Before sitting down with Sam Corlett, I wasn’t sure what to expect. The 28-year-old actor from New South Wales’ Central Coast has been touted as Hollywood’s Next Big Thing ever since Vanity Fair praised him for “giving off strong early Heath Ledger vibes” back in 2020. In the intervening years, Corlett has landed top roles in big-budget Netflix dramas. He played the shaggy-haired, axe-wielding lead in “Vikings: Valhalla” and, more recently, the renegade heir to the world’s biggest cattle station in “Territory”, a lavish miniseries set in the Top End that’s billed as Australia’s take on “Succession”.
Yet listening to a bunch of podcasts ahead of our interview, it soon becomes clear that Corlett isn’t your traditional Aussie leading man. That maverick streak is evident from the way he litters the conversations with effusive references to a range of New Age practices and quasi- spiritual forms of self-care. The usual suspects are all present and correct: the daily affirmations, meditation, journaling, veganism, breathwork and cold-water therapy. Others are a bit more out there, like reiki healing and manifesting (the idea that, through the power of belief, we can “think” a goal into reality). Every time my wife walks into the room coincides with a podcast moment when Corlett happens to be discussing kinesiology, Carl Jung’s shadow self or how much he just loves Eckhart Tolle. “Well, he sounds very open-minded,” she says with a slight frown.
It’s actually not a bad assessment, but, in a way, that makes Corlett thoroughly intriguing company. He walks into the cafe at Sydney’s Ace Hotel trying (unsuccessfully) to disguise his boy-band good looks, dressed down in a checked shirt, stonewashed jeans and a pair of Vans, with a battered cap jammed over his floppy hair. Yet there’s nothing restrained about his conversation. From the moment he sits down, Corlett is disarmingly open and unguarded. He’s eager to share and connect. Within three minutes — two minutes and 10 seconds, to be precise — he’s already disclosing unprompted memories about what it was like for him, as a 12-year-old, when his mum got thyroid cancer, an illness subsequently followed by breast cancer and then bowel cancer. Thankfully, Kelly Corlett survived all three.
It’s a good place to start in trying to understand Corlett’s life trajectory.
