Thomas Cocquerel's extraordinary gift

OF COURSE, IT’S my final question to Thomas Cocquerel that reveals most about the man. I’ve been chatting with him for a good 45 minutes on a bark-strewn nature strip on a brisk afternoon in Paddington, a conversation intermittently disrupted by leaf-cleaning council vehicles.

I’ve asked Cocquerel whether he has a motto in life. He does, he reveals, though it’s not one that boils down to an aphoristic three-word slogan. Instead, it’s distilled even further to one word, a singe syllable: ‘If’. He has it tattooed on the inside of his finger in a totemic nod to Rudyard Kipling’s paean to the virtues of a principled life, one that prizes resilience, humility and temperance, come what may. You likely know its most famous line, which bears repeating: If you can meet with triumph and disaster; And treat those two impostors just the same . . .

An impossible feat for most mortals but one Cocquerel is having a decent crack at while navigating the vicissitudes of an impermanent profession, in which your successes can be dizzying and your failures crushing, where temptation is rife and you can, if you’re not careful, find yourself suckered into solipsism.

“It’s a poem that I use daily,” says Cocquerel, as we sit on a pair of chairs that seem purposefully put there for the occasion, though perhaps are seldom witness to the kind of severe self-reflection the poem invites. “It’s what I recite to myself before moments of high pressure, in moments of stress. It’s what I use as a vocal warm-up. I recite it in different accents before auditions. It’s kind of my go-to. I just think it’s a beautiful poem and I find a lot of comfort and I find a lot of strength in it.”

The poem was a gift of sorts – one that keeps on giving, you might say. “My grandmother gave me a birthday card with the poem for my 18^th,” says Cocquerel, now 36. “And since then, I’ve just always loved it. I had that card on my desk. I know it back to front and I love it.”

He chose a discreetly positioned tattoo to make the poem’s universal message intimate and deeply personal. “No one sees it,” he says. “No one knows I have it. It’s just for me.”

If you’re so inclined, you might cast the poem’s distilled wisdom as iambic pearls, and then, in a leap of imagination, draw a straight line to the fact that Cocquerel is joining Esquire today to help showcase Diver, Paspaley’s debut collection for men.

Given he knows the poem by heart, I do have to wonder if, after our chat, Cocquerel might reflect on another of its life-girding lines:

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken; Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools . . . if.

I’M CATCHING COCQUEREL between shows, in the middle of Australian Fashion Week. He’s been to a menswear show this morning, he tells me, as we grab a coffee and search for a quiet place to chat, eventually settling on the aforementioned nature strip, blithely unaware of how much of a racket a council committed to clean streets can conjure. He was recently introduced to Paspaley, he says, at what sounds like an induction for the Diver collection for men, coming away impressed by the depths, and lengths, divers go to retrieve the ocean’s most precious bounty.

“They showed a video of their divers wearing pearls and how they go and find them and the level of risk that those divers go to get those pearls. They make them look so cool and so masculine. You don’t think about pearls in that sense, but I was like, Wow, that’s really something that I’d like to wear.”

Right now, he’s dressed comfortably in his favourite thrifted navy workman’s shirt with loose-fitting jeans and brown loafers. “I can thank my sisters for getting me out of the skinny jeans a couple of years ago, as a Millennial,” he says dryly.

As the only male in a family with three sisters, you imagine Cocquerel received his fair share of unsolicited fashion advice from his siblings growing up. The family are close-knit, he says, which he attributes to their peripatetic childhood. Cocquerel was born in Sydney to a French father and spent time in Madrid, Paris and Houston, Texas, before returning here as a 12-year-old. He was educated in French schools but arrived back in Sydney with an American accent that saw him cop it from his high school peers.

“I definitely had a pretty strong Texan accent that I didn’t feel very accepted for,” he says. “So I had to work pretty hard and fast to get rid of that. And I did it in about a year, but I did get knocked around a bit for having it. And I think that’s maybe why acting came to me. I was always moving countries, schools, languages. I was quite adept at adapting to different environments.”

