Comedian, actor, composer and musician - is there anything Tim Minchin can't do?
Yes
Such as?
Well I don’t know how good I am at any one of those things. I think the reason it’s going ok for me is because I do them all. I mean I’m a good musician for a comedian and I’m a good comedian for a musician but if I had to do any of them in isolation I dunno. Acting’s the next thing I’m gonna have to test because I’m more failed as an actor than in any other genre; I’ve consistently not got acting work. But I am going to make this film so if I’m bad at it-
*Tim answers his ringing telephone*
So yeah, we’ll see. I like doing lots of different things and my whole career has been defined by people saying, “you should just stick to this,” or, “stick to that” and I haven’t and so now that I’m doing this type of thing, everyone’s like, “why don’t you stick to that?” I’m just not gonna do that because I think life is long and if all I’m gonna do is trawl through the festivals putting on a new comedy show each year I’m going to suddenly have spent five years not acting or not putting out a serious album and everyone’s totally gonna pigeonhole me. I wanna do different things early enough in my career to make sure I can keep trying to be everything.
I’m bad at… I’ve played hockey all my life and I never got into any state teams or anything. But no, I’m good at everything. Cooking? Not really cooking.
And I’m a bad person.
Did you aspire to be any of those things?
Before I became a combination of them? I spend a lot of time taking the piss out the fact I wanted to be a rock n roll star but I didn’t really. I was more composing theatre stuff.
Well, I sort of did, but I never did what it took to do that. Whereas with composing and music and this comedy thing, I’ve done everything I can to push it, whereas with the music thing I was very reticent to go very far because the scene didn’t really interest me.
It’s weird cos one of the things that happens in the arts is that you get horribly jealous of all your friends who are doing better than you and now I look back at all the things I was jealous of, or envious of, and I’m so glad I didn’t get them, like friends who got roles in soaps or whatever as actors and I was like, “oh fuck, all I want is an acting job,” but actually, acting’s just saying someone else’s words. What I’m doing now is so much more creative and fun, and now if I can go back and do some acting I can have it as a small part of what I do then that would be ideal, so now I feel really lucky. And to have spent ten years being quite poor but doing loads and loads of different stuff and then to suddenly have a career that draws from all that stuff I do, it’s great.