Michelle Brasier was so convinced that she'd have a successful career in theatre and TV that she didn't ever consider having a backup plan.
"Maybe I was just an arrogant child. I was so determined that this was my destiny," the award-winning comedian, actor, singer and writer tells SBS News.
"I was never religious or spiritual or anything like that, but I always had this real, I guess, faith in myself. I had this idea that this was who I would be and that was unstoppable."
What she didn't expect was that her success would come from her ability to make people laugh.
"I thought that my success would come from my voice, which I think in a way it has. I think it's opened a lot of doors for me, but it took me a long time to be like, 'Oh yeah, I'm actually funny enough that if I don't sing in a TV show or whatever I'm doing, I'm still good enough to be there'."
Michelle Brasier's comedic chops have taken her all over the world. Source: Instagram / Michelle Brasier
A frequent collaborator with sketch comedy group Aunty Donna — often referred to as "the girl one" — Brasier has won awards at both the Melbourne and Sydney comedy festivals, featured on TV shows such as Mad As Hell, Thank God You're Here and Koala Man, and is a regular at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. This year she even released an album and performed a sold-out run of shows off-Broadway in New York.
But it took a significant sacrifice, loss, and a whole lot of debt for her to become the artist and woman she is now.
'Telenovela f***ery'
After a relatively sheltered childhood in Wagga Wagga, which she frequently points out is the teen pregnancy capital of Australia, Brasier moved to Melbourne to study at the Victorian College of the Arts. At the end of her first year, she was told she "didn't have enough pain from which to draw [on]" and was kicked out.
"They were totally right … I really didn't have enough life experience. I mean, I was 18 years old and I'd never lost a thing in the world," she says.
They set me on an incredibly important path. If I had stayed there, I would be not as creative and I wouldn't have a chip on my shoulder in the same way — and that chip has really driven me for a long time.Michelle Brasier
That pain and life experience came thick and fast: an accident with a heater the next year left her with third-degree burns to her legs. She was hospitalised for more than a month and had to learn to walk again.
In 2008, when Brasier was 20, her father John died only a week after receiving a pancreatic cancer diagnosis. Almost seven years later, her older brother Paul died from bowel cancer aged just 42 while she was performing on the other side of the world.
Then came the news that Brasier's family history meant she had a 97 per cent chance of developing cancer herself.
Brasier (pictured as a baby) lost her father John (second from right) and brother Paul (far right) to cancer within a few years of each other. Source: Instagram / Michelle Brasier
It taught her that "nothing is certain … nothing is a sure thing and nothing is solid".
"We can't always just assume that all the good things we have will stay with us," she says.
It's also made her "very pushy" when it comes to ensuring the people in her life look after themselves.
"If my brother had maybe gotten help earlier … he might've been able to find it [his cancer] before it was stage four, so I'm just really aggressive with my friends who still smoke, or friends who don't go and get that mole checked or whatever."
After being kicked out of drama school, Brasier has built a successful career in comedy, TV, and musical theatre. Source: Supplied / Paul Jeffers
Turning grief into comedy
Brasier channelled all of those feelings and lessons about loss, grief and living in the shadow of hereditary illness into her 2021 comedy-cabaret show Average Bear.
"When you are a storyteller of any kind, it's not really a choice... it's just like, 'When am I going to tell this story and how am I going to tell this story?'" she says.
Because that's what we do, we share our stories in order to make people feel less alone.Michelle Brasier
"We share our stories to feel seen and to make people feel seen by us, and I think there's no way that I could have kept it to myself — there's no way."
Despite the serious subject matter, Average Bear is littered with laughs: from anecdotes like how a music mix-up at her father's funeral meant Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire was playing as his coffin was lowered into the ground, to the original songs she performs with her partner and collaborator Tim Lancaster about the "fingering shed" at her high school and how grieving people always get given so much lasagne.
Brasier (right) has collaborated with her partner Tim Lancaster (left) on several stage shows, including Average Bear. Source: Instagram / Michelle Brasier
"I think I would not be as effective if I wasn't funny … I'd probably be a lovely writer and I'd be probably some sad poet who wrote these beautiful songs and sang them and was kind of annoying to be around and overly sincere — and I am all of those things, but I get away with them because I'm funny."
Brasier's recently-released memoir, My Brother's Ashes are in a Sandwich Bag, also draws on the highs and lows of her thirty-something years of life so far, leaving readers shedding tears of sadness one minute and screeching with laughter the next.
It contains musings on family, sex, being a teenager in the 2000s, womanhood, her great loves — namely dogs and the Fast and the Furious franchise — and how she does things she's afraid of because she's more afraid she'll die not having done them.
Dogs, especially Brasier's black labrador Eva, are one one of her great loves. Source: Instagram / Michelle Brasier
"The book is my greatest achievement because I think it surprised people. I think people didn't quite know what to expect, and then they read it and they went, 'Oh, f***', and I'm really proud of that. I'm really, really proud," Brasier says.
"The fact that it means something to people is really, really wonderful. People that I've never met, people that have never seen me in a show, people that I've never physically been in the same space with, and I think that's really special."
Doing good and (camp musical villain) evil
Outside of her creative work, she has also tried her hand at activism.
Last month, the federal government announced it would ban life insurance companies from using predictive genetic testing results in their underwriting assessments. The move came off the back of an advocacy campaign that Brasier was involved with, calling for an end to discriminatory life insurance prices and policies for Australians with a family history of cancer.
"You know how people talk about using your platform for good, I felt like I'd actually done something — and then there was part of me that was incredibly delusional and was like, 'Sorry, am I going to grow up and be a politician? Am I going to save the world?'. I got very carried away very fast," she says.
I just hope that the government sticks to their guns and they don't back down. That's my fear.Michelle Brasier
Even though she's "really, really tired" and her most recent holiday only lasted three days, Brasier's not planning on slowing down anytime soon.
Her next appearance will be on stage in Hayes Theatre Co and Griffin Theatre Company’s co-production of Flat Earthers: The Musical — "a big gay conspiracy theory love story set on the internet" — which opens in Sydney this month.
Brasier (right) is in rehearsals for her next project, Flat Earthers: The Musical. Source: Supplied / Griffin Theatre Company
"I'm so glad that I'm finally getting these roles because for my whole life I've just been wanting to do this, so I'm really happy to be in my villain era," she says.
"Anything really big and camp is what I'm interested in right now. I've done subtlety, I've done thoughtfulness, give me a hot second to just go for it."
runs at Hayes Theatre Co from 11 October - 9 November.