It certainly sounds like good training for a career that would see him take on roles ranging from Tom Raikes in HBO’s period drama, The Gilded Age, to a high school teacher in last year’s All Her Fault. Cocquerel traces his desire to perform to a school project on Steven Spielberg, when he was 10 years old.“I think I failed the project because I was so focused on learning about filmmaking. It was a bug and it was very quick and instant.”

In his research on the iconic director, Cocquerel remembers reading a book that brought home to him the magic of movie making. “I was just enthralled by it,” he says. He nominates Indiana Jones as his favourite Spielberg character and The Last Crusade as the best of the trilogy – we agree Temple of Doom is terrifying as a kid. “I love the father-son dynamic [of Last Crusade]. Sean Connery’s incredible. You have Indiana Jones and James Bond in the same movie.”

From there, Cocquerel started making home movies with his sisters, some becoming hour-length short films. Often, they’d shoot on the family’s property out at Orange. “I would bring a whole bunch of schoolmates up on weekends and shoot action-adventure films.”

It would all serve as a precursor to what Cocquerel describes as “the best three years of my life”, at NIDA. “I compare it to Hogwarts. Funny Hogwarts,” he says of the drama school. “The range of things that you get to work on and study that don’t feel like they deserve to be real classes. We were doing clowning and fencing and Greek theatre and Shakespeare and dance – jazz, tap, ballet. It just felt like we had this plethora of classes that would be the fun classes at school that you’d only get to do once a week. We got to do them every day, and it was an absolute dream.”

Amid all the dress-ups and tomfoolery, NIDA taught him some important lessons. For one, he learned to push himself, he says. “As much as I loved performing in high school, I did find a kind of safety on stage,” he says. “There are things that would scare me – singing in public was always terrifying – and NIDA pushed me to do that.”

The drama school also taught him to back himself and his material. “It [NIDA] pushes you to not be too humble and be somewhat proud of what you have to offer as a performer.”

Not least, the school gave him a sense of validation that he was a performer who was on the right path, a belief that’s been tested but never wavered in his career since. “It gave me a confidence that this was now a life vocation that I was always going to do,” he says. “I think if I hadn’t gone, I might have always doubted my ability or if the job is worth it. I never really doubt myself now, which you really need in this career because it is bloody tough.” He looks at me meaningfully, letting a pregnant pause fall, as yet another street cleaner powers by. “It is so tough.”

THE 2026 GOLDEN GLOBES were a night anyone in attendance is unlikely to forget. The Oscars’ looser, bawdier little cousin, the Globes offer a relaxed forum for celebrity revelry, as stars let their hair down, the host goes after the guests (this year, comedian Nikki Glaser spared no one) and everyone gets tanked. Needless to say, Cocquerel had a ball.

“It was unbelievable,” he says, his hazel eyes caught momentarily in reverie. “One of the coolest moments of my life. I could not believe I was in that room with all my idols. I was smiling the whole night. It was so cool.”

He was there for his work in Peacock drama All Her Fault, with Dakota Fanning and fellow NIDA alumnus Sarah Snook. The night was a milestone – a checkpoint, perhaps – if viewed through a wider, more ambition-tinted lens, in Cocquerel’s career, which had begun back in 2014 with Aussie drama series Love Child. His path since has been something of a gradual ascent, working both here and in the US, each role building on the one that preceded it, with some, like his turn as Raikes in season one of The Gilded Age, seeing him climb a couple of steps at once.

“Everything, for the most part, has felt like it’s a stepping stone,” Cocquerel says, as he contemplates his body of work. “It’s been a slow move forward, but that [The Gilded Age] was HBO. It’s prestige. And to watch it back and hear that HBO [signature sound] before those episodes, I was like, Oh, my God, this is incredible.”

Of course, big-budget productions come with attendant pressure, which was heightened in this case by shooting during COVID, Cocquerel says. “We didn’t have many takes and you had to get it right, have the accent right and the work prepared. I felt that adrenaline and I felt that pressure. Luckily, I really kind of get off on that. I don’t think I could do this job otherwise.”

