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| balmain3001 Quote | Reply | | Brendan Cowell posted on: 3/28/2005 9:29:26 AM The diary ANNETTE SHARP 27 March 2005 Sun Herald Happy ending for Cowell ACTOR Rose Byrne and her talented ex Brendan Cowell have reunited. Byrne, who memorably starred opposite Brad Pitt in the blockbuster Troy, reunited with playwright and actor Cowell, cheeky tradesman Todd from the SBS lifestyle spoof Life Support and author of plays Bed and ATM, earlier this year. The couple had split early last year. After an 18-month relationship, it was Byrne's decision to relocate to Los Angeles for 2004 that prompted the pair to separate. When she returned home for Christmas after having failed in her one-year plan to take LA by storm, the couple apparently just picked up where they'd left off. Although the couple were reluctant to be photographed together at a recent event, Cowell appears unable to contain his delight at having reconciled with the beautiful 25-year-old actor, who had a small part in Star Wars Episode Two: Attack Of The Clones as the handmaiden of Natalie Portman's Queen Amidala. Referring to Byrne as his "girlfriend", Cowell, who has won the respect of his peers for his body of work as an actor, director, playwright and poet, understandably is feeling on top of the world. |
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Brendan Cowell
replied on: 3/28/2005 9:33:15 AM Cowell, the Next Big Thing MICHAELA BOLAND 5 March 2005 Australian Financial Review IF THERE IS ONE WORD FOR ACTOR, DIRECTOR, PLAYWRIGHT, POET BRENDAN COWELL IT IS 'PROLIFIC'. MICHAELA BOLAND REPORTS. Australian playwrights are not meant to be prolific, successful, gainfully employed. The local theatre industry doesn't provide for it nor, some would argue, encourage it. Sure, David Williamson has a guaranteed audience, Hannie Rayson and Tony McNamara are now main stage regulars, and Stephen Sewell is finally getting his dues. But these four have decades of toil behind them. Brendan Cowell is 28, prolific, successful and gainfully employed. He even has a mortgage. "My first ambition is to stay employed because, even though I'm on a really great roll, I'm pretty realistic," he says. "I've had the arse fall out of my career before but now I feel I've got a bit of respect, people want to work with me, I'm learning heaps but I don't really feel like I'm flying." For a young Australian playwright, he's positively rocketing. He has directed his own work, Bed, now closing, and was co-winner of the 2002 Patrick White Playwrights' Award, for the Sydney Theatre Company's Wharf 2 Blueprints program. That normally would be half a year's work for an emerging writer but it comes only a fortnight after the conclusion of both his Sydney Festival collaboration with Kate Champion and Force Majeure, Already Elsewhere, and the critically lauded, if little-watched, Fox 8 drama series, Love My Way, in which he acted and co-wrote. Of course, it would be too much if he also was one half of a thespian glamour couple but he is. Cowell is dating Rose Byrne. He knows he's in a terrific position, professionally, being offered the diversity and challenges anyone, of any age, would kill for. "Shit, yeah," he laughs. "Everyone kept saying to me you're really going to make it one day, you're the next big thing and I'm thinking, well, this is it. "I want to make bigger things that affect more people and get better at it, absolutely, and I'd love to touch more people and learn more and work with different artists but this is it," he adds. "If you get to wake up every morning and cast a spell, it's pretty great." Granted, Cowell has yet to cast the spell that ensures a sold-out hit during a metropolitan subscription season but now that Williamson has signalled his retirement, Cowell is the one most likely to join Rayson and McNamara, who were also part of the writing team for Love My Way. The test will be to build on the emotional vignettes that make up the script for Bed and counter Williamson's notion that younger Australian playwrights have little sense of narrative structure or character development. If that weren't enough, Julian Meyrick's recently published book, Trapped by the Past, Why our Theatre is facing Paralysis argued there was no middle ground for Australian writers to progress from the fringe to the mainstream. STC's Blueprints program is definitely fringe and Cowell concedes his next step might be a hurdle. "I guess I feel: 'How do I get on the main stage at Belvoir or the main stage here [at the STC]'?" he admits. "But I'm very cynical about cynicism," he adds of Meyrick's lament. "The time he spent writing that book he probably should have spent making theatre. "A lot of people really enjoy sitting around with a chardonnay just saying how bad everything is. Don't waste your energy on that conversation, pour it into something." Cowell's verve comes from a degree in Communications from Bathurst's Charles Sturt University that taught him self-reliance. He acted when young but he wasn't interested in acting school. "The great thing about that course, which I don't think acting courses give you, is [the tip that] you are your industry," Cowell explains. "A lot of actors get out [of school] and wait around expecting to be plucked and used, whereas that course says you have to play your violin and you have to find ways to do it. So I came to Sydney and just said 'Right, let's go'." After a minor post-graduate slump, in which he sold wine for six months, he started collaborating with Anthony Hayes and reading poetry at Glebe's Friend in Hand pub. "I did hundreds of poems, it's kind of how I started writing," Cowell says. "I thought if I can hold an audience and entertain them thoroughly for half an hour then I think I can write a play." He wrote a play, Men, for him and Hayes to perform and a short film. Men sold out and moved to Belvoir Street Theatre and the short was a hit. "That was the last time I wrote to get it up and have a go," he says. "Then I started to go, you know what, 'I think I'm a writer, I can do this'." He's barely slowed since. As a writer he came to prominence at the 2002 Sydney Festival production ATM, a witty collection of exchanges set around an automatic teller machine. At that same festival, he met Kate Champion, who asked him to collaborate on her next work. "You hear the words poetry and dance and you think, Jeezus Christ, how to turn off an audience," he laughs. "They're ugly words on their own but put them together, f hell! But I think Already Elsewhere worked. I'd do a dance piece again, it's the easiest work I've ever done." Cowell maintains a cool self-assessment that shows in his often brutal writing. You need it in theatre, where you might find fame but rarely fortune. A British tour of his play Rabbit in 2003 was the only moment he felt flush from the stage. "Thank God for television," he says. |
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