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. When his mum first got sick, Corlett was living at home in Terrigal with his father, Tim — a carpenter and former jackaroo — and his older brother and younger sister. By making him forcibly aware of the possibility of death, his mother’s illness became a galvanising force. “My mum always was encouraging,” he says in his quiet voice. “But after that it was like: ‘Live! Go for it! Get amongst it!’ ”
Kelly Corlett’s battle with cancer prompted her to explore a number of alternative forms of healing and eventually train as a Gestalt therapist, a form of psychotherapy in which self-awareness and self-acceptance are believed central to personal growth. Corlett was consequently exposed to a range of holistic ideas and self-help tactics from a young age. “We were always taught to be open-minded,” he says. His mother, for example, introduced him as a teen to Rhonda Byrne’s megaselling self-help book “The Secret” and its message of empowering optimism and positive thinking. Corlett was so taken with its notion of esoteric promise that he downloaded a motivational YouTube video, converted it into an MP3 file and used it as his daily alarm clock. “Whenever I woke up, it started off: ‘I don’t know what that dream is that you have. I want you to know that it’s possible …’ ”
Back then, Corlett’s cosmic motivation was largely channelled into his sporting efforts, but whatever he was doing really seemed to work. At his school, Central Coast Grammar, he went on to captain both the rugby and basketball teams — status-heavy roles for a teenage boy. The positions required Corlett to stand up at assembly each week to update the entire school on his teams’s performances. He found the public speaking to be a nerve-wracking ordeal: “I’d get shaky in my voice, sweaty palms, the whole lot.” To help him conquer his fears, his mother suggested that he maybe take drama classes. Suddenly, a new passion was ignited. Corlett loved figuring out the arc of a character and trying to find ways to relate to their experience. After leaving school, he combined a year of working for his dad as a carpenter with some short drama courses before clinching a highly sought-after place at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts.
Since graduating in 2018, Corlett has been in high demand, enjoying an extraordinary run of nonstop work. Straight out of drama school, he played a young Eric Bana in Robert Connolly’s Australian feature film “The Dry” before landing a role as the demonic love interest in “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina”, a cheerfully deranged Netflix drama about a sassy teenage witch. Then came the breakout moment. Corlett was cast as Leif Erikson in “Vikings: Valhalla”, a historical epic featuring lots of gore, sex and muscle-bound men with remarkable beards. His wardrobe had to be stitched entirely out of vegan leather made from cactus plants.
The show was a huge commercial hit, regularly appearing globally in the Netflix Top 10. Corlett recalls, for example, waking up one morning in a West Hollywood hotel and looking out the window to see a billboard on Sunset Boulevard emblazoned with a 12-metre-high image of his face. Yet after filming two seasons, the actor started to fret he was in danger of being seen as a one-dimensional hunk. In “Sabrina”, he’d seemed contractually obliged to wear his shirts permanently unbuttoned (if at all), while “Vikings” also traded on his physicality and looks. “I worried about being typecast,” he says. “I worried about my whole 20s being dedicated to one show.”
While staying in Byron in 2022, Corlett shared his concerns with a friend who organised a blind-date style lunch for him to discuss his career worries. “I had no idea who he was setting me up with. I was like, ‘What the [expletive] is going on?’ And we went to this hotel just outside of Byron and there was Matt Damon.”
Sitting on the terrace at the Byron at Byron, Corlett quizzed Damon for intel. He probed him about his career progression. He delved into the specifics about what it was really like on set with Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro and Heath Ledger. Eventually, he shared his fear of being permanently stuck as “the Viking guy”. Sipping his coffee, Damon considered the problem. “Well, don’t play another Norse explorer then,” he said.
Corlett took the advice on board and ran in the complete opposite direction for his next role. “He Ain’t Heavy” is a low-budget Australian movie with a tiny cast from the first-time feature director David Vincent Smith. Corlett plays Max, a raging meth addict who’s so messed up that he doesn’t even know how old he is. His sister Jade, brilliantly played by Leila George, is desperate to pull Max out of his tailspin. The plot revolves around her decision to kidnap and imprison him in a deserted house in a last-ditch attempt to help him get clean.
Corlett’s portrayal of Max is as raw as an open wound. It’s a guttural scream of a performance that hints at the underlying trauma propelling his character’s self-destructive instincts. Visually, it’s also confronting. To prepare for the role, Corlett dropped from 92 kilograms to 66, becoming an emaciated figure that makes Max’s frailties seem viscerally real.
“I felt it was necessary,” he says of the extreme weight-loss, for which he received guidance from medical doctors. “The physical transformation — just like putting on weight for ‘Vikings’ — is that kind of basic 101 of representing someone and seeing how closely you can physically and cellularly express their story. I was fuelled by the need to honour this person. I didn’t want to look back on this and think: [expletive] I could have done more.”