It’s fair to say The Gilded Age improved Cocquerel’s standing in Hollywood. Unfortunately, due to COVID and the writers’ strike, he wasn’t immediately able to capitalise on the show’s success. Those stepping stones got a little further apart.

“There was a bit of a dip, honestly, after Gilded Age, and I think that was more the industry itself. The strike hit us hard and, financially, it’s taken a while [for the industry] to find its feet.”

He also believes that upon entering his thirties, he’s faced a transitional period in terms of the roles he’s offered. “I think as a man now, getting older, you do fit into pockets,” he says. “I was playing more boyfriend roles or younger kids then [in his twenties] and I’m stepping into my manhood now and playing fathers and very different sorts of roles. It’s taken a while for me to both personally and externally be seen as that or feel like that. That’s the shift and I think the reason for the bigger breaks in work the last few years.”

Cocquerel admits those periods when he’s not working make him question what he’s doing with his life – and perhaps look searchingly at the tattoo on his finger.

“From the outside, it [acting] looks fun and glamorous and maybe somewhat easy,” he says of the life he’s chosen, “but I’m still always terrified about when the next job is. And in the last few years, there were many months without work and that’s terrifying stuff.”

The anxiety, of course, is something shared by all actors – it is, after all, a cutthroat profession in which luck plays no small part. Outwardly, Cocquerel’s vulnerability, as endearing as it is, is a little difficult to reconcile with a résumé many struggling actors would kill for. Given he’s been at something of a crossroads these last few years, the time was probably right for something a little different, a turn towards reinvention. He noticeably perks up when the subject turns to the upcoming season of Colin from Accounts. 

“Colin feels like an absolutely massive stepping stone and win for my career,” he says. “I knew Harriet [the show’s co-creator Harriet Dyer] back in the day and have always been a massive fan of the show. I was kind of fan-girling in being there, but also, I’ve really struggled to break into comedy. I used to do a lot of improvising and comedy at school and even clowning was something I really f*cking know.”

Another street sweeper interrupts Cocquerell’s flow, giving him the opportunity for a wry aside. “Comedy’s about timing. That was bad timing,” he says, eyeing the street sweeper, before returning to his theme. “I think I’ve just been typecast in that sense, as a drama guy. So to have Harriet and Patrick [Brammall] give me an opportunity here and write such an incredible role was just a gift.”

Cocquerel has two big US projects coming up later this year, including Runner, with Owen Wilson. Honestly, he says, he’s just relieved to be working. “Makes me looks busy,” he deadpans.

What kind of career would he like to forge from here? He says he wants to continue to work on “good projects with good people”, citing his experiences on The Gilded Age, Colin and All Her Fault. “I feel it’s what makes me better. It’s what excites me. It’s what I want to watch and what I want to be a part of.”

It’s now that we get to the guts of our conversation. Cocquerel’s biggest fear, he tells me, is disappointing people. “I feel the responsibility to my family. I just want to do the right thing in life.” At the same time, he nominates “fearlessness” as his biggest strength. “I like to think that I kind of gravitate to what scares me. It gives me the feeling of being alive. I like to pick things that I don’t know if I can pull off. That I don’t know if I can do and push myself to see if I can. That’s part of growing, part of living.”

Cocquerel’s career, then, is one that exists under a certain tension. There’s a struggle, as there must be in the pursuit of excellence, with doubt – see Kipling: If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you . . . At the same time there’s a willingness to stare into an abyss of uncertainty and walk forward; to continue to strive. And finally, underlying it all, a determination to reckon with those questions of character – disguised in pretty verse – that have the power to define him . . . if. Some might call it a burden. Cocquerel knows that in the struggle lies the gift.

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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF/CREATIVE DIRECTOR: GRANT PEARCE

PHOTOGRAPHY: JAMIE GREEN

WORDS: BEN JHOTY

PRODUCTION DIRECTOR: REBECCA MOORE

GROOMING: DARREN SUMMORS

FASHION ASSISTANT: KAILEE WALLER

VIDEO: TALE STUDIOS

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