FOR OUR FEBRUARY ISSUE, the team at Esquire asked 10 young creatives, groundbreakers and visionaries why they do what they do.
Our questions were similar, their answers were anything but, revealing different drivers, goals and how the nature of creativity itself is variable
David Howell
Method man
DAVID HOWELL is 25-year-old from the Gold Coast who’s possessed of a level of commitment that can alarm those who aren’t prepared for it. Last year, he walked into a casting office in the Sydney’s Redfern to audition for Run – a just-released Binge series based on the life of notorious criminal Brenden Abbott – and decided that politeness would be the wrong approach. “I couldn’t just go in and be nice to these people,” he says. “I had to intimidate them.”
Howell arrived an hour early, studied the building layout, went up the fire escape and concealed his face beneath a hoodie, medical mask and sunglasses. Then he burst through the door screaming, “This is a fucking hold-up.” The casting crew was enthralled, but after the audition wrapped, he got the sense something was amiss. “We heard a massive kerfuffle downstairs. We looked out the window and saw that the building had been evacuated and there was a SWAT team outside,” he says. “Someone called the cops on me.”
Remarkably, Howell wasn’t cast as Brenden Abbott, but he did play the bank robber’s brother in a supporting role.
That kind of all-or-nothing approach has defined Howell’s path since he moved from the Gold Coast to Sydney to study at NIDA. “Some guys book big gigs right away,” he says. “But I’ve had more of a steady growth. I’m levelling up rather than going boom.” The momentum is building now, with a major role on the horizon in a project about which he can’t say too much.
Acting, for Howell, has always been a way of communicating things he couldn’t otherwise articulate. “A lot of it stemmed from stuff that I couldn’t say or couldn’t verbalise,” he explains. “But I was able to do it through monologues.” As a kid, he’d roam shopping centres dressed as other people, “playing the fool”.
A recent breakthrough came with A Narrow Road to the Deep North, in a role that required a drastic physical transformation. To prepare, Howell put on 20 kilograms, then lost 25 in just 11 weeks. “Matthew McConaughey lost 20 kilos for Dallas Buyers Club,” he says. “And I lost more. So, I’m coming for you, Matthew McConaughey!”
That bravado masks a powerful work ethic and great ambition, signs that the future is bright. “If you want to be like these guys,” Howell says, “you’ve got to be as committed as these guys and put yourself on the same level as them.”
Words Cayle Reid
Lewis Major
The craftsman
LEWIS MAJOR didn’t decide to become a choreographer after some kind of grand epiphany, but rather through curiosity. Raised on a small farm in South Australia, Major was “really sporty” as a kid. It’s the sort of background that doesn’t immediately suggest a life in contemporary dance, but that shift began when he went to boarding school. One day, he was asked, almost offhandedly, to step onto a stage and move a dancer from one place to another. “I thought it was pretty cool at 18,” he says. “I would say I became interested and then obsessed.”
From there, Major’s path quickly took shape. He attended ballet school in New Zealand, and by his second year had secured a job in Vienna. After returning to finish his degree, he went back again, spending close to half a decade immersed in the continent’s dance and performance scene. The experience cemented something he’d already begun to suspect: he preferred creating over performing. “I always wanted to make things and be a creator,” he says. “I didn’t really love being a dancer. I’m much more interested in making things.”
That instinct toward authorship underpins Major’s career as a choreographer. It’s also what makes the question of achievement complicated. Asked what he’s most proud of professionally, his first answer is rather disarming. “My kids are my proudest achievement,” he says, before pausing. “But that’s going to sound really self-pitying.”
Major can’t point to a single trophy or award as his biggest achievement. Instead, his pride stems from endurance. “It’s very tough out there as an independent choreographer,” he says. “Somehow managing to get amazing people into a room and being able to make things on the regular . . . I’m pretty happy with that.” In an industry where precarity is the norm, simply sustaining a creative practice can be viewed as a stunning accomplishment.
Major is pragmatic about the nature of the work. “It’s both,” he says, when asked whether choreography is a job or an art form. Some days it resists the language of labour entirely; other times it does, indeed, feel unmistakably like work. “But, at the end of the day,” he adds, “it is an art form.” For Major, choreography isn’t about spectacle or status. It’s about the ongoing, often beautiful act of making something where nothing existed before.
