VIDEO: A Star is Torn | Tim Minchin

INTRODUCTION: Hi, I'm actor Toby Schmitz. I first met Tim Minchin when I was just a spotty teenager. I knew even then that he was destined for great things. It has been nothing less than thrilling watching the rest of world catch up with his formidable talents. Yes, there have been pitfalls and disappointments, especially of late, but they've only served to sharpen Timmy's focus on the things that matter.

(Tim and Sarah Minchin preparing for London premiere of Matilda movie, October 2022)

TIM MINCHIN: There's a line in Upright, Sah, where Noni Hazlehurst calls me ugly Keith Urban.

TIM MINCHIN: I think we all have an understanding that fame is not good for you.

(Tim and Sarah Minchin preparing for London premiere of Matilda movie)

TIM MINCHIN: Warm champagne next to a disgustingly over blue cheese salad.

TIM MINCHIN: In fact, I am absolutely convinced it's not good for you and the people around you.

(Tim and Sarah Minchin preparing for London premiere of Matilda movie)

TIM MINCHIN: Sarah? Do you want this?

SARAH MINCHIN, WIFE: You gave me a fright.

TIM MINCHIN: Yeah, well, I'm here to keep you adrenalised.

TIM MINCHIN: The problem with being famous yourself is it takes your internal camera, which is a thing that should look outwards, and it does this and you can't stop it and it's terrible for you. It's all about me, me, me, me, me. The audience is laughing at me and they love me and it's me that and it screws with your ego and this is what makes stars into wankers, you know, you can't help it.

(In car on way to movie premiere)

TIM MINCHIN: Fuck yeah. Excuse the language, but fuck yeah.

SARAH MINCHIN, WIFE: Learning to manage jealousy is kind of interesting when you've got a partner who has had a few … has had some interest over the years.

SARAH: How do I say that?

TIM MINCHIN: It seems weird, right? Also, I'm away a lot and I am in a really flamboyant industry and I'm really flirtatious and I really like women.

SARAH MINCHIN, WIFE: But I knew that. That's all part of what I had to figure out. That that was what he was going to be and there was going to be no changing that.

TIM MINCHIN: I understood quite early that my career is a sort of kite and, and I've, I've flown it cautiously in a way that has allowed me to have unbelievable grand adventures and amazing, fun times and parties and shaking, beautiful crying girls who can't believe they're touching me and all that nonsense whilst keeping my marriage and giving my kids a feeling of safety. Loving affirmation is like loving chocolate. You just need to have a square every now and then and then have a good think about whether you should be on your greens.

Title: A Star is Torn

NEL MINCHIN, SISTER: For Tim, as a satirist, it's really about trying to kind of even out the playing field, hold everyone to account. He used to punch up but now it's sort of … it's harder. The dynamics don't work anymore, right? The more high-profile you become, the less targets there are because you just become a bully. And I think he's changed his attitude a lot recently.

'Prejudice'

TIM MINCHIN: In our modern free-spoken society, there is a word that we still hold taboo.

TIM MINCHIN: I am a straight white dude with a huge microphone speaking in a time that is at the end of hundreds of years of straight white dudes with microphones imposing their knowledge, their condescension, their unchecked privilege, their patriarchal blah, blah.

'Prejudice'

TIM MINCHIN: Only a ginger can call another ginger ginger. Only a ginger can call another ginger ginger.

TIM MINCHIN: But I do not believe that my straight white maleness means that I have nothing to contribute on a whole variety of subjects if I have thought deeply about them.

'Come Home (Cardinal Pell)'

TIM MINCHIN: Come home Cardinal Pell, come down from your citadel, it's just the right thing to do, we have a 

right to know what you knew.

Tim Minchin: But I am on the end of that line and I am, of course, an inheritor of that. So it is not so bad that people like me feel like we need to shut the fuck up for a little bit.

‘Thank You God’

Tim Minchin: You only need to pray in a particular spot, to a particular version of a particular god, and if you pull that off without a hitch, he will fix one eye of one middle-class white bitch.

