Matthew Mitcham is heading to the stage.
The diving legend, who became the first out gay Olympian to win a gold medal during the 2008 Summer Games, will make his U.K. acting debut later this year.
And the show looks like a perfect match.
Mitcham will play two roles in a revival of Strangers in Between, the Australian classic that depicts the highs and lows of growing up gay in rural Australia.
The 35-year-old may be an international celebrity now, but his rise to the top wasn’t linear. The all-time great athlete, and native Aussie, experienced many trials and tribulations, even as he reached the apex of his sport.
The play, an instant hit when it debuted in 2016, follows the journey of a young man who flees his rural hometown for Sydney, where he’s finally free to live his true life. The protagonist, Shane, befriends an older gay man and meets a casual lover.
Lost and confused, he relies on his chosen family for support.
While Mitcham grew up in Brisbane–a city of 2.28 million–his childhood wasn’t easy. His mother battled mental health issues, and he felt ostracized in a heteronormative world.