Words Cayle Reid
Mekonnen Knife
The standard bearer
MEKONNEN KNIFE is 19 – and acutely aware of the space he already occupies. Born in Ethiopia, Knife came to Australia in 2013 to live with his adoptive parents. His upbringing imbued him with a worldview that would later inform not just his ambition but his sense of responsibility as a young actor from a cultural background that isn’t typically spotlighted on screen.
“I think it was the diversity side of things,” he says, when asked what first drew him to acting. “I saw that there wasn’t much diversity in the industry compared to what there is now, and I wanted to change that. I’m honoured to be sort of a spokesperson for the people of my culture and my skin in the industry.”
That sense of purpose has found a natural outlet online. Knife has built a sizable social media following, with 2.4 million followers on TikTok and 570,000 on Instagram. But for all the reach, his focus remains firmly on his work. At this early stage in his career, the role he speaks about with the most pride is Vargas in Disney’s Zombies 4: Dawn of the Vampires. “That was incredible,” he says. “I had so much fun on that.” More than just a milestone, the role also laid the foundation for what comes next. “I’m really excited for the future, for what I get to do with that character and also for future projects.”
Looking ahead 10 years, Knife is clear about the direction he wants to take. “I’d like to do projects that sit close to home,” he says. “I’d love to do a project that’s really inspirational, has a true storyline to it.” There’s an appetite, too, for depth and difficulty. “I’d love to do a more serious drama series, something that’s really heavy on the acting side, on the maturity side.”
Knife is clear on whether he views acting as a job or an art. “For me, truly, it’s an art form,” he says. “It’s storytelling, it’s creation, it’s building a character piece by piece. I think that’s a very special thing to be able to do.” He acknowledges that, for others, it may be transactional, “a nine-to-five”, but that framing doesn’t resonate with him.
He isn’t afraid to set lofty goals, either. When we ask if he aspires to win awards, he doesn’t demur. “That’s the dream, man,” he says. “I’ve still got a long way to go, but that’s something down the pipeline.” He’s on the right track: a few weeks after his Esquire shoot, Knife was nominated for two AACTA Awards, Breakthrough Artist and Best Digital Creator.
Words Cayle Reid
Oliver Edis
The natural
OLIVER EDIS has the kind of relaxed personality and sun-kissed mop of blond hair you’d expect from someone who split his childhood between Sydney’s Northern Beaches and Hawaii. Saltwater and an easy confidence seem baked into him, byproducts of an upbringing spent surfing Palm Beach breaks and being observed through a camera lens. His mother is a photographer, and while Edis insists he’s only “done a little” photoshoot work before his shoot with Esquire, it’s plain to see his background has made him comfortable in front of an audience.
“I always said to my mum that I wanted to act,” he says. “I would ask her to take me to casting calls.” Acting came properly into focus in high school, but at the time it felt less like a career path and more like play. “I liked the feeling of being in the room with other kids and playing with a sense of freedom. It was just like a really fun game to me.” The joy of trying things on and stepping into other skins is something Edis is still chasing.
He graduated from NIDA in 2024, joining a long line of Australian actors attempting to convert institutional training into real-world work. The first year out, he admits, is disorienting. “You’re just trying to figure out what do with yourself.” His first major gig is Gnomes – a horror-comedy set to release on Stan later this year – which doubled as a personal milestone. “That was like the first time in my life that I was away from home,” he says. “But I had the time of my life.”
Ask Edis where he sees himself in 10 years and the answer pays no mind to fame or prestige. “I’d love to be making stuff, my own stuff, with the people and collaborators I love, but on a bigger scale.” At the core of it, though, Edis wants something simpler. “I just want to keep chasing that feeling of fun that I had when I was a kid.”
And one more thing – he’d like to keep doing Shakespeare. “I’ve been doing Othello and King Lear. I did Iago from Othello, Richard from Richard III and Romeo from Romeo and Juliet. They’re all really fun.” For Edis, Shakespeare is less sacred text and more a shared language in which he’s free to make his own interpretations. “It’s like playing footy. It doesn’t matter if you’re a little kid playing at the park or a pro in the AFL, you’re still playing with the same ball.”