Nel Minchin, sister: He probably doesn't perform some of those songs anymore because the world has changed and he has changed and he's not a 30-year-old dude anymore, you know.

Tim Minchin: I am one of four kids, and my parents are still together.

Nel Minchin, sister: We grew up in Perth. It was a very warm and loving home. Tim was very much the middle child of the older three.

Tim Minchin: My dad's a surgeon. He's very hard working. Pretty modest. Not interested in money, you know, second-hand cars and camping trips, but very good schools and stability.

Nel Minchin, sister: We're all quite musical. That was a big part of our life. Piano, I think, was a way for him to process things.

Tim Minchin: I was always drawn to the piano, mostly because I didn't like studying and so I sort of figured out what chords were and I learnt a bit of guitar and I just sort of, I just worked it out. I mean, it's not actually that hard, really. I didn't think one day I'm going to be a star. It just wasn't in my culture. It’s not how we were brought up.

Toby Schmitz, friend & actor: Tim and I first met at a youth theatre company. And Tim was a shining star. He was quite incredible. He was magnetic.

Tim Minchin: I was just a kid doing amateur theatre and I just really loved doing it. And I suppose to the extent that I now have the career I have, I was learning everything I needed to know.

Tim Minchin: The overarching relationship of my adult life is Sarah.

Sarah Minchin, wife: Well I think the first time we both remember each other is when you came to my house that time.
Tim Minchin: For a party.
Sarah Minchin, wife: My parents who were away. Had some people around.

Tim Minchin: And then we turned up to first year, first day of our arts degrees and we realised we had a lot of the same subjects. So we just started sitting together. And yeah, we got together in the middle of 1993.

Sarah Minchin, wife: He was quite silly and funny. I mean, he’s just funny. He was always in it for the gag. He was always noodling away on the piano. He wrote very passionate, sort of romantic stuff early on. And it was. It was lovely.

Tim Minchin: Half the songs were about you.

SARAH: I know, it was great. And then they weren't. And then they were angry songs about me when I dumped you on your arse.

Tim Minchin:  Yeah, that’s right

Sarah Minchin, wife: We'd been together from when we were 17 and and he was a lot and I was kind of trying to figure out how I would fit and if I would fit. And I thought I just need some time to figure that out.

Tim Minchin: She broke up with me for the same reason that she still has trouble. I swallowed her. Because she's a quiet person and a thoughtful person and I had all these actor friends and everything was huge.

Rhian Skirving, friend & filmmaker: I was working with Tim during ‘the great separation.’ And yes, he was he was lost without Sarah during that time. He was heartbroken.

Tim Minchin: It was awful. It was proper first heartbreak. A lot of lying on my bed looking at the ceiling. And so, I recovered by falling in love with someone else. Sarah by then had realised she didn't like me being in love with someone else, so she was very proximate when things started collapsing.

Tim Minchin: That two years break, and the experience of me having another partner [clears throat] and you having your whatever you were doing. That sounded like I was being awkward. I just got something in my throat.
Sarah Minchin, wife: Me having my partner.
Tim Minchin: And you having, you fucking whoever you wanted. But I actually think the the break-up can be the seed of a bunch of bitterness and crap in the future if you get back together. I think in hindsight we did quite well.

Tim Minchin: When you're an arty type growing up in Perth you know that the main thing in your head is when do I leave.

(Stateline, ABC, 2001)

REPORTER: Tim Minchin has been writing music since he was a teenager. Approaching 26 he’s just made his first CD and in two weeks hopes to be knocking on the doors of record companies in the eastern states.

Tim Minchin: Ultimately, I’d like to write for my living and I guess this album is a showcase of all different writing styles that I’m capable of.

Rhian Skirving, friend & filmmaker: Moving to Melbourne was really tough for Tim. He'd come from a place where he had somewhat of a profile to a much bigger pool in Melbourne where nobody knew him and he knew no one. It was really difficult to break through.

