Gareth Isaac has played the lead role of Buddy the Elf more times than he can easily count, and he still gets nervous before every single performance. Not occasionally — every time. It’s the kind of admission that could sound like a weakness from most performers, but in this episode of Showtime, Gareth reframes it as something closer to a badge of honour: the moment nerves disappear, he says, is the moment you’ve stopped caring.
Recorded ahead of the Melbourne premiere of Elf the Musical at the brand-new Crown Live theatre, Andrew G’s conversation with Gareth moves well beyond Christmas cheer into some genuinely candid territory — mental health, rejection, and what it actually feels like to build a joyful character while managing very real anxiety and depression behind the scenes.
Gareth’s path to originating the role of Buddy started, fittingly, in community theatre on the Central Coast of New South Wales. He’s unusually passionate on the subject, pushing back on the idea — one he says persists even within the industry — that community and amateur theatre are somehow lesser than professional work. He points out that the word “amateur” simply means “for the love of,” and some of his closest friendships, including a decade-long Dungeons & Dragons group, trace directly back to shows he did with teachers, accountants and forensic scientists who just wanted to tell stories together.
That love of performing revealed itself early and, by his own account, chaotically. Raised on a steady diet of British variety comedy thanks to a Welsh father and a Geordie mother, Gareth became the class clown at a school in regional Australia in the ’90s, landing in trouble often enough that “put your name on the board” became a running theme of his childhood. The first time he remembers deliberately trying a joke and landing it was in a Gosford Musical Society production of High School Musical — an audition he only went to in order to see a girl he liked, playing a background announcer role he decided to make genuinely funny almost by accident.
The conversation takes a more serious turn when Gareth speaks openly about performing while living with depression and anxiety. He describes days doing high-energy, physically demanding shows while privately working out which parts of his mindset are the illness talking and which are reality — a distinction he says takes real, ongoing effort. He no longer reads his own reviews, relying instead on his partner to screenshot the parts worth seeing. On rejection, he’s arrived at a hard-won philosophy: most casting decisions have very little to do with you as a person, however much the process can feel personal in the moment.
Gareth is refreshingly honest that he doesn’t believe anyone ever fully “solves” imposter syndrome. He describes it as an ongoing balancing act rather than a destination — some days steady, some days knocked off balance by a stray comment or a hard show, and always requiring a return to the basics of why he does this at all. That same principle shows up in how he thinks about stage nerves: citing what he learned during his own postgraduate voice training, he points out that nervousness and excitement are, chemically, the exact same reaction in the brain. The only real difference is the lens you choose to view it through.
Buddy, he says, was an unusually appealing role to take on precisely because there was no existing Australian version to measure himself against. Unlike “replica” productions such as Wicked or The Phantom of the Opera, which reproduce a show’s staging, costumes and blocking almost exactly wherever it tours, this production of Elf was built from the ground up — new choreography, new sets, new costumes — giving Gareth genuine creative latitude to shape the character himself. He describes the role as teaching him just how far he could push hyperactivity and physical comedy on stage, so much so that stepping into the far more restrained role of Ogie in Waitress afterward required consciously “turning the tap back off.”
Some of the episode’s most affecting moments come from what happens after the curtain falls. Gareth recalls a fan who came to see Waitress for the fourth or fifth time, telling him after a show that the character of Dawn shared a name with a family member she’d recently lost — a small, quiet reminder, he says, of why musical theatre matters beyond the spectacle of it. He’s equally thoughtful about the differences between audiences city to city, noting that previews in a new town are often more meaningful to him than a glossy opening night, purely for the chance to discover what actually makes a fresh audience laugh.
Alongside performing, Gareth runs his own vocal coaching studio, deliberately pricing his lessons below market rate. His reasoning is straightforward: he doesn’t believe access to your own voice should depend on how much you can afford to pay, and he sees teaching as a direct way of feeding what he’s learned from big shows and experienced mentors back into the wider community.
Asked what he hopes audiences take from Elf beyond the songs and spectacle, Gareth points to its underlying message of found family — the idea that the people you’re meant to be with aren’t necessarily the ones you were born to or raised by, and that those connections are out there to be found wherever you go. It’s a theme he says runs through his own career just as much as it does through Buddy’s journey from the North Pole to New York.
Elf the Musical, starring Gareth Isaac as Buddy, opens at Melbourne’s new Crown Live theatre from 27 November 2026. Tickets are available at elfthemusical.com.au.
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