Chris Lilley » Articles

Gilded Lilley
Melbourne Weekly Magazine | May 24, 2006

Andrew Fenton

It’s Logies night and Chris Lilley is spinning out. After ten years of poorly paid stand up, bit parts and bad sketch shows, his career has finally taken off. The ABC has lashed out and hired a stretch limo, which Lilley shares with the cast of Play School. Long time host Benita, whom he gurgled at while watching telly as a child, sits next to him excitedly explaining how much she loves his show. He runs the gauntlet of the red carpet, past posing starlets and a phalanx of cameras. When he makes it inside there’s no time to relax and get sozzled in true Logies tradition. Instead Lilley’s off to prepare for his big show-stopping number as deluded Asian actor Ricky Wong. Considering the resolutely middlebrow nature of the Logies, it’s an unconventional performance: Lilley’s a white man, playing an Asian man, playing an Aborigine singing a song with Cathy Freeman, who can’t sing, and dancing with a group of Asian actors, who can’t dance. Bert Newton sees him backstage and gives him the thumbs up. Ray Martin comes up and gushes that We Can Be Heroes is his favourite show of all time.
Too weird, Lilley thinks. Surreal.

By the end of the night Lilley’s been honoured with two Logies: the Graham Kennedy Award for Most Outstanding New Talent, and a Logie for Best Comedy Series. Unbeknownst to the viewing public, this isn’t the first time Lilley has got his hands on some Logies - ten years ago he had a shelf full of them. Fair enough, he’d carved them himself out of polystyrene and painted them silver, but he still had some.
Don’t get the wrong impression though: Lilley hasn’t spent his life desperately hoping to win a Logie. The fake Logies were props in a musical he staged at Uni called Heart Throbs.
It was a fairly unusual plot: “These two school girls imagined a soap opera and then we saw the soap opera come to life, and then we saw the actors behind the soap opera come to life and they ended up winning Logies,” Lilley explains. “There was this whole thing about: is it real or is it fantasy?”
It’s a question that could be asked about Lilley’s own life. He seems to have the unusual ability to blur the boundaries between fiction and reality. Skip back a few years to his childhood in the Sydney suburb of Turramurra and we find the young Lilley inhabiting the fictional world of his own fantasy soap operas.
“I had a friend and we used to do a lot of character stuff together,” he recalls. “We were constantly in the fantasy world of these characters. We’d invented these little soap operas in our minds and we’d ring each other up and talk as the characters, and write letters as them.”
It wasn’t a short phase either: “This was all the way through primary school and high school.”
The soap operas evolved so the pair would also sometimes pretend to be the writers and the producers of their fictional show. You can trace a line from that, through to Heart Throbs and then on to last year’s hit series We Can Be Heroes. “It’s all connected,” he says.
The ability to live inside the minds of his own fictional characters was crucial to the success of the mockumentary series. In fact, Lilley did it so well that some people had trouble working out the joke. One Melbourne viewer wrote to his local paper: “I am appalled at the selection process of Australian of the Year as shown on ABC. The only hero in this is the ex-cop…. Good luck to the lady rolling to Ayers Rock but the others disgust me.” If that letter wasn’t written by someone at ABC publicity, it should have been.
It’s far from the only example of the audience believing in Lilley’s alter egos. When ‘totally hot’ private school girl Ja’mie King was interviewed on Nova and Triple J, the switchboards lit up with irate callers. A similar thing occurred after Ja’mie ‘wrote’ a guide to the school formal for the Good Weekend. “I said that Asian girls weren’t welcome at the formal,” Lilley giggles. “And then I got a letter from an Asian girl saying she was deeply offended and that I wasn’t even hot and that I looked like a man! She said ‘how dare you say Asian people aren’t hot because I’m a model and I’m Asian.”
Understanding Lilley’s past reveals his motivation for writing and performing. It’s the same impetus to create that saw him dream up those soap operas as a child.
“I didn’t want to be famous and I still don’t want to be a celebrity,” he says. “I just love creating these worlds and making them seem real and being able to control what happens.”
He certainly comes across as a reluctant star. Initially he doesn’t want to be interviewed face to face or take part in a photo shoot. He seems shy in real life, and possibly a little too concerned about what people think of him. His voice is gentle and his conversation peppered with the words: “weirdly”, “kind-of” and “like”. He looks similar to, and sometimes even sounds like, his teenage character, Daniel Sims, especially as he’ll occasionally refers to something as “gay”.
His initial plan after University was to become a musician. “I never talk about this, but I used to be like: ‘I’m going to be a pop star – forget comedy, I’m writing music,’” he says. He sang over the top of ‘weird electronic stuff’ in pubs, playing a keyboard and triggering a sampler.
“I was approaching record companies and I was going to this new alternative artist. I really thought some A and R person from a record company was going to give me a call. I was completely insane.”
But as far as failures go, he didn’t do so badly. He managed to perform his haunting love ode “Get Under My Doona” live on Triple J, and once shared a bill with Powderfinger and The Presidents of the United States in front of a crowd of thousands at Macquarie University’s Conception Day festival.
But it was becoming apparent Lilley was much more popular as a comedian than as a musician. While at Uni he performed in numerous student comedy reviews, and hosted band nights. In truth, the only reason he got to play at the Conception Day festival was because he was also MC’ing the event.
While Lilley was at University ostensibly to study teaching, he says he never intended to become a teacher.
“It was just to keep my family happy,” he says. “I was just pretending. It was awful. I can’t even say it was a fall back thing because I could never imagine myself doing it.”
Lilley actually created a comedy character based on how his life could have turned out if he continued teaching: Mr G, a frustrated drama teacher. “He’s my worst nightmare of what I could have ended up being like.” Ironically, the character brought him his initial success in stand up comedy.
Mr G will be familiar to viewers of Channel Seven’s The Big Bite and the character is set to become even more widely known when Lilley reprises it for his forthcoming, untitled and as yet unwritten series for the ABC. The new show will be another fictional documentary series, this time entirely set in a high school. While Lilley has been preparing for the series by watching rehearsals of a school production of Oliver, he says the new series won’t be following the staging of a school play. But he won’t reveal what will actually happen in the show, saying the ABC would kill him for talking about it before it’s even been officially announced. All we know for certain is that it will feature Mr G, alongside a ‘cast of thousands’.
“He’s a drama teacher and he’s completely delusional about his abilities and he’s also a bit jaded about the fact he’s ended up in a school because he wanted to be a performer,” Lilley says
He created the character for his first stand up shows back in 1998 when he’d treat the audience as if they were his drama class. It went over rather well, and Mr G helped Lilley make his first tentative steps into the spotlight when he won the NSW state final of Raw Comedy in 2000.
“That gave me the confidence to keep going,” he says. Lilley shot a short film about the character and sent it to Channel 7 who were impressed enough to keep offering him gigs between 2001 and 2004. Unfortunately for the network, they never really found the right vehicle for Lilley’s talents. He took part in a couple of pilots, and performed sketches in Roy and HG’s Monday Dump, The Big Bite and the short lived and much derided Hamish and Andy.
We Can Be Heroes traces its genesis to a series of commercials Lilley wrote and acted in for the Australian Open. In the advertisements, which won an International Promax award in 2004, Lilley played a number of different behind the scenes characters at the tennis: an umpire, a ball boy, and a lineswoman. The lineswoman later became the basis for his Pat Mullins character. “For me it was a really cool thing because I thought this whole multiple character thing in the one environment really works,” he says.
It’s a formula that he’ll employ again for his new series, which he confidently predicts won’t be as well received as We Can Be Heroes. “I reckon the critics will go: ‘it’s not as good as the last one’ and the fans will love it and go: ‘it’s even better than the last one’.”
However the new show is received by the critics, Lilley’s star is firmly in the ascendant, like an antipodean Ricky Gervais. We Can Be Heroes, retitled The Nominees, has been sold in Europe, America and the UK and last month Lilley won a Rose d’Or for Best Male Comedy Performance. To put that in perspective, the year before the award went to the stars of Little Britain, David Walliams and Matt Lucas. “Everyone keeps telling me how huge it is, but I don’t know what it means,” Lilley says. “It’s like, nobody has called to give me any money.” But Lilley reveals the BBC has called to sound him out. “The head of BBC comedy John Ploughman (Absolutely Fabulous) really liked the show and he sent one of his representatives over to meet me. That was cool because he’s made some pretty big shows.”
So it’s possible we won’t have Chris Lilley making TV in Melbourne for too much longer.
“I like the fact the British aren’t as conservative with their comedy and are a bit riskier and do crazy things,” he says. “I think I’d fit in well over there.”

