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The New Faces of Chris Lilley
Time Out Sydney | September 25, 2007

Premiering as the highest-rating ABC comedy since Mother And Son in 1992, Summer Heights High has emerged as a devil’s playground for Chris Lilley to weave black comedy magic. “With parody, the real test of whether you’ve got it right is when people from the original environment recognise it as real,” reckons Lilley. “There’s no methodology to what I’m doing, no time-worn formulas. I just come up with a bunch of ideas and find ways of making them connect.”

Rest assured, when this Sydney boy connects, you know it. Floating like a butterfly, stinging like a bee, Summer Heights High has hit so hard it hurts.

Bug-eyed, putty-faced and dangerously talented, Lilley, 32, first entrenched himself in the canon of classic Australian comedies with 2005’s We Can Be Heroes, the award winning mockumentary he wrote and performed. It garnered him Logies for Most Outstanding Comedy and Best New Talent, plus the prestigious international Rose d’Or Award for Best Male Comedy Performance.

Described by the Hollywood Reporter as “utterly ridiculous, ingeniously subtle – the kind of inventive comedy that leaves you pining for more”, Heroes is now screening to acclaim as The Nominees on the Sundance Channel in the US and on networks in the UK, Canada, Ireland and Finland.

Right now, though, the Turramurra-born terror is raising fresh hell in the fictional school he created via hundreds of interviews and 12 weeks of intensive verité shooting.

In Heroes, he played six characters. In Summer Heights High he’s playing three: Jonah Takalua, a foul-mouthed, ADD-demented Tongan schoolboy; Mr G, an ambitious drama teacher diva famous for staging Tsunamarama (the tsunami tragedy set to the music of Bananarama); and megarich über-bitch Ja’mie King, a North Shore private school princess on a student exchange program.

“I could feel it on set when we were pushing the boundaries and I knew it was going to translate into something special because I’ve always been excited by offence and outrage,” says this youngest son of a nurse and pharmacist. “There’s some full-on stuff happening in this series – sexually, racially, politically – which I think people will find quite upsetting but even though it’s risky to go against the grain, risk is always the most valuable currency.”

Like Larry David, who never broke as a comic and spent a year on Saturday Night Live before penning the seminal Seinfeld, this youngest son of four to a pharmacist dad and nurse mum walked a lonely road as child care worker and voice-over man before hitting it big. “I lived in my head,” he smiles shyly. “As a kid, my weekends were spent performing scenes I’d written as characters I’d made up and roping other kids in to film me.”

That anarchic verve first found air at west Sydney roller rinks in the early 90s, where Lilley performed “doomy art rock” in a velvet sequined suit. Later, his act evolved into standup musical comedy and, ultimately, TV skitting on Seven’s short-lived Big Bite. “He’d chuckle contemptuously at your best gag, but cack himself at your faintest foibles or most innocent peccadilloes,” recalls colleague Andrew O’Keefe.

But, as Summer Heights High has proven, it’s depth of immersion that makes Lilley a true original. Shooting scriptless and improvising scenes with a cast of untrained actors, some wheelchair-bound or mentally disabled, only four of Lilley’s 87 taboo-tackling tapes made final cut.

“The secret to compelling TV is to take people on a journey,” Lilley says, grinning like a fox chewing on guts. “For me, it’s tightrope walking.”

Summer Heights High
Wednesdays at 9.30pm
ABC.

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