WOMAN OF WORDS

She’s famously hilarious and one of Australian theatre’s hottest young writing talents, but actor and creative NAKKIAH LUI lurks in dark places for her best material

- RACHEL SHARP

Humour for me has always felt like some type of dirty trick,” says performer and script-writing prodigy Nakkiah Lui, over her first extra-strong soy flat white of the day. “Sometimes I feel so bad about it because it’s like going through a back door into someone’s head, but I think you need laughter to change hearts and make people ask questions.”

The 29-year-old co-writer and star of hit ABC series Black Comedy continues, “Even as a child I was annoyingly, insufferably filled with curiosity. Questions all of the time. Always about everything. I know everyone thinks I’m opinionated, which is probably true, but my opinions change. I like hearing what people have to say, as a writer primarily but also as a performer. I think it’s fun to write characters and have them grapple with what you’re trying to figure out.”

Curiosity was a compulsion that served her well, too, when she won a scholarship at age 15 to the prestigious Pearson College UWC in Canada (named after 1957 Nobel Peace Prize winner, the late Canadian prime minister Lester Pearson). “Being a curious person was cool at this school— and there were some pretty liberal teenagers there. We once had a village meeting debate on whether or not the school should have a sex room, because we all bunked in shared dorms,” she recalls with a wry chuckle. “That was really funny for me, because I definitely wasn’t having sex at all.”