Nick Cave on how tragedy inspired his son to become an actor
Nick Cave lost his 15-year-old son Arthur in 2015 after falling from a cliff near Brighton. The Australian musician has frequently shared his experience of grief with fans via his website, The Red Hand Files, and he also discussed the loss in the 2016 documentary One More Time With Feeling.
In a recent entry on Cave’s blog, he responded to a fan who asked, “how can I stop feeling this pain and anxiety and sadness?” regarding her terminally ill twin brother. Cave decided to share a story about his son Earl – Arthur’s twin – and how he coped after his brother’s passing. He shared, “When Arthur died, one of our biggest fears was how it would affect Earl. The twins had never been apart and were extremely close to each other.”
He continued, “Susie and I were poised to pick up the pieces of a boy we thought would disintegrate under the devastating weight of the death of his brother.” Luckily, his school “set up a support network of therapists and counsellors in preparation for Earl’s return.” However, on his first day back, he said something that lingered with his father, “Whatever happens now is for Arthur.”
With this sentiment in mind, “Earl went back to school, and he applied himself and worked hard. We waited for the worst, but it didn’t happen. He took up drama and became really good at it. He had this weird sense of purpose around things and good stuff started to happen to him. He landed a role in a film while he was at school, and people liked it, so he got a role in another one and then another after that. […] He stayed close to me and Susie, and kept a sort of watchful, almost paternal eye out for us. We looked on in awe as he grew into an adult, borne along by a promise he had made one morning to his stricken parents.”
“I don’t know what lives inside of Earl, what he has had to endure, but he is a strong, funny, extraordinarily kind young man with a razor-sharp wit and a warm, generous laugh, and he seems to me to be doing well. I don’t know what darkness he carries, what angers and griefs, but I do know I can see his brother in there somewhere, as a condition of being, as a kind of meaning, as a direction taken.”
Earl Cave had a minor role in The End of the F**king World in 2017 before starring in the lead role of Simon Bird’s debut feature Days of Bagnold Summer and starring alongside George Mackay and Nicholas Hoult in True History of the Kelly Gang.
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