Though he’s had a long run as a working actor, Australian born Black Sails and INXS: Never Tear Us Apart star Luke Arnold says he’s always been a writer. He says that’s related to his favorite part of acting – figuring out the strategy for the performance more than the performance itself.
For Arnold, getting into the space to create is vital. Drama school was followed by the start of his on-screen career, but while he was still writing, he felt a truth that will resonate with many aspiring creators: “For so long you’re so desperate for a paycheck and for something to happen in your career that for so long as a young actor, it’s hard to really focus on something [else],” he says while recounting the process of trying to find time to write in between auditions and jobs.
Arnold is talking with us as he readies the launch of a Kickstarter campaign around a new, high concept graphic novel that he-co-wrote with Chris “Doc” Wyatt. The story plays with shifting realities, twisting truths, and anti-science ideas. It sound expansive and timely, deploying multiple heavy-hitter artists (including Bill Sienkiewicz, Glenn Fabry, Jason Howard, Vince Locke, Brendan McCarthy, Andrea Mutti, and M.K. Perker) in collaboration with The Lab Press. This follows his three novels with a fourth on the way.
Arnold’s writing work is the result of a careful balance that grants him the time to carve out dedicated space to write, doing it in a way that seems to not just impact the work but also reinvigorate him when a new acting role comes along. That balance has come from having worked steadily and from legit financial planning.
“I do put time aside and I know I’ve got to make the acting money last through that time. And make sure there’s enough, all the rent and bills and everything are covered while the money isn’t pouring in the same way it does when you’re on an acting job that gives you a check every week,” says Arnold.
Working in this fashion gives Arnold the ability to not be pushed into bad creative decisions by necessity, accountable to his audience more than to the business side of things. It’s a luxury, to be sure, but one that he is happy to lean into with focus and humbleness (believe me, Arnold gets how lucky he is to be able to put one career down for a moment to pick up another, mentioning it more than once).
“If you start spending so much that now you have to make all your decisions based on finances, you start making the wrong decisions, you start taking jobs you don’t want to take.” says Arnold.
The desire to chase a kind of purity with the creative process extends beyond planning and striving for dedicated time. It also factors into how he chose to pursue this specific process, turning to Kickstarter.
“It takes so many barriers away, because so much in publishing and getting books out can be about this whole network of agents and publishers to the booksellers, to the bookstores, to the people in the bookstores recommending it to readers. And that can be such a great pipeline of people, but it can also limit what people have access to,” Arnold says. “Kickstarter is a very level playing field and very creator driven. So it’s a perfect place for this whole journey to start.”
While Arnold also lauds Kickstarter’s creative community and other benefits, he acknowledges the advantage his name recognition brings, though we both agree that it may, at times, be overstated.
“I think that the’ve got to be careful how I say this. I’m sure when I get opportunities like this, some part of it is that I have have a profile from a TV show. But I think it often gets overestimated, this idea of how much of an audience will follow you between different fields and different mediums,” he says, before I co-sign the thought by reminding that there is a big difference between following someone and giving them a credit card number.
At the end of the day, while some may click because of Arnold’s run on Black Sails (the pirate epic is about to hit Netflix in full), the idea for Essentials has to win them over. It’s why we’re talking with him, to be honest. And so, to end off and share info on the Kickstarter, let’s have him make that sales pitch in his own words.
“Essentials follows Harris Pax, who was the one scientist who foresaw this inter-dimensional collision happening where our dimension collided with another. Now objective reality has become untethered. And people’s subjective realities are becoming real, the way they see the world, their fears, beliefs, ideas are manifesting around them. This was a kind-of COVID baby. This was an idea that we were forming in 2020. A lot of it is dealing with that idea of what the hell do you do when everyone is in their own little world. And we can no longer agree on some basic facts, science, the world we’re in, and how hard is it to do what Harris tries to do, which is to go into these subjective realities and try and convince the person inside that they need to come back to the real world.”
You can check out the Kickstarter for Essentials on April 17.