What Keiynan Lonsdale has learned about himself along the way
The 34-year-old actor has had his fair share of lessons
By 
WHEN I MEET Keiynan Lonsdale at a hip sake bar in Sydney’s The Rocks, he arrives dressed in a silky leopard-print shirt (its top three buttons undone), pinstripe bronze velvet trousers and chunky leopard-print penny loafers. He looks immaculate, unflappable. Despite the summer heat, there’s not a drop of sweat on him when he reveals that he’s just come from filming a promo for his new show, Run, a Binge original series based on notorious bank robber Brenden ‘The Postcard Bandit’ Abbott, in a jail-themed escape room with co-stars George Mason, David Howell and Ashleigh Cummings. “I’m not good at them [escape rooms] and I don’t contribute to the team,” Lonsdale says. “I’m holding them back. I’m all stressed out and then I feel bad about myself. But we were all kind of as bad as each other.”
Being enclosed in those four walls took Lonsdale back to his preschool days, when he was a shy boy unable to talk and work with other kids. “Maybe it was because I [come from] such a big family and it was so loud that I would need to go into my own zone,” suggests Lonsdale, who grew up with 11 half- and full siblings in the western Sydney suburb of St Marys. He realises now that retreating into a quiet inner space is how he has approached most things in his career as an actor, dancer and singer. Stepping back to gain some clarity is “how I like to apply myself, and then I’ll see the next piece of the puzzle. My friend posted the best meme the other day that said, ‘Does the process know that we’re trusting it?’”
With an enviable triple-threat career that has taken Lonsdale from Australia to the US and seen him star in blockbusters and streaming hits, much of our conversation about his body of work encompasses healing, and when he voices some of his deepest thoughts about what he’s learnt about himself along the way, he invariably leavens the mood with his infectious laugh.
When he was 21, following his twofer role as the talented and confident Ollie in the teen ballet drama series Dance Academy, Lonsdale joined the great Australian exodus that routinely “swarms” LA for the “race” that is pilot season. After two years’ crisscrossing the Pacific, he landed his first run of credits in the Divergent trilogy and The Flash series. “I wanted more opportunities for more characters, especially at the time when there weren’t that many roles describing people of colour,” says Lonsdale. “I was just trying to find my story.”
The stories Lonsdale would play on screen started to intertwine with his own when he was cast in 2018’s Love, Simon as Bram, the closeted high school soccer player and anonymous pen pal to Nick Robinson’s titular character. This was different to playing Ollie, an openly gay man, whose self-assurance allowed Lonsdale to “mask it [his real-life sexuality: he identifies as queer] with a certain level of confidence”. While shooting Love, Simon, Lonsdale was in a private three-year relationship with his first boyfriend; the two broke up the night before the shooting of the pivotal Ferris-wheel scene – “the most romantic scene ever,” he says.
In the period following the 2015 nationwide legalisation of same-sex marriage in the US, Love, Simon was first in a wave of wholesome queer stories produced by Hollywood. But at an age when he was still figuring out his own sense of self and his career still relatively nascent, how did Lonsdale feel about often being in projects that dealt with issues around sexuality? “Each project felt like it opened me up, and that felt like a real gift,” he says. “I just felt like the luckiest kid in the world to see these stories reflected back. Craft or art was the thing that helped me feel more courageous and self-accepting. It got to a point where I was so over feeling self-restrictive . . . Often the roles that [appeal to] me lift me into a new space of growth.”
So, what kind of space was he hoping Run would lift him into? When Lonsdale read the script for Detective Gary Porter, he grasped a man who had to lead despite being in a system that didn’t favour him. Porter, Lonsdale says, “has to be articulate, he has to be sharp; he needs to come with the correct information and be well-studied” – qualities he found inspiring in terms of improving his own leadership skills.
Part of Lonsdale’s process of developing his characters is nailing down their truth. So, to prepare for Run, he worked closely with director Ben Young to craft the character between the script and the real-life detective Porter is based on, Glenn Potter, who led the police pursuit of Brenden Abbott in the mid-’90s. One of the exercises involved quizzing Lonsdale on 37 areas that, cumulatively, would make him Gary Porter. “The first question was: ‘What’s his full name?’” Initially confused, Lonsdale thought for a moment. “He’s an African Australian detective in the late-’80s, early-’90s,” he thought. So, Lonsdale pulled from his own truth and gave Porter a Nigerian name: Osaivbie, which means ‘God never sleeps’.
There is no mention of the name Osaivbie in the show; rather, it was something for Lonsdale to carry with him, privately, during filming – an interior technique. “I believe a lot of what drives you comes down to childhood. So, someone probably told him, ‘Osaivbie means this, so do the work’. So, he never feels like he’s doing enough work. He has to be obsessed – and we place our value in how much we succeed. He’s trying to come up from the pressure of being one of the first to represent a minority group. It’s a lot. So, I thought it would be a nice spiritual fit for him. In some ways, he’ll feel burdened and privileged by it.”
Ultimately, Lonsdale’s only hope is for his work to do for others what art has done for him. “I like to provide artistic work that has helped me get out of storms and into a lighter space,” he shares. “Because I’ve watched shit that has renewed me for a day, a week, a month or a year, something that’s helped me feel less alone. And in this world, where we each have so much power in how we treat ourselves and each other, our perceptions of reality and of ourselves are what continue to create and recreate this world. So, I like to be honest . . . with some flair.”
This story appeared in Esquire Australia’s February issue, on sale now
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