The photographer has barely walked away to find his shot when Josh Thomas blurts out, “I’ve kissed him before”, which is not how many interviews begin. “I had to tell you,” he says, “for the shock value.”
It turns out that Thomas and our photographer Jackson Gallagher, who also acts, had a threesome in Please Like Me, Thomas’s much-loved ABC dramedy about the misadventures of a young gay man called Josh. Thomas himself wrote the threesome scene, in which Gallagher’s character is noticeably not attracted to him but wants to sleep with Josh’s boyfriend. It is in keeping with Thomas’s particular sense of humour that he would write a sex scene in which no one really wants him there – but as in much of his comedy, a funny story comes before self-preservation.
It is a shockingly hot morning in Abbotsford; the light is bright and hazy, almost as if the Yarra is giving off steam. Thomas used to walk the river searching for Salvatore, a seal who entertained locals during Covid-19 lockdowns. “He worked out if he left his friends he’d get all the carp and eels,” says Thomas. “I would walk through here all the time to try to see him.”
Thomas has lived in the area for more than a decade, but currently splits his time between Melbourne and Los Angeles. He relocated to the US after the success of Please Like Me, in which he played a neurotic, gay Australian called Josh; in LA he created Everything’s Gonna Be Okay, in which he plays a neurotic, gay Australian called Nicholas, who moves to LA to care for his two half-sisters after the death of their father. One of the sisters, Matilda (played by Kayla Cromer), is autistic; in later seasons, Nicholas discovers that he is also autistic – just as Thomas did, aged 33.
Like much of Thomas’s work, the concept behind Everything’s Gonna be Okay doesn’t immediately scream laughs: when he pitched it to Disney, he concluded his presentation with a confetti cannon. Likewise, he describes his new standup show, Let’s Tidy Up as being about “one time two years ago, when I had to tidy the house”.
“Does that seem like a fun idea?” he says, cringing. “It is not just about putting things away.”
Let’s Tidy Up explores what happened after Thomas was officially diagnosed with ADHD, which his psychiatrist accidentally described as being “incurable”. “Which is not good – you are not supposed to describe my personality as incurable,” Thomas says. “I am so worried that she’s reading all these articles and going ‘it was ONE word’ – she realised she wasn’t meant to say it as she said it and nine years later I am doing a tour about it.”
In the routine Thomas ruminates on whether he is “incurable” as he tries to tidy his house, a task he has never successfully finished. “I’ve never got to the end, not once. It has never been tidy for one minute. But I don’t know if I’m allowed to believe that it’s not going to get tidy, I have to believe that it will,” he says.
(The day after our walk, Thomas goes on ABC Breakfast and the chyron reads: “Josh Thomas says Let’s Tidy Up more fun than it sounds”.)
From our very first steps, Thomas is preoccupied with the mechanics of writing my piece. “There are some butterflies – will you put them in?” he says, pointing. I agree to do so. “OK, good. How about these nasturtiums? Lovely in a salad.”
He speaks quickly, often traversing conversations in ways that can leave you scrambling to keep up. For instance, when I ask him about food, as I have heard he has adventurous tastes, he says: “I ate whale carpaccio in Norway. Oh I shouldn’t tell you that, fuck. It was only a tiny bit! And I ate blowfish testicles. And ant eggs in Mexico – they call it Mexican caviar and I know when I say it that sounds quite racist, but it’s just what they call it. In America I tried to eat stinging nettles as everyone is always doing it on TikTok, but they’re disgusting. And I ate horse in Ukraine. I wonder how the lady who gave me the horse is doing now. I think about her all the time.”
He despairs at food culture in LA, where “no one eats anything weird …Americans can’t handle anything that is like me: unprocessed,” he says, in a mocking west coast accent.
How does he find living in LA? “Um. Next question,” he says. Well, how does it compare to Melbourne? He gives a dramatic sigh. “Melbourne is so nice, isn’t it? When you move overseas I think every Australian realises how nice it is to grow up in a country that’s so safe. I wouldn’t ever have thought that was my favourite thing about Australia, but it feels so calm here. It’s just really nice knowing that no one’s going to shoot you. You’d never have this in LA,” he says, gesturing at the river. “They’d have a fence up and they’d be worried about homeless people living here.”
Now he wants to talk about life in LA: “I like the stress of a big city, but LA has all the stress of a big city without any of the vibe. Everyone is so intense. Everyone is always working on their five-year plan, and I’m just trying to have a nice day at the party.”
He loves coming back to Abbotsford, to its quaint suburban streets and community gardens, to the bucolic farm that serves exotic teas and lemonade scones. “It is really cute. Nobody really talks about Abbotsford, but now it is up and coming.” He snorts. “It is so funny trying to convince everyone that your suburb is up and coming. That’s exactly what everybody does whenever I go back to Brisbane. They always want you to know it has changed, ‘it is metropolitan now, you’ll be shocked at how cool it is’.”
When he first moved to America, he found himself having to translate Australianisms for the first time – not parmis and schooners, but ineffable qualities like self-deprecation. “I would go on dates with boys who had seen the show and if I ever said something like, ‘I am an idiot’, they’d stop me to let me know that no, I’m not an idiot – which would make me feel like they thought I wasn’t joking. Americans are too aspirational and serious about themselves,” he says.
“A lot” of Australian creatives are moving back now, he says, and he has decided he is going to try to do the same. “So much of show business is now on Zoom that I don’t have to live in LA any more. The last show I sold was on Zoom.”
But in some ways, America’s relentless self-belief has been good for him, he admits: “If I’m enjoying what I’m doing and I think it’s good, I will say so now. Which, growing up, would have felt like such poison in my soul to admit. There is something nice about their self-belief. Absorbing 10 to 15% of that would probably be healthy, actually.”
Josh Thomas’ stand up show Let’s Tidy Up is touring Australia now