To cut the weight, Corlett stuck to a daily routine whereby he ate only one meal — usually a Thai stir-fry — and walked 20,000 steps. While he walked, Corlett would listen to an audiobook of Hermann Hesse’s “Siddhartha”, in which the title character becomes an ascetic and undergoes long fasts as part of his rejection of physical desire. “Walking and fasting, he feels a sense of connection to all things,” Corlett says of the book’s character. “I actually felt fuelled by it, felt energised by it, emptying myself. I was very inflamed after ‘Vikings’ — I had niggles all over my body from training and eating a lot. This was like a three-month cleanse.”
Despite its criminally limited cinema release, “He Ain’t Heavy” is a smart career move. On the one hand, playing a stick-thin junkie with a facial tattoo proves that Corlett can extend his range beyond the pretty-boy roles. In addition, of course, extreme physical transformations often lead to critical recognition due to the way they present acting in the most conspicuous way possible — see also Charlize Theron (“Monster”), Matthew McConaughey (“Dallas Buyers Club”) and Robert De Niro (“Raging Bull”).
But Corlett had a much deeper personal incentive. The underlying theme of “He Ain’t Heavy” is how to maintain a loving relationship with someone’s who’s been hopelessly sucked into the black hole of addiction. As Max’s mother, played by Greta Scacchi (actress Leila George’s real-life mother), explains: “There’s only so much you can do for another person, y’know.”
The idea resonated powerfully for Corlett as it mirrored his mother’s complex relationship with her brother Christian, who struggled with alcohol addiction. “He ended up on the streets and alcohol kind of dimmed his light,” Corlett says of his uncle. “He was described as being the light of the household and was this incredible guitarist, poet and singer.”
He was drawn to the character of Max as a way of trying to honour and connect with Christian and understand his alcoholism on a deeper level. Due to his uncle’s chaotic lifestyle, Corlett had limited interaction with the man from whom he takes his middle name. But he always felt a powerful “kind of kinship” with him. Growing up, Corlett would constantly play the Stevie Ray Vaughan and BB King records that Christian had left with his sister for safekeeping. One day, following an unexplained two-year disappearance, Corlett remembers his uncle calling out of the blue on the family landline. “I was the first person to speak to him — I felt such pride and it was a beautiful moment for me. But I didn’t know when I handed the phone over to Mum that my uncle was in jail and needed help to get out.”
Their final encounter came in Corlett’s late teens. His uncle has been taken to Gosford Hospital and was hooked up to an IV drip when the family were notified and came to visit. “He wasn’t the light that I’d seen in the photos of him, but his eyes were just as beautiful and I just remember him looking at me,” Corlett says, blinking back tears. “I wrote a poem about it and the last line was: ‘Look real hard son, your time here matters / So I’m holding up this mirror before you see yours shatter.’ Yeah, that was the last time I saw him.”
That poem is one of many that Corlett has written. In fact, he has compiled an entire book of poetry that he’s planning to publish. Nor is that his only extracurricular pursuit. Since 2020, he’s collaborated with the jewellery brand Merchants of the Sun, designing collections with profits donated to StreetSmart, a local charity that supports people who are homeless. Suffice to say, these are not the most likely endeavours for a sports-mad kid from regional Australia. But then, Corlett seems to embody a more enlightened form of masculinity that he wears with natural ease.
I ask if he’s familiar with “jock insurance”, an idea coined by the sociologist CJ Pascoe. In the early 2000s, she interviewed dozens of teenage boys at American high schools and was struck by how the majority clung to a rigid set of strict rules to avoid being seen as effeminate in a mercilessly homophobic environment. The exceptions, Pascoe found, were some jocks who could engage in more emotive and sensitive behaviours, safe in the knowledge their athletic prowess would safeguard their macho credibility. Did that more elastic freedom apply to Corlett as the school rugby captain? Not really, he replies. “I’ve always been in touch with my feminine side.”
Masculinity is one of the underlying subjects explored in “Territory”, Corlett’s latest Netflix drama, which takes place in a world of cattle barons and billionaire miners. As one woman in the show confides to another: “One thing I can’t stand about the Top End is the stink of testosterone.”
Corlett’s character, Marshall Lawson, is a freewheeling kid in his 20s who’s forced to return to his family cattle station following the death of his uncle. His family offers no male role models. His grandfather (played by Robert Taylor) is gruff and psychotic, his father (Michael Dorman) a struggling alcoholic, his uncle (Jake Ryan) a ruthless operator whose scheming leads to his uniquely ocker death of being eaten alive by a wild pack of dingoes. The generational pattern of violence and toxic masculinity is made explicit by Marshall’s bitter remark to his father: “You fight your dad. I’ll fight you. My son will fight me and we’ll all be big, strong Lawson men.”
Marshall is determined to escape that bleak legacy with its limited horizons. “I really wanted him to be like: ‘OK, well, what do I want instead?’ ” Corlett says. Indeed, he thinks of his character — and that of his love interest, Sharnie — as intrepid souls who are seeking freedom by unshackling themselves from their pasts. “They’re two really great representatives of the youth of Australia, trying to find a new way,” he says. Speaking to Corlett, you can’t help noticing that, personally, he’s already found one