It’s an apt metaphor for an emerging actor entering the professional world. He has the same tools and instincts at his disposal, with bigger arenas ahead.
Words Cayle Reid
Jack Patten
The convert
JACK PATTEN didn’t grow up dreaming of being an actor. For a long time, he didn’t pursue a career in a creative industry at all. Patten was a member of the Sydney Swans Academy and had his sights set on making it to the AFL, but injuries intervened and the plan fell apart. “I wanted that to be my career,” he says. “I ultimately wasn’t good enough, got injured a bit and had to change career paths.”
What followed was a stretch of uncertainty. “I spent a good four-and-a-bit years figuring out what I could do,” he says. Patten describes himself as an “all-or-nothing” person, a trait that served him well in footy but left him adrift once it was gone. “It was a point in my life where I was pretty lost,” he admits.
Patten was working a regular job when he struck up a conversation with a colleague about film and art. “He more or less steered me in the direction of acting,” Patten says. Curious, he signed up for a Kevin Jackson masterclass at the Hub Studio in Chippendale. “From that point, I just fell in love with it. It was like an immediate thing. I thought, This is what I want to do.”
That sense of certainty has since carried him a long way. After being cast in War Machine, an Alan Ritchson-led project set for release on Netflix in March, he came, via recommendation, onto the radar of the producers developing Robin Hood. “They thought I’d suit the world of Robin Hood,” he says. Soon after, he would land the lead role.
Robin Hood took Patten to Serbia for eight months, an experience he describes as both a dream come true and exhausting. “I got paid to act for eight months in a different country,” he says. “It was pretty surreal.” It was also, he adds, “probably the hardest thing I’ve done”.
Looking ahead 10 years, Patten resists the temptation of defining success in concrete terms. “It’s more of a feeling than a physical thing,” he says. What he’s chasing is “a feeling of collaboration and pushing boundaries creatively”. Whatever comes next, Patten has successfully redirected his all-or-nothing approach from footy to storytelling.
Words Cayle Reid
Nicholas Burton
The dreamer
WHY DID Nicholas Burton want to become an actor? When he was 11, he had a dream he won an Oscar – lofty, indeed – and thanked his crush, none other than Britney Spears. “She was like, ‘I’m so proud of you, baby!’” he recounts, laughing. “I woke up, and I was like, ‘Mum, Dad, I need to go to an acting class – now’.”
He dropped out of his Canadian father’s ice hockey team (“I was too uncoordinated”) and dedicated his adolescence to the craft of acting in classes that “felt like home and where my ADHD could run wild”. Soon after, a trip to the US solidified what his career might look like. “It made me realise there is more than just Australia; it made me think of the bigger picture.”
At 28, Burton has a clear idea of the types of characters he wants to play: complex men who live in the moral grey zone. When asked about the film that he’d like to win an Academy Award for, he says it would be for a dramedy, citing Leonardo DiCaprio’s latest, One Battle After Another, and Whiplash with Miles Teller.
Working backwards from that future Oscar, though, Burton has been a workhorse young actor, appearing in short films since those acting classes, and landing roles in Australian TV series such as Safe Home with Aisha Dee and Pieces of Her with Toni Colette.
An exemplar of his MO has been playing Dr Rainsford Sneed on Disney+’s The Artful Dodger, its second season airing in February. “One day my character is drilling into a brain or cutting off a leg, and the next day he’s having these really raw, emotional moments with Dodger [played by Thomas Brodie-Sangster] and Belle [Maia Mitchell] as the stakes increase,” he says. “There’s such a beautiful balance between comedy and drama that is such a joy to bring to life as an actor. James McNamara, the writer, has been so adventurous with it – it’s a riot.”
Taking another step towards grasping the golden man statuette, Burton hopes to make the move stateside (that well-beaten path of Aussie actors seeking greater opportunities), even giving himself a deadline: before he turns 30. “It’s also really important for me to work with different people, whether it be actors or practitioners, just to expand my knowledge of the craft,” says Burton. “And I do love American material. It feels very lived-in.”
