You may never have heard of Michael Cusack. Chances are, that’s about to change.
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Michael Cusack is a big deal in America, but in Australia, few outside the avid fandom of adult animation have heard his name. Though that could soon change.
Cusack, 35, is a nominee at next weekend’s Emmys (the craft component, held a week before the main event, the Primetime Emmys) for his show Smiling Friends, co-created with American Zach Hadel.
“It feels very surreal because I’ve never won any award, not even at school,” he says from Wollongong, where he grew up, and to where he has returned from his base in Melbourne for a short burst of writing before flying to LA on Thursday.
“To be nominated for the Emmys before even being nominated for an Australian awards show feels huge, elite, almost too far,” he adds. “I’m very honoured, of course, it’s very nice. But I do find it funny that I don’t even know if someone at the Logies would know who I am.”
Cusack is self-taught, his work in the rough-and-ready vein familiar to watchers of Adult Swim, but with a distinctively Australian edge, perhaps best described as a lack of affect.
“I think it’s a little bit looser,” he says of his style, and of Australian animation more generally. “Americans love their really polished, kid-meets-adult kind of thing that’s going on right now. Our animation is rough and observational, sometimes grounded and boring, but that’s the joke. Like, that’s definitely my kind of thing because Aussies are just kind of like that.”
Cusack left high school with an ambition to be a filmmaker, and put $15,000 saved from his job at Subway towards a live-action feature, All Night Gaming, when he was 20 (he also got a bank loan for $10,000 to top up the budget, and later took a job washing dishes in a Queensland mining town to pay it off).
“It was very much like a Clerks, Kevin Smith, Richard Linklater kind of thing,” he says. “It was the best film school I could ever have because I just learned. Like, it was hell.”
Among the things the experience taught him was that much of the cost of making a movie goes on catering, and you’re often at the mercy of the weather. “So I was like, ‘I just want to draw what’s in my mind rather than having to film it’. So I taught myself animation.”
Once his first effort, a two-minute short made for the gaming community, caught fire, he was hooked. “It got 400,000 views in a few days, and that blew my mind,” he says. “‘Yeah, I’m gonna just keep doing this’.”
Cusack still releases material on YouTube, where Damo and Darren (better known as Ciggy Butt Brain), about a couple of drug-addled losers squabbling over a lighter, found him a huge audience more than a decade ago. But he’s also scored with the major broadcasters, with Yolo (originally a short about two nightclubbing women in Wollongong) and Smiling Friends both on Adult Swim and HBO Max, Koala Man (with a voice cast including Hugh Jackman, Hugo Weaving, Miranda Otto and Sarah Snook) on Hulu and Disney+, and the forthcoming Dad’s House on its way to Netflix.
Notably, all these commissions came from the States.
