Josh Helman has been kicked by Tom Cruise, caused chaos across the wastelands of Mad Max, and stood in a jungle clearing while Tom Hanks personally briefed his cast on the weight of the story they were about to tell. Ask him what surprises people most when they actually meet him, though, and his answer has nothing to do with any of it. “How insanely boring I am, probably,” he says — a man who admits there’s nothing he loves more than eating dinner at six o’clock and sitting on the couch.
That gap between the roles and the person is exactly where Andrew G’s conversation with Josh lives in this episode of Showtime, recorded ahead of Josh’s return to the stage as Biff Loman in the acclaimed Australian production of Death of a Salesman, alongside Anthony LaPaglia and Alison Whyte.
Josh describes performing as a kind of escape — not from his life exactly, but from himself. He’s drawn, he says, to emotionally complicated characters, particularly villains with a warped internal logic, because playing them offers a strange kind of catharsis: a safe way to explore the darker corners of human psychology without ever having to act on them. It’s a curiosity he traces back to childhood, watching Back to the Future on a ceiling-mounted television as a toddler and, later, memorising entire sketches from British comedy shows to perform for his friends.
That early obsession eventually turned into a plan. Josh admits he only ever auditioned for one drama school — QUT in Brisbane — with a backup plan to study writing if it didn’t work out. It did, and not long after graduating, he landed a role on the HBO miniseries The Pacific, a project he describes as almost unbelievable for someone his age and experience at the time. The bond formed on that shoot, he says, produced some of his closest friendships to this day.
One of the episode’s most striking stories comes from the production’s notoriously tough military boot camp. Cut off from phones and dropped in the middle of the Far North Queensland jungle, Josh and his castmates were confronted by a car pulling up in the middle of nowhere — and Tom Hanks stepping out to remind them, in person, that they were telling the story of real men and women who died in service of an idea worth protecting, and that it was their responsibility to honour that story as respectfully as possible. It’s a moment Josh clearly still carries with him, framing the discomfort of the experience as small and necessary next to what it represented.
The conversation doesn’t shy away from the harder years that followed. After The Pacific took him to the US, Josh spent roughly two years auditioning relentlessly, describing the grind candidly — including one particularly brutal audition that ended with him crying alone in a car park, certain he’d failed. He’s honest about how deeply perfectionism and negative self-talk shaped that period, and equally honest about what eventually helped: therapy, and a community of fellow actors, many of them fellow Australians, who commiserated together and reminded him he wasn’t going through it alone.
Death of a Salesman marks a significant milestone for Josh: his first-ever professional stage production in Australia, despite decades of screen work. He’s disarmingly candid about the insecurity that kept him away from Australian theatre for so long — a long-held, self-imposed belief that he simply wasn’t developed enough as an actor for the stage. Doing the play, now in its fourth season, has been one of the genuine pleasures of his career, even as he admits to still occasionally feeling like an outsider looking in at a theatre community that knows each other far better than it knows him.
Much of the conversation circles back to why a play written more than 75 years ago continues to resonate so powerfully today. For Josh, Arthur Miller’s work endures because it deals with struggles that don’t really change — the sacrifices between parents and children, the crushing weight of a capitalist idea of success, and the lies people tell themselves to make life more bearable. He draws a direct line between the play’s preoccupation with being liked over being valued and the mechanics of modern social media, where, as he puts it, likes have effectively become a kind of currency — something he’s had to consciously navigate in his own relationship with promotion and public life.
Asked what he hopes audiences take away as they leave the theatre, Josh doesn’t reach for a neat answer. He hopes, simply, that people walk out inspired to have a more honest conversation with someone in their own life — to move past the surface-level exchanges many relationships settle into, and ask themselves who they should really be talking to, and about what.
Death of a Salesman plays at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Melbourne, from 11–22 August 2026, and at QPAC’s Lyric Theatre, Brisbane, from 28 August–6 September 2026. Tickets are available at salesmanaustralia.com.au.
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