Chiefly though, I’m an actor. A professional one. Which means I spend a lot of time at family gatherings justifying my career choice to relatives who work in finance. It also means that I can claim a tonne of organic make-up as “deductions” in the tools, equipment, and assets section of my tax return. I think. I should check that.

But I have always also kind of felt like a writer, in some vague sense.

In year 5, I penned a moving little poem concerning the sinking of the Titanic (it was ’97, Leo and Kate fever was off the chain). I’d seen the flick several times in the cinema and had a fairly vivid rendering of how shit went down, coupled with a spritely kiddy imagination, before the adolescent binge-drinking ironed me out by ’02. But in year 5 my metaphors were tight. My similes were next- level. I was the shit, the poem was a gem. I rhymed starboard side with slowly died, and it warped the teacher’s mind. So much so, she demanded the piece be read aloud over the PA, so the other kids could reflect on its power, its simplicity. Titanic-inspired poetry of this calibre was too good to keep in the binder. Unfortunately I was too shy to do it, so a boisterous friend with a hearty voice stepped in. Ironic, considering I was the dolt who pursued a career in acting. Should be in finance like her. Then I’d have all the stuff.

At 21, I wrote a charming short story about a babysitter who smokes too many jazz cigarettes, and has a very strange night in the house of the couple she’s minding for. It married the pared-back naturalism of Raymond Carver with the fruitiness of Miranda July, and was accepted into a modest Melbourne periodical. Published! In print! The parents were delighted, mostly.

“But how did you know what it might feel like to use the Marijuana, darling...?” “I Googled it, parents...swear to God...”.

More recently, there was a long, lonely winter, when I thought it a good exercise in creativity to lock myself in the house for a month with my laptop and a half-baked script idea, zero central heating, some inadequate cotton jumpers, not enough food for the temperature to metabolism ratio, and attempt to write a screenplay. A whole bloody screenplay. A friend knocked on the door one bleak afternoon, weeks into the siege, checking that I was still alive, and promptly told me I looked like total shit. And the screenplay is really and truly awful. Just woeful.

But there’s lot of bad writing out there. A lot that makes it to the shooting script that probably shouldn’t have. There’s that great anecdote from the Star Wars set, where Harry Ford pulls George Lucas aside and says, "George, you can type this shit, but you can't say it!”.

It’s so true. A few years back I was cast in a recurring guest role on a long-running Australian cul- de-sac soap opera that will remain unnamed. On said soap opera, I got the catering, renumeration, and glamorous call times enjoyed by regular cast members, without the added stress of being constantly hammered by British tourists in K-mart. But the lines were often hard to say. Like really, really hard. Humans in real life don’t talk quite like they do on soap operas. Real humans have nuances and subtext, subtleties and quirks. But not in soap world. An average session with the drama coach would look like this:

“Sue, I would never say this like this”.

“You’re right, no one would. Ever. Say it in a way that doesn’t sound like you’ve completely rewritten it. But do. Rewrite it. And I mean completely”.

“But Sue, I’ve played this scene before, like three times. You know, when I was illegally sleeping in the garage, remember? Only last time there was no crow-bar. It was the sniper story-arch.”

I’m not even joking.

“Well, find a way to make it sound new, it’s just there for the twelve year-olds in Leeds who need daily plot-refreshers”.
And round and round we’d go, until I would find a way to say the words like a real human might, because that’s what being an actor is, I suppose. Making the words work. Even when they make little to no sense. And I did learn a lot from that cul-de-sac soap opera. Sometimes you have to swallow your pride, remove the critical writer’s hat, toss the ego aside, and get on with the job, service the bigger picture. Even if it means yelling things like, “you’re using me as bait, Mike! Bait! I knew I should never have left Adelaide!” in a freezing studio at seven in the morning, jacked-up on greenroom Nespressos.