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Meyne Wyatt to bring his searing City of Gold show to Perth Festival

If you feel the desire to troll Meyne Wyatt go ahead. Just, please, try to make it funny. The WA born and raised Wyatt, who radiates the kind of self-confidence you’d love to bottle to dab behind your ears at shaky moments, knows what it can be like to accumulate micro-aggressions over the course of a day, a week and a lifetime. He is a Wongutha-Yamatji man with a public profile, working in an industry that is still predominantly white. But when it comes to strangers throwing rocks Wyatt is largely indifferent, even occasionally amused when someone has really “done their research” to insult him. “I read the comments because I think they’re funny,” he says. “As long as it’s funny, that’s cool. “I have a thick skin, I’m that type of person that I don’t let it affect me. “Who are you? I don’t know you. If you’re not in my inner circle you don’t know me. If you think I’m a piece of sh.. all the way back there in the nosebleed section then you don’t mean anything to me.” On paper Wyatt’s self-belief might read like brashness but that impression would be misleading. In person — or, rather, over the phone from Sydney where he now lives — Wyatt is funny and self-aware, charming without being obsequious and self-deprecating without going in for false modesty. Why should he dabble with modesty? It’s been a big few years. If you recognise Wyatt’s face it might be from his stint on Neighbours, where he was the first Indigenous cast regular, his turn in the musical comedy film The Sapphires or from his latest role on ABC’s new comedy series about the end of the world, Preppers. Many, though, will recognise the 32-year-old from his appearance on ABC’s Q&A last year, when he delivered a searing monologue about being black in Australia. “You can be OK. I have to be exceptional,” he said. “I mess up, I’m done. There’s no path back for me. There’s no road to redemption. “Being black and successful comes at a cost. You take a hit whether you like it or not. Because you want your blacks quiet and humble. “You can’t stand up, you have to sit down. Ask the brother-boy Adam Goodes. A kid says some racist sh.. — not ignorant – racist. Calling a blackfella an ape? “C’mon man, we was flora and fauna before 1967, nah actually we didn’t exist at all. This was a learning moment. He taught that kid a lesson. “Didn’t like that? A black man standing up for himself? Nah, they didn’t like that.” Against the backdrop of the global black lives matter movement and Australian Indigenous deaths in custody, Wyatt’s nearly four-minute monologue was a scorcher. The huge public response to that clip — overwhelmingly positive, says Wyatt — helped land him on Time Magazine’s prestigious 2021 TIME100 Next List. He was the only Australian to do so, putting him alongside people like Hollywood actress Florence Pugh and Bridgerton break-out star Rege-Jean Page. Wyatt was also a finalist in last year’s Archibald Prize, picking up the Packing Room Prize — a popular vote by gallery staff — for a self portrait that started as a pandemic project. He was the first Indigenous artist to win any of the prizes associated with the portrait prize. Now, Wyatt is preparing to bring the play from which that Q&A monologue was adapted, City of Gold, to WA in March as part of the Perth Festival. Wyatt says the play came out of a period of his life about six years ago, following the death of his father, where he felt disillusioned by the state of the industry and his place in it. “It started while I was grieving and mourning. I started going through depression,” he says. “I got into a bit of a funk. I wasn’t particularly interested in the work I was being offered … I was a bit disillusioned by the industry.” He did a course in playwriting, found he had “a lot of material” scraped at least partly from his life and the result was City of Gold. City of Gold tells the story of a young Indigenous actor who finds himself dispirited by the work, including a stint in a controversial Australia Day ad, and returns home to Kalgoorlie to reconnect with his family. If it’s not so much the literal story of Wyatt’s life it has certainly allowed him to play out a lot of his inner monologues on stage. That includes the parts of him that are, he says, “contradictory”. “I wanted to be a hypocrite,” he says. “A lot of it is a reflection of who I am.” The play has already been performed in Sydney and Brisbane, where it was praised by critics. The Guardian declared a “bold and exciting new voice in Australian playwriting has been discovered and unleashed”, while Time Out called it “confronting but deeply moving”. Bringing it to WA, where Wyatt grew up and where his family still lives, is “exciting”, Wyatt says. Eastern States audiences might be able to enjoy the play and appreciate its message but they’re from the other side of the country. He’s not expecting a lot of fence-sitting from the audience. “The (WA) audience will be able to call out what’s authentic and what’s not,” he says. “Audiences are either going to love it or hate it.” Wyatt hasn’t called WA home for about 13 years but he grew up here, first as a toddler in Perth before his parents moved him and his three older siblings to Kalgoorlie where his mother Susan Wyatt, a children’s book illustrator and artist, was from. “All of my extended family are there, mum wanted us to experience ... I think being close to the bush and stuff like that,” he says. At 13 he moved back to Perth to attend Hale boarding school where, among other things, he developed an interest in drama. After school he went to the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts with an idea of getting into sports journalism. He fell into acting instead. Ultimately Wyatt was accepted into Australia’s National Institute of Dramatic Art, the same prestigious acting school that helped launch the careers of Cate Blanchett, Sam Worthington and Baz Luhrmann, and moved east. At the time, he said, moving to Sydney felt like the next logical step. The rest isn’t so much history as years of hard graft that have seen Wyatt accumulate an impressive looking body of work that included stints on Wentworth, The Leftovers and Mystery Road. It has not landed him in Hollywood where some of his contemporaries with, he says wryly, comparable talent and experience, have wound up. “But they’re white and I’m not,” he says. “If I was white I wouldn’t be sitting here, I’d be in Hollywood. “The majority of the industry is white people.” That includes behind the scenes, where Wyatt has found himself lately and where he would like to see more diversity. He says there is still a frustrating degree of nervousness in the industry about what kind of stories mainstream audiences want to see, despite growing evidence on streaming platforms that audiences are open to something different if they are given the opportunity. “I’ve been in a lot of writers’ rooms over the past two years,” he says. “We need more people in these roles, behind the stage in every role: producing, writing, directing. In every role there needs to be Indigenous people, there needs to be queer people. “I feel like the industry is slowly moving forward with diversity. But doing the bare minimum is easy. “There’s still this fear around ‘is this going to sell?’ An audience doesn’t know what it wants until they see it.” If Wyatt is bitter about the career trajectory he might have had he hides it well. “I feel like I’ve always been that type of person,” is how he explains it. “I’m very easygoing. “I walk into a space or room I deserve to be there. I walk in there and I feel I’m equal, I don’t care who you are. I’ve worked with some big names ... we’re working together and I’m not going to kiss your arse. “I don’t let it affect me. I don’t let it affect me because I don’t like being a sad person. I like having fun. I don’t want that to dictate my life, being angry ... it’s boring and it’s toxic. “Bitterness doesn’t help you.” Fresh out of acting school, back in the day, Wyatt felt the pull to do “the LA thing” and try his luck in Hollywood. These days he’s not so sure if that will be in his future. “It depends on the role and the job,” he says. “I think my priorities have changed ... I want to be close to my family and mum and I’ve been to LA and I’m not entirely sure if I want to live there.” It is inevitable that whenever Wyatt’s name gets mentioned in a newspaper, on radio or in a magazine the phrase “Indigenous actor” is sure to be close behind. For him it’s a source of both pride and frustration: the push and pull between wanting to represent the community he’s come from but also be recognised for his work the way a white actor can be lauded and profiled without being asked about their whiteness in every media interview. He put it like this in that City of Gold monologue: “I’m always gonna be your black friend, aren’t I? That’s all anybody ever sees. “I’m never just an actor. I’m an Indigenous actor. I love reppin’, but I don’t hear old Joe Bloggs being called quite white Anglo-Saxon actor. “I’m always in the black show, the black play. I’m always the angry one, the tracker, the drinker, the thief.” A year and a bit on Wyatt describes it to STM as “a double edged sword”. “I feel like visibility is important and being called an Indigenous actor is for Indigenous kids to see that you can be an actor,” he says. “Me personally as an actor, I can do anything ... I just want to be seen for my talent sometimes.” City of Gold is at Heath Ledger Theatre from March 4-26 as part of the Perth Festival.

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Meyne Wyatt to bring his searing City of Gold show to Perth Festival

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The West Australian exclusiveMeyne Wyatt to bring his searing City of Gold show to Perth Festival

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Meyne Wyatt to bring his searing City of Gold show to Perth Festival