Breakout:
We Can Be Ja’mie
We Can Be Heroes is something of an unusual program in the annals of Australian comedy in that much of the show was improvised. While there was a rough storyline, many of the classic moments came straight off the top of Lilley’s head.
In order to be able to pull it off such a sustained piece of improvisation, Lilley researched his characters until he knew them inside and out. To create the series most popular character, Ja’mie King, he interviewed gaggles of private school girls from some of Melbourne’s top schools. The school scenes were shot in Brighton and real life private school girls played Ja’mie’s friends.
Melbourne Girls Grammar student Emma Clapham played Brianna. “Being at a private school I can definitely see how the character has been formed,” she says. “There are so many girls like that.”
Despite Clapham’s inexperience, she was thrown into the deep end of improvising scenes with Chris. “They’d just set the scene like: ‘sit on the oval and talk girly’ and Chris would come out with these random comments.”
“Everyone asks if it was actually that hard to act in because I’m so like that (in reality). I’m like: it was actually really hard to keep a straight face because it was so improvised.”
In keeping with the ‘non actors’ policy, the actress playing Sudanese refugee Sonali, actually was a Sudanese refugee.
“I don’t know if she got much of it,” Clapham says.
Producer Laura Waters says Lilley frequently had the crew in stiches. “There are certain shots we couldn’t use because the camera was shaking so much,” she says.
Waters believes Lilley is one of a kind. “I don’t think there is another talent like Chris anywhere. You look around the world and ask who would be able to portray those characters so realistically and so honestly, with comedy and drama.” She thinks for a moment. “Maybe Mike Myers.”