Fair Dinkum

For Lincoln Younes, acting is more than a profession: It’s a never-ending learning exercise in developing and forging human connections, and he, therefore, carries on with gusto in one of the world’s most competitive and unforgiving industries.

The son of a journalist single mother, Younes, along with his younger brother, spent a significant amount of his childhood on the move, chasing stories and reporting gigs for various Australian newspapers. Now, 27 years old and one of Australia’s leading young actors, Lincoln Younes’ life has yet to settle down into a boring routine. “I got very used to change and to adapting,” he says. “I’m quite malleable to given situations, which helps with what I do.” That said, though, his core values do not change that easily – especially when his goal is “to pursue what scares me. Because when you’re scared, you’re uncomfortable, and when you’re uncomfortable, you’re growing. If there’s something that I’m fearful of, then there’s something to be done with it.”

Here comes the question: Was Lincoln Younes, an actor with over a decade of experience, afraid of acting when he first started out? “Yes,” he responds. “I was an extremely shy kid, so acting was not the most obvious foray into a career for me.”

On the one hand, his connection to the entertainment industry was established fairly early in his life: As a teenager, he wrote film reviews for The Advertiser, one of the newspapers that his mother used to work for. Indeed, it was during that time that he discovered his interest in acting. “I thought I was going to be a journalist,” Younes recalls. “But it was seeing how film affected me that consolidated the fact that I wanted to be an actor.” On the other hand, his entrance into show business wasn’t exactly conventional: He got cast in a production of Peter Pan that was set to be performed in Japan by exaggerating his acting qualifications. “I had never sung or danced or acted before,” he adds. “But I was learning Japanese at the time, and I always wanted to go to Japan, so I kind of said I could do all of those things while planning to learn them once I got there. Then, I fell in love with the feeling of performing. In a way, it was a way of escaping from my shyness. It was also a way to build confidence and explore who I was.”

Younes has since enjoyed a successful career as a TV and film actor, appearing in the popular Australian TV series, Tangle and Home and Away, and in the American drama series, Grand Hotel. And in the spirit of constantly pursuing what scares him, Younes has even made an effort to branch out of TV and movie acting and into the theatre. “There’s no safety net! It’s live,” he says. “There’s no certainty in theatre, which is one of the reasons [why] I loved it, but it was also incredibly terrifying.”

Whether he is performing on set or in front of a live audience in a cramped theatre, however, the main draw of acting remains unchanged for Younes. “The wonderful thing about acting is the exploration of other people’s lives through experiencing it in an intensified period of time,” he describes. “People are what interests me the most. Things like empathy and compassion, and the psychology behind actions – that was always what I found the most interesting. With acting, you can experience many lives in one life, and have this very magnified experience of what it would be like to be in someone else’s shoes.”

Writer: Monica Dias

Photographer, Stylist, Men’s Grooming & Videographer: Al David

Editor: Eiko Watanabe

Special thanks to EPK Media (@myepk & @epkmedia - epkmedia.com)