I can give you a little taste of forest if you like,” says Murray Bartlett , grinning as if he were getting paid by the tooth. The Australian actor – whose wily, charismatic presence graced several of the past decade’s best TV shows, from The White Lotus to Looking to The Last of Us – picks up his webcam and spins it around. Gone is the plain white interior of his Massachusetts home.
In its place: a window overlooking a wooded vista. “It’s very cold,” he says. “But beautiful.
” He spins the camera back around. Bartlett does have the vaguely rustic air of a man who has turned his back on civilisation. The 53-year-old is styled almost as you might a cartoon lumberjack: ungroomed beard, a red-and-black-plaid shirt under a green fleece.
It’s the sort of look that served him well in his effusively received one-episode role in HBO’s post-apocalyptic thriller The Last of Us – playing a kind-hearted apocalypse survivor who falls in love with a sexually inexperienced Nick Offerman. That was the latest in a run of prominent gay roles for Bartlett, who came out himself early in his career. He was already in his forties by the time he was cast as Dom, a world-weary late bloomer in Looking ’s queer San Franciscan bohemia.
By the time he found wider recognition – and an Emmy win – as the psychologically unspooling hotelier Armond in the first season of The White Lotus , Bartlett was 50. Amid this burgeoning fame, his bucolic home in Cape Cod, shared with his pa.
