Black bag of clean clothes slung over his shoulder, Eddie Perfect is fresh from the laundromat when we meet in a Bondi Beach bookstore-cafe. He’s temporarily separated from his own front loader in Melbourne.
The shop is a jumble of books, crammed and dark, with two wooden tables for cafe customers and armchairs for readers. We are in a section with a prominent display of heavy hitters – Kurt Vonnegut, Stephen King and Patrick White.
“Read any White?” he asks. I tell him I read The Vivisector at uni. “What about JM Coetzee?” Yes, Disgrace, and a couple of his early books. Perfect has read Disgrace, too, and Coetzee’s Jesus trilogy. “I grew up Catholic and when I got to the end, I felt … ” He pauses. “Rearranged.”
Sipping a chai, Perfect fits, well, just about perfectly with the hushed and bookish vibe. Dressed in day-off baggy jeans and a soft cotton waffle T-shirt, he speaks in a soft tones while he tucks into a chocolate brownie. He keeps his phone close by. His wife and two daughters are home in Melbourne and his Apple watch lights up with a photo of them. It’s the other side of the coin to the one we’re most familiar with – that of the multitalented, high-energy, high-profile entertainment professional, a wunderkind even.
Perfect is in town performing in Candide at Sydney Opera House, before heading home to Melbourne to join rehearsals for the lead role in Beetlejuice the Musical, the movie spin-off Broadway show he wrote the music and lyrics for. Brought up in the somewhat less shiny bayside Mentone, Bondi is his suburb of choice when he’s in Sydney and it still “blows my mind”, he says. “It’s the opposite of Melbourne, basically.”
Perfect (his real name, by the way) is a household face thanks to his role in Channel 10’s long-running TV series Offspring and stage shows ranging from snarky satirical solo cabarets to light-hearted musicals such as South Pacific, 9 to 5 and his first original musical Shane Warne the Musical. He’s also a playwright (2013’s The Beast, staged by Melbourne Theatre Company), a singer (bass-baritone) a composer and lyricist with two Broadway shows to his name – King Kong (which opened in New York in 2018) and, more recently, Beetlejuice.
The “wunderkind” label was attached when Perfect was in his early 20s, but “I never felt like I was one”, he says as we step into the bright sunshine. “I actually think my true natural state is utter laziness. It’s only that my mortification at the idea of not making the most of whatever time or gifts I have is slightly bigger than my desire to lie on the couch all day.” Any impression of continual creative activity is an illusion, he smiles. “When it’s time to talk to someone like yourself, then I’m in a busy part of my life. If we averaged all the busyness out over the last three years, I’m that fucking guy who does almost nothing.”
We take off for a walk along the Bondi esplanade, crowded with dog walkers and the young and fit, promenading in flesh-tone athleisure wear. He’s still lugging his laundry bag. Our pace soon slackens to a stroll but the conversation flows easily. He takes me to the faded art deco apartment building he once lived in and where his eldest daughter Kitty was (almost) born. “We called the midwife and she said, not to worry, the baby wasn’t going to arrive any time soon. We got to Randwick hospital with about seven minutes to spare.”
He shows me his favourite tree (“It’s been that high for about 20 years. How do trees know when to stop growing?”) and talks about surfing (“I’m a poor to average surfer and not very gung-ho”). He talks about growing up middle-class (he’s the son of two teachers, Judy and Tom) and working a summer job in year 12 in an educational bookstore whose owner deliberately kept the stockroom empty. “It was like the Monty Python Cheese Shop sketch – we had no fucking cheese!
“I remember looking at the empty shop and saying to myself ‘This could be your life if you don’t get out and make something of yourself.’ That experience, he says, “put me off disappointing people for life”.
“Now I’m someone who just wants to overdeliver on whatever promise I’ve made someone.”
Once Candide opens, Perfect won’t have much time or energy for strolling the esplanade. He’s doubling the roles of the show’s narrator, Voltaire, and the title character’s unfailingly optimistic tutor, Dr Pangloss. At least the optimism comes naturally, he says. “I am an optimistic person. I learned it by having an optimistic father, though a therapist would probably say that it’s more about my inability to sit with uncomfortable feelings for long. I like to plough forward and just throw energy and optimism at things. But every now and then my wife [Lucy Cochran] is like, can’t we just sit and wallow in the shit for a minute?”
Basically, no, says Perfect. “My trouble is that I find everything interesting. Even terrible things or things that don’t work, or that most people don’t like. You can always learn a lot from trying to understand what it is that makes something unsuccessful.”
Which brings us back to books and reading. Perfect has recently fallen under the spell of the American author George Saunders – specifically his slender but weighty Congratulations, by the way: Some Thoughts on Kindness. It chimed, says Perfect. “He says when he looks at his life and the things that bring him sadness or regret, they are always failures of kindness, not anything else. When he could have been kinder, and wasn’t.”
We’ve become accustomed in an unkind world to seeing kind people as “doormats”, Perfect says. “But kindness requires strength. When you are besieged by your own woes, it’s very hard to give anything of yourself. You actually need to be very robust in order to be kind. It’s a powerful thing.”
While preparing for Candide, Perfect read Jamie Bernstein’s memoir Famous Father Girl. Her dad, the musical polymath Leonard Bernstein, wrote Candide. “There’s a part where her mother, at the end of her life, calls her into her bedroom and says, ‘Kindness, kindness, kindness, that’s all that matters.’ It’s probably a bit twee to say, but I think that’s true.”
There are worse philosophies to align yourself with, I say. Perfect says he’s wary of “planting any kind of philosophical flag in the sand because I’ve just proven myself to be a hypocrite home and time again”.
Instead, he prefers to focus on the little things and the community around him. “I wait my turn in queues. I hate it when people cut in line for something. I think that’s pretty much the baseline for me on fairness and equity. I don’t like people being inconsiderate.”
Aged 47, Perfect is the father of two teenage daughters. It’s a lot, he says. “There’s cheerleading and ballet, and a lot of parties. We’re in that period where we’re either driving or sitting in the car killing time, waiting for the kids to finish what they’re doing. It’s not my favourite era, but I’m doing it.”
He misses the toddler years, he says. “It was relentless and tiring and no sleep but, you know, they need you, they look to you, and up to you, they listen to you. Now it’s like I’m on call, ready to spring into action just in case. And that’s hard, because they need you, but they don’t want you.”
Perfect says is happy to be at the threshold of his “wise old man era”.
He’s mentoring emerging talents and writing a new musical with and for students at Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (Waapa), his alma mater.
It’s an antidote to time spent writing. “A lonely pursuit,” he says. “You make yourself lonely and then you write your way back to people. That’s what it feels like for me.”
Solace, he says, comes in the form of birdwatching. He shows me the bird tattoos on each of his forearms – both are superb fairywrens. “I love birds,” he says simply.
Perfect is no twitcher, he’s the first to admit, but he likes observing them at length. “We live our lives in parallel. And it’s nice, actually. It’s good for my mental health to just go, you know what? At any one time, there’s a species living an entirely separate existence that doesn’t give a fuck about musicals or all my stresses or anything like that. I think that’s a lovely thing to bear in mind.”