Words Tyler Dane Wingco
Davide Di Giovanni
The empath
GROWING UP in Italy in a family full of musicians, Davide Di Giovanni couldn’t stop moving. His mother said there were enough artists and enough musicians around the house, so when he was 15, she pushed him to become a serious dancer. “She was like, ‘You can do something different’,” he recalls, laughing at the memory.
As expressive as dance is, what followed for Di Giovanni was structured, classical training at the renowned ballet school Balletto Di Toscana in Florence, where he attended on a full scholarship. His first job out of school was with Balletto dell’Esperia, in Turin, where he met the likes of American choreographer William Forsythe and Italian dancer and choreographer Jacopo Godani, then headed to Munich, where opportunities for dancers abound. What finally brought him to Australia was an encounter in Switzerland that connected him to the Sydney Dance Company (SDC), which offered him a position.
While working with the world’s finest in the company’s idyllic Wharf Studios under the Harbour Bridge, Di Giovanni took part in the SDC’s Young Choreographers program, which attracting him to a new path of creation. But in his early thirties, Di Giovanni felt he was burning out and left the company. “Being in SDC, which is a great company to be in, it’s quite big and a big workload,” he says. “A lot of touring, a lot of theatre, and always dancing in a black box [a minimalist adaptable performance space].”
That last part is crucial to Di Giovanni’s new venture: his dance collective: New Old Now, or NON, which he founded in 2023 and now co-directs with Chloe Leong. As artistic director, “I always wanted to bring dance performance to places that are unconventional and unique,” says Di Giovanni. So, the collective’s first performance was held in a Sydney car park, its brutalism contrasting with his romantic, dreamy choreography exploring themes of love, life and time. “In the end, it does become a black box, just with a lower ceiling.”
At NON, Di Giovanni and Leong are intent on fostering an inclusive community of dancers – a challenge in an industry that prizes youth and athleticism. One NON dancer, for instance, is 75 years old. “I love seeing bodies move at any age,” says Di Giovanni. “I’m not interested in athleticism, because that means the emotion of the movement isn’t there. We’re artists.”
Words Tyler Dane Wingco
Dylan Goh
The uniter
ONE OF Dylan Goh’s earliest memories of visiting the Sydney Opera House was via Meet the Music, a discounted program for high school students to see world-class performances by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra (SSO). “I remember going to karaoke after school to kill time before heading into the majestic Concert Hall to hear SSO perform,” Goh remembers. “It was great to experience symphonies live at the Opera House.”
Goh is a street dancer, so expect accessibility and diversity to inform his new role as a Sydney Opera House director – at 26, he is the youngest in the institution’s history. Goh joins five other creatives appointed to board positions at various cultural institutions across Sydney as part of a drive to reinvigorate their hallowed halls for younger and future audiences. Part of Goh’s role is helping to oversee an annual budget of $140 million and a workforce of 670 people.
Growing up in suburban Sydney, Goh’s extended family all lived within a four-kilometre radius, meaning cultural exchange – whether through food or conversation at the dinner table in English and Cantonese – was frequent. On how it has influenced his practice today, Goh says: “It taught me about the simple joys of people coming together in one space. It highlighted the importance of language in enabling connection, empathy and understanding. And it inspired a passion within me to invite people to sit face-to-face with one another. To share time, space and stories with one another.”
As well as his street dancing, Goh brings with him a decade’s experience in the cultural sector. He is the founder in Australia of Palette Session, a not-for-profit dance collective in Sydney and Seoul; co-chair to the street dance community Cypher Culture; and he works with Create NSW to allocate grants to dance and physical theatre.
At the Opera House, Goh aims to bring the communities that have supported under its sails. He asks himself: Who is ‘the community’? And which communities are we serving? Who has a seat at the table and who doesn’t? How can we physically insert a chair at this table and give other underrepresented artists and communities agency? “It’s important to celebrate and recognise the diversity of communities and the unique individuals that make up communities – to see them through intersectional lenses.”
