters. “I was really terrified as a young actor, and I think I started doing a lot of that work to make me feel more secure,” he says. “I don’t full-on Daniel Day-Lewis, I do different degrees of it, but I enjoy the whole process. For me, it makes me feel like I’m building a strong foundation of the world of that character – so that when I’m doing the scenes, I’ve got that world with me.“

Which brings us to 2020. COVID-19 had hit, the world had shut down, and Bartlett was wondering if he’d ever work again. Then the chance came to send a self-tape audition for the role of hotel manager in Mike White’s pandemic dramedy. Bartlett had never met White; he hadn’t seen the scripts; he knew almost nothing about the project. But he could imagine Armond’s inner world. He went into his garage, pressed record, and let rip.

It was, as casting director Meredith Tucker described it to the Los Angeles Times, a “brilliant, brilliant audition. Murray did it in his natural [Australian] accent. He captured the obsequiousness of the character, but there was also something else going on … He just got the tone so perfectly.”

The next thing he knew, Bartlett was on a plane to Hawaii.

Showbusiness fantasy

What Murray Bartlett loves most about acting is hard for him to pinpoint. “There are so many parts of the process I love,” he says. “But I think what comes out on top – and I hesitate to talk about these things because it can sound a bit wanky and self-indulgent – is that when I’ve seen plays or films that deeply affect me, they’ve changed me. It’s a genuinely transformative experience. And I want to be part of that: I want to offer that to people.”

The success of The White Lotus in general and of Bartlett’s role in particular has certainly transformed his own life. In one of those showbusiness fantasy plot lines, he was nominated not only for an Emmy, but also for an AACTA International Award, a Critics’ Choice Television Award, a Hollywood Critics Association TV Award, an Independent Spirit Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award. He won the first three – and, in a moment less often seen in showbusiness, absolutely everyone was delighted for him. “Oh my god,” says Genevieve Hegney. “I don’t know where in the world you’d find someone who wasn’t happy for him.”

“Oh no,” says Bartlett, modest to the end. “I think maybe people were thinking, ‘He’s old, it’s about time! Let him have his moment in the sun.’ ”

Since The White Lotus, he has not stopped working. “It’s very exciting,” he says, smiling. “It’s not like I have a million choices coming at me, but there are some, you know? I never had that before. For the first time, it’s not just work or no work.” He’s done a film with Amy Adams (At the Sea) and one with John Malkovich and Juliette Lewis (Opus). He’s in Sydney to shoot Place to Be, directed by Kornél Mundruczó and starring 92-year-old Oscar winner Ellen Burstyn. And in the second season of Nine Perfect Strangers, Bartlett plays Brian, a disgraced children’s TV host with anger issues and a puppet.

In the upcoming second season of Nine Perfect Strangers, Bartlett plays Brian, a disgraced children’s TV host with anger issues and a puppet.Credit: DISNEY

“It can be daunting when you have that cast of actors who are all just exceptional, and all pretty established,” says Jonathan Levine of Nine Perfect Strangers. “The culture of the set can be overwhelming for a director. And having someone like Murray in my corner really helped me with the rest of the cast. When they saw that someone of his stature was kind, and a great collaborator, and so respectful and so lovely, it earned me points with everyone else. It just helped me so much.”

“I was talking to a friend the other day,” admits Bartlett, “and I was saying, ‘Why is nobody on set talking to me?’ And then I realised, ‘Oh, they’re deferring to me!’ ” He laughs. “It was so unfamiliar to me that I didn’t understand what was happening. Which does feel a little uncomfortable, and I want to say, ‘I’m just like you – I’m a little child inside too!’ But then, at the same time, it also makes me realise, ‘Well, I do have a few ideas.’ It’s made me more confident, I guess, that I know what I’m doing. Or at least, maybe I should pretend to!”

Hugh Jackman’s respect

As the autumnal afternoon sun shines through the cafe windows, Murray Bartlett explains one last way in which his life has been transformed by fame. Finally, aged 50-plus, he’s bought a house. He and his partner of a decade (a man called Matt, who is not in the entertainment business, and whom Bartlett tries not to talk about so his life isn’t swamped by the backwash of fame) moved from New York to Provincetown before COVID. But since The White Lotus, they’ve been able to buy some land on the edge of a national park and a cedar shake (wooden shingle) home. “It’s not a fancy house or anything, but it’s very peaceful, nestled in the forest,” says Bartlett. “And I realised that as an adult, I’d never really had a place that felt like home. Even as a teenager, we were going back and forwards between Mum’s and Dad’s – which wasn’t bad – but there was something about, at this point in my life, buying a home, and a piece of land that we’re now the stewards of – that is an anchor, and feels very significant. I’ve never really had that before.”

Bartlett has also got a dog – a beautiful, black and white border collie cross called Bo, who has become the star of his master’s Instagram page. Bartlett, his face lighting up, leans forward to talk about his many perfections. “He’s very active when you take him out – but he’s also happy to lie about the house. And he is very smart, but he’s not frenetic all the time. I’ve never had a dog before, so it’s a new experience for me. It’s extraordinary – really. The depth of love is real.”

With his dog Bo: “The depth of love is real,” Bartlett says.Credit: @murray.bartlett/Instagram

As we leave the cafe, a group of pigeons – including, presumably, Bartlett’s pigeon – are industriously dismembering a pastry on the footpath. Bartlett, who sent his enormous black luxury car away at the start of the interview rather than making the driver wait for him, is going to walk to the beach for a swim. He gives me a number “in case you need to check anything”, then gives me a hug. “If you come to the [Nine Perfect Strangers] screening – it’ll be great to see you. We West Australians need to stick together!” he says, smiling.

Such is Bartlett’s power, I actually believe him. And maybe I should. On the morning of my deadline for this story, I receive an email from Hugh Jackman, who worked with Bartlett 19 years ago (on The Boy from Oz), and this year (on The Death of Robin Hood, written and directed by Michael Sarnoski).

“All of the best actors have one thing in common: we feel a deep respect for them,” writes Jackman. “Murray’s range is nothing short of extraordinary. I have been on stage with him. He can be diabolical, hilarious and soulful. [But] the thing I want to highlight more than his acting ability is that he is universally adored for who he is. No matter who I say his name to, the response is always not only how phenomenal an actor he is but what a truly great human he is. Not just for this business we are in, but for the world – Murray makes it a better place for having him in it.”

It’s not often a Hollywood movie star echoes your own introduction. The pigeon would no doubt agree.

Season two of Nine Perfect Strangers premieres on Prime Video on May 22.

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.