Tim Minchin: And I auditioned for things and tried to get an agent and got rejected by pretty much every agent in Australia. So I was playing piano for cabaret artists. I'd done this big tour with Todd McKenney, the Boy from Oz, where I played and sang with him.

(Performance in Brisbane, Queen Street Mall)

Todd McKenney: Please welcome my music director Mr Tim Minchin. He only learned to play piano today so we’re hoping he goes OK.

Tim Minchin: I played piano for Eddie Perfect, and I really remember thinking I'm just not as good as him. So I better get writing.

Eddie Perfect, friend & performer: When Tim started doing his solo stuff, like all of us, it was hard to get traction, you know. He did a show called, I want to say like Navel or … does that make sense?

Tim Minchin: It was called Navel Cerebral Melodies with Umbilical Cords

Eddie Perfect, friend & performer: Yes, that was it … That’s a good title. Why the fuck didn’t anyone go to that.

Tim Minchin: We were trying to figure out whether we could afford to have a baby. And we we're sort of … we could always pay the rent because you were ... had a day job, but it was a bit rice and gravy sometimes.

Rhian Skirving, friend & filmmaker: Sarah was a huge support during the Melbourne years. I mean, she was working full time as a social worker.

(Rock ‘n’ Roll Nerd, directed by Rhian Skirving)

Sarah Minchin, wife: I’m paying for everything. We’ve got a stack of bills over there which I have to work my way through at the moment and I can’t conceive of how we’re going to pay all this stuff when I'm not working.

Rhian Skirving, friend & filmmaker: It was just so frustrating just seeing what was the most exciting act in town, as far as we were concerned, and nobody was taking any notice.

‘Darkside’

Tim: You could be as clever as Voltaire but it won’t get you nowhere if you want to sell discs.

Rhian Skirving, friend & filmmaker: Tim said, I'm going to give it one more year. I'm going to give it one last shot and then I'm going to get a job, at teaching piano or something. And that's when I started to film him, because I just thought, Well, whatever happens in that year, it's got to be interesting.

Tim Minchin: Toby Schmitz, this dear friend of mine, and Travis Cotton, another dear friend of mine, wanted me to write songs for a musical that they were doing at the old Fitz in Sydney

Toby Schmitz, friend & actor: He was like yeah, what's the what's the fiscal upside? I went I don’t know it’s like about 100 bucks and we'll get you a mattress to sleep on. What else are you doing?

(Rehearsals for This Blasted Earth, 2004)

Tim Minchin: La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la

Tim Minchin: It sort of changed my life. And in that period, my curly hair was getting big and curly and I decided to straighten it. And I decided to lose a bunch of weight.

Rehearsals for This Blasted Earth, 2004

Tim Minchin: I’m so bored of fucking actors and their self-indulgent bleating, I have to change keys every second verse just to keep myself from sleeping.

Tim Minchin: So for a show in early 2005 was the first time I did the eye make-up and played on a grand piano. And I went, from now on, I'm this guy and it's grand pianos. And then a month later it was a Melbourne comedy festival and that's when things started to change.

Rhian Skirving, friend & filmmaker: He knew that he needed to look ‘interesting’, in his words. It was theatrics. And, you know, that was all very, very deliberate.

(‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Nerd’, 2005 Melbourne Comedy Festival)

Tim Minchin: He will always be, a rock n roll nerd.

Rhian Skirving, friend & filmmaker: So for the Melbourne Comedy Festival 2005, Tim created the Dark Side show.

(‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Nerd’, 2005 Melbourne Comedy Festival)

Tim Minchin: But you see the problem is he always dreamt of being a star but he learnt piano instead of guitar.

Rhian Skirving, friend & filmmaker: And the idea behind that show was to put everything that Tim could possibly do into this one act.

(‘Peace Anthem for Palestine’, 2005 Melbourne Comedy Festival)

Tim Minchin: So if we don’t eat pig and you don’t eat pigs, why not not eat pigs together.

Rhian Skirving, friend & filmmaker: And Tim created the character in that show. So this crazy haired, wild, chaotic rock star looking guy with the self-deprecating, downbeat persona was just incredibly endearing to audiences. And they fell for him.