Words Tyler Dane Wingco
Theo Clarke
The idealist
IN A Troy Bolton twist, sport was the dream for Theo Clarke . . . until it wasn’t. Born and raised in Lismore, NSW, in Bunjalung Country, Clarke moved to Sydney at 15 to play a higher level of soccer. But an injury and the politics of the sport put him in a bad headspace.
“I really had to think in that year if it was sustainable for me to keep going,” he recalls. While Theo, by now school captain, was a back home to reevaluate and focus on his studies, his mum noticed some pieces of art he’d made and heard the melodic guitar strumming coming from his bedroom. Clearly, a creative life was calling, so she encouraged him to apply for the Aboriginal Performance Certificate Course at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA).
In the halls of WAAPA, Clarke rehearsed pieces written by First Nations playwrights, finding a sense of home in the language on the other side of the country. “I was reading characters who I’ve seen in the streets of Lismore, or I’ve seen in my dad,” says Clarke, a proud descendant of the Ngemba people from Brewarrina in northwest NSW. “From the beginning, I knew there’s real potential in telling [Indigenous] Australian stories, and I’m really motivated to be a part of that . . . that made me think to give acting a crack because these stories came from a place of love and gave a meaning to my life again.”
Chasing that purpose landed him once again in Sydney, this time pursuing a bachelor’s degree at NIDA. “I was scared to come back to Sydney after that [earlier experience],” he says, “but the goal was to become the best actor I could.”
While talking more about his family, who do community-based work in Lismore, Clarke admits that he’s still reckoning with the thought of acting being a selfish pursuit. “But I’m realising, as I do more of this work, that all the people I admire in this profession are selfless,” he says, referring to his NIDA mentor, uncle-in-residence Matthew Doyle. “And so, I think my way of giving back is through art . . . I realise, in doing that, that’s one way of inspiring all the little young ’uns.”
Clarke is now fresh out of NIDA and already signed with an agent. As a kind of mission statement, he adds: “Above all else, I just want to be a good person. I want to have fun, make meaningful work and have something to say with this art.”
Words Tyler Dane Wingco
Charles Davis
True believer
CHARLES DAVIS had never considered a career in production design until he saw the work of others. He started out studying architecture, which landed him at Monash University. But not yet ready for the demands of academia, Davis deferred his degree to travel around Europe, frequenting theatres to watch plays and dance performances. That’s when something clicked. “It’s kind of a hidden thing,” he says of his profession – not many people know about it specifically. But looking at what was happening on stage, I thought, Surely someone’s responsible for this.”
He returned home with his eyes set on the design course at NIDA. For his application, he made a miniature scale model of the set design for Federico García Lorca’s’s tragedy Blood Wedding. Many don’t realise set and costume design are often done by the same person (a famous example being Catherine Martin, Baz Luhrmann’s partner in life and work) and Davis also gained expertise in costume design during his three-year degree.
“[Whether it’s] fitting architecture to a theatre or garments to a body, [my role] is to work with the director, choreographer or lighting designer, a lot of the conversation is about how we create a world for the story that enriches it in a non-verbal way – that gives the audience a sense of the world and allows them to fill in the blanks with their imagination,” Davis says.
Since graduating in 2014, Davis has worked with state and national companies in theatre, dance, opera and film; no material – written or conceptual – is off limits. He’s proudest of his work on a production of the Czech opera Rusalka – in 2024, with director Sarah Giles for the West Australian Opera – which follows a water nymph caught between the human world and her watery home; the challenge was to have the two coexist on stage.
In 2026, Davis is codesigning on an Opera Queensland and Queensland Theatre production of Into the Woods, Stephen Sondheim’s musical of interwoven Brothers Grimm fairy tales. “So much of that text that Sondheim wrote during the AIDS crisis wasn’t, in my analysis, a conscious allegory,” he says. “But the themes in that production – the characters going on journeys, forming an unexpected family community that’s not as typical or recognisable – there’s a real personal connection there for me that I appreciate. I’m interested in work that heroes otherness – work that presents or celebrates the underdog, I suppose.”
Words Tyler Dane Wingco
Credits
Photography: Michael Comninus
Creative direction and Editor in Chief: Grant Pearce
Grooming: Max Serrano and Kristyan Low
