After three decades in the industry, Tim Draxl shows no signs of slowing down
The 44-year-old actor is at full throttle
By Cayle Reid
THERE’S A WIDELY HELD and misguided belief that all actors need to uphold a level of cool by looking a certain way. The standard was likely set in the ’50s by James Dean, astride a motorcycle clad in a leather jacket, radiating cool. Since then, actors have been expected to be similarly magnetic, but assuredly, most of them don’t pull it off. Simply, they are people just like us, with their own personalities and interests that rarely orbit leather jackets and motorcycles. Tim Draxl, however, is an exception.
He arrives at his Esquire shoot on the back of a shiny new Honda Rebel, its engine’s rumble penetrating our otherwise silent studio.
“Nice bike,” I tell him, because what else can you say?
“Thanks, man,” he responds, taking the key out of the ignition. “I actually just bought it.”
Earlier in the day, we’d shot a bunch of fresh-faced, up-and-coming actors exuding that early-career buzz. Draxl is something else entirely: calm, grounded, unhurried. He’s been around long enough to be familiar with this kind of thing. For him, it’s just another day.
The shiny bike isn’t for show; Draxl really rides. For 15 years he had a Sol Invictus Mercury, but a few weeks earlier its throttle snapped. “The Honda has the smoothest fucking ride,” he says. “I went out to near Cronulla to pick it up, and driving back in here I was just laughing the whole way, because it’s got so much more power.”
It’s telling that Draxl stuck with his old ride for so long. His multi-hyphenate career has been anything but predictable, his path nonlinear, but he’s managed to hang on to some semblance of stability, with his erstwhile ride playing its part in that.
“Dancing was actually my entry point into performing arts,” he says. “Then I got a recording contract with Sony. I had a five-album deal, but after the second album I decided that I wanted to leave the music industry. I was very young, I signed my contract when I was 16, I cut my first album at 17, my second one at 18. It was kind of a matter of just burning out. There was also, from my experience at least, not a lot of space for creativity.”
Acting was all Draxl had ever really wanted to do, anyway. He grew up watching Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire – and wanted to be them. Eventually, he quit music to focus on acting. “Back then, and we’re talking the late ’90s, you could either be one or the other [an actor or a musician],” he says. “It was very hard to cross over. [But] my manager at the time was adamant that because I could do all those things, I should be trying to do them all and not dedicate myself to one.”
For the next few years, Draxl “didn’t sing a note”. Untethered from his recording contract, he was looking for work for the first time in years. “I kind of fell on my feet in a way because I started booking TV and film work, and then everything has kind of happened quite organically from there,” he says, though he refuses to say that his acting career has been snowballing. “Maybe a snowball that occasionally stops and rests for quite a long time in between. Certainly not an avalanche.”
There were times when Draxl went a year without work. At 25, he moved to LA and spent a long time knocking around before landing his first job. “The longer you go without work in the industry over there,” he says, “the harder it is to get back in.” He found that runs on the board in Australia are worth next to nothing in the States and, eventually, decided to come home to seek opportunities.
Some actors talk about “making it” – a moment when everything clicks. But Draxl is wary of the concept, having learnt early how seductive and misleading it can be. “The second film I ever did was called Swimming Upstream [2003], with Geoffrey Rush and Judy Davis playing my parents. I had a trailer. It was a big-budget film. I did two months of swim training, and they were sending me for massages and facials every day to look after my skin and whatever. It kind of gave me this false sense that, like, this is just the beginning, right? I felt like it’s just going to go up from here. And it didn’t happen like that.”
Draxl stresses that, particularly in Australia, your path rarely takes a continuous upward trajectory. “You can have a lead role in something, and then you just have to take what work comes your way,” he says. “You can go from being a lead to being a support to being a day player or a guestie on something.” In the US, on the other hand, Draxl says that you work your way up and “once you’re a lead, you’re a lead”.
It may sound like a stressful line of work, but as Draxl explains, it’s important not to see the variability as a negative. “There were times when I really struggled with that as a young actor because it’s a big hit to your ego,” he says. “But looking back, I think that’s helped me realise that it’s not about how big the role is or how big the budget is, it’s about being creatively stimulated and satisfied. It’s very humbling being an Australian performer. There’s no room for ego here.”
That humility feeds into how Draxl thinks about acting itself. He’s careful to separate his work from his identity. “If you think of yourself as only an actor, what are you when you’re not acting?” For Draxl, acting is a job, one that’s meaningful and sometimes artistic but not the totality of who he is.
He is about to appear in The Normal Heart with Sydney Theatre Company. “It’s a Larry Kramer piece that was written in the ’80s as a response to the AIDS pandemic,” he says. “It’s a very powerful piece, a very important piece, especially with what’s happening in the world right now, with Trump announcing [late last year] that the White House would not be commemorating World AIDS Day and would be pulling funding for AIDS research.”
After that, he heads to Melbourne to work with Melbourne Theatre Company on The Glass Menagerie, a Tennessee Williams classic. “I love Tennessee Williams,” he says.
After the interview, Draxl texts me his answer to a question we didn’t quite get to in the studio – what advice he’d give to his younger self. “I’d tell my younger self to be open to taking advice,” he writes, “but to listen to [his] own voice first. Trust your instincts, stay true to yourself and don’t listen to people who tell you who they think you ought to be.”
On this point, Draxl speaks from experience. Early in his career, he found that people were quick to pigeonhole him. He was told that if he did musical theatre, he wouldn’t be taken seriously as an actor. If he sang, it would undermine his credibility elsewhere. He resisted that sentiment. “I’m quite proud that I’ve been able to cross over between cabaret, music, TV, film, theatre and musical theatre,” he says.
At the end of 2023, Draxl was cast in the musical Sunset Boulevard after receiving two AACTA nominations and a Logie nomination for a TV role. Choosing to return to musical theatre, he says, wasn’t a step backwards but demonstrative of his range. “It was a pretty satisfying feeling to make the choice to go back to musical theatre, which ultimately led to me working with STC and MTC next year.”
If there’s one takeaway from Draxl’s story it’s that even if others want to slap limits on you, do not impose them on yourself.
Credits
Photography: Michael Comninus
Styling: Mikey Ayoubi
Grooming: Max Serrano and Kristyan Low
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