Tim Minchin: Straighten my hair. Start calling it comedy. That's the key, if anyone's wondering

Rhian Skirving, friend & filmmaker: He was the talk of the festival. And from that he was invited to go to take the same show to Edinburgh, the biggest comedy festival in the world.

‘Hello’, 2005 Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Tim Minchin: Hello, welcome to my show

Rhian Skirving, friend & filmmaker: Tim went in there as an absolute nobody. I mean however was he going to get noticed?

‘Hello’, 2005 Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Tim Minchin: We’re going to have some fun.

Rhian Skirving, friend & filmmaker:  And it came down to him breaking through very early with a really great review.

(Rock ‘n’ Roll Nerd, directed by Rhian Skirving)

Katie Minchin (reading review): He plays like angel, he sings like a rock star he always wanted to be and has a devlish sense of humour. Fantastic.

Tim: S’alright.

Eddie Perfect, friend & performer: What happened for Tim at that festival was sort of unprecedented for someone to make that big an impression so quickly and, you know, kind of like conquer that festival in the way he did.

Rhian Skirving, friend & filmmaker: So to top off the Edinburgh Festival, having won the Best Newcomer award, which was a massive deal, he was then invited to perform at a massive charity gig at the Royal Albert Hall in London to, I don't know, 5,000 people.

Tim Minchin: Mariah Carey was waiting to come on after me. And I walked out and I looked up and I remember my brain going, ‘Fuck yeah.’ And it could have gone. ‘Oh, fuck.’ And I just. I'm sort of proud of old me because I don't know why. I just went, yep, I can do this. This is going to be awesome. They're going to love this.

‘Inflatable You’, Tickled Pink charity event, 2005

Tim Minchin: Your love for me is not debateable, your sexual appetite’s insatiable, you never ever make me waitable, delectable, inflatable you.

Nel Minchin, sister: He went from nobody to suddenly people recognising him on the street. It was an incredible thing to witness and they moved to London straight after that

Sarah Minchin, wife: Setting up a family, you know, and a life in London was great. It’s pretty easy to be married to someone who's just living their dream.

Tim Minchin: My first tour was 500 seaters and then there were bigger rooms. And it wasn't long before we were talking about orchestras and arenas.

‘I'm in a Cage’

Tim Minchin: Nothing ruins comedy like big arenas. That is a well-established fact. But your enjoyment is not as important as my self-esteem is. My ego is the only thing you can see clearly from the back. Cause I’m quite famous now.

Tim Minchin: It happens very, very rarely to go from absolute zero to, you know, getting the best agent and the DVD deals and all the stuff that happened to me.

Rhian Skirving, friend & filmmaker: Well obviously with the trappings of fame, he gets attention from everywhere now, I mean, including women he used to have on on his bedroom wall as a kid. I kid you not and, you know, of course, it's tempting.

Tim Minchin: When I got known, people who would have otherwise been disinterested in me were interested in me. And it's very intoxicating. And you're away from home for a long time and you're jetlagged and you're drinking. I dunno I think the times I got close to doing the wrong thing made me realise that it wouldn't be worth it to blow my marriage up.

‘I’ll take Lonely Tonight’

Tim Minchin: I’ll take lonely tonight.

Sarah Minchin, wife: I'll Take Lonely.
Tim Minchin: Yeah. You came round to lonely.
Sarah Minchin, wife: Oh, well I yeah …
Tim Minchin: No, you know …
Sarah Minchin, wife:  I joke about that song, but it is ... I feel like it is the perfect Tim song.

‘I’ll take Lonely Tonight’

Tim Minchin: So though I am hungry and tempted I’m sorry I’m not going to buy.

Sarah Minchin, wife: That is a song about my darling husband, like, not cheating on me. Congratulations. Well done, Tim.

‘I’ll take Lonely Tonight’

Tim Minchin: Well I know regret in the making

Sarah Minchin, wife: I make a joke of that that he shouldn't be praised for everything, including … including not cheating on me.
Tim Minchin: That's right. I’ve had a couple of reactions when that song came out from women just like, what do you want? A frickin medal? Like really angry women. And I'm like, No, I don't want anything. I'm just writing a song. It's just an experience that I haven't heard reflected in a song.

Sarah Minchin, wife: It’s a story.

Tim Minchin:  And that's my job, is to write about experiences that are common in a way that people might not have thought about.

Tim Minchin: This is my first piano I ever bought. I didn't get a piano till I was 30-ish and we'd moved to England. After I quit piano when I did grade three piano or whatever it was, on my very last lesson, my piano teacher said, Oh, well, you should probably know before I go that when you harmonise the C major scale, it sounds like that. C major, D minor, E minor, F major, G, A minor, B minor flat 5, C. And she went that's kind of how chords work, bye. And I went, OK. And I've got it over time. And for a hell of a lot of my audiences that seems like magic. It seems sort of impossibly complicated. For all my musician friends, they'll all just be going, ‘You're a hack, Minchin’, which I'm very comfortable with.

Eddie Perfect, friend & performer: He refined it to the point where It is one of the most extraordinary things to have someone be able to give the vocal performance that he does, the beat poetry performance he does, at the same time completely independently siloing his brain into being able to play like extraordinarily complex jazz accompaniment.

Tim Minchin: I was happening. I was just going to be a star, you know, I was on all the telly and I was being invited to things and I was winning awards and and I was just on the up. And then Matilda came along and I nearly said no.

Rhian Skirving, friend & filmmaker: That offer for the Matilda job came in, in and around hundreds of other offers. And I do remember saying this is the one. Do some work on that one.

Sarah Minchin, wife: It's kind of like, oh, imagine if I if that it becomes a musical. That would be amazing. And, and so I was going, wow, I hope he, hope he ...

Tim Minchin: Hope he doesn't blow it.

Sarah Minchin, wife:  Hope he doesn't blow it. Yeah

Tim Minchin: Suddenly here I was trying to figure out what a six-year-old girl would say just before magic happened out of her eyes and arguing with this extraordinary playwright and hearing advice from this brilliant director and having an orchestrator going, We could do this. And I was just like, Oh that’s collaboration, that’s art. We're making something that's bigger than me and bigger than an opinion that might change soon and bigger than a tit joke.

Eddie Perfect, friend & performer: He got in and he just wrote the shit out of that show and it got picked up and brought to Broadway and it certainly put him on the map as an extraordinary composer of musicals.

Nel Minchin, sister: Matilda, I think, was a dream come true. But where do you go from there? You then have to go even better, you know, to feel that same level of success.

Tim Minchin: I had done a deal with DreamWorks in the US and this guy called Harry Cripps had written this script of an outback animal rollicking adventure and I agreed to come on board and write some songs. And then at some point they started suggesting that I should move to LA and help direct this movie. And so I decided I'm going to be an animated film director now.

Eddie Perfect, friend & performer: Larrikins was up to the point where it was completely storyboarded, the whole score was written, some parts of it been expanded and animated. They’d had several readings, had cast this incredible cast.

Tim Minchin: We had Hugh Jackman and Jacki Weaver and Ben Mendelsohn and Naomi Watts.  It was huge and we spent four years on it and then the film studio got bought and they just trashed the whole thing. And years, just millions, $50 million, $40 million worth of work. And they just went we wouldn't have commissioned this so, tax write off. And that was that.

‘Groundhog Day: The Musical’

Chorus: ‘There’s nothing more depressing than small-town USA and small don’t come much smaller than Punxsutawney on Groundhog Day.’

Tim Minchin: At the same time, Groundhog Day: The Musical, which had won Best Musical Award in the West End and went to Broadway trailing critical success, had closed very quickly on Broadway for lots of reasons and, you know, I was acting in a Robin Hood movie which subsequently flopped. And so it was this period where having had all my dreams come true I had this big, big reality check.

Rhian Skirving, friend & filmmaker: I think the end of the movie in LA left Tim and Sarah feeling less affectionate about LA. But the move back to Australia was always on the cards.

Eddie Perfect, friend & performer: it's an absolute privilege to be in the great sandpit of creativity. But there is there is treachery there and there is loss there and there there's failure. It really hurts. And no one wants to hear about it.

Sarah Minchin, wife: That was a tough time, only because he wasn't kicking goals every minute at that point so the mood was heavier. You needed to vent a lot of stuff. And you know.
TIM: I don't like being fucked with
Sarah: You don't like being fucked with. Yeah. We learnt that, we figured that out.

Tim Minchin: The kind of real pity of it is it just broke something in my my, you know, Pollyanna-ish attitude. And I think it's permanent. You know I just feel like I'm a little bit more cynical about stuff, which is a pity.

Sarah Minchin, wife: It's just what happens. And probably good to have a bit of a knockback, a bit of a big knockback, you know, to help see you through.

Tim Minchin: Yep.

Sarah Minchin, wife: A bit like me dumping you.
Tim Minchin: Yeah, yeah. Just like.
Sarah Minchin, wife: You know, a bit of heartbreak so that you can learn some of that end of the spectrum of things to learn.

Tim Minchin: You change after those sorts of experiences. And I have done things differently since. So I took back control of my work and I was very, very blessed to be able to come back to Australia with the reputation I now have and be given an opportunity to write Upright and to be allowed to be the sort of key creative in that process. Upright is a thing about what we do with our scars and our bumps and our bruises. The piano is a metaphor for something that's out of tune and hacked up, but it's it's individual and it's beautiful in its own way.

(Upright, Foxtel)

Lucky: What do you want me to play?

Meg: Something appropriate.

Tim Minchin: All these ideas, all my angst, went into that show. So that was amazing.

Upright

Lucky [sings]: My humps, my humps, my humps, my humps. My little camel … Too soon.

Meg: A little bit.

Rhian Skirving, friend & filmmaker: Tim always wanted to be an actor. That was his dream. The comedy, the music, all the rest was a distraction and a kind of an accident. So for him to be in this position now where he can create work, that he can be in and be a part of is is probably exactly where he wants to be.

Tim Minchin: It's just completely bonkers at the moment, I'm trying to deliver the pitch document, for my new TV show whilst preparing for my Opera House steps gig on the 12th of November and on the 21st November, Upright comes out and on the 23rd of November my ‘Back’ show goes to cinemas in the UK and on the 25th of November, Matilda comes out in cinemas in the UK and then I fly to New York to promote Matilda the movie in America and there's a bunch of other shit as well going on.

Eddie Perfect, friend & performer: I think Tim always had something to prove. That, you know, that he wasn't just a comedian, that he wasn't just a musician. He's kind of a polymath artist. It's a lot of different things rolled into one.  And that's really kind of important to him.

Tim Minchin: I basically just didn't want to be known as one thing because I don't want to just do one thing.

(Rehearsal for media event)

Stage manager: And here to perform The Aeroplane from season 2 please welcome the supremely talented star of the show, the supremely talented Tim Minchin.

Rhian Skirving, friend & filmmaker: Tim still performs these big live shows, but that character that he created, the self-deprecating wannabe rock star, no longer exists.

(Rehearsal for media event)

Tim Minchin: What should I wear? A suit?

Stage manager: What should you wear. What are you comfortable in?

Tim Minchin: Trackies?

Rhian Skirving, friend & filmmaker: So he can't play that character authentically because he's too high status for that now. So I think Tim's much more himself on stage now.

Toby Schmitz, friend & actor: I think he has a ball in life. I think he has a ball being a parent and a partner and an artist. The fact he's not a wanker is because he can talk about the trappings of being a wanker. I mean, his real great sins are cheese, wine and occasional flirting, as far as I can tell.

Tim Minchin: I'm proud of my marriage and my family and I'm proud of how boring I am, basically. I want to have a lovely, normal, hard-working, honest sort of version of what is actually just a Bacchanalian, fantastic romp of a career, you know. Boring Keith Richards, that's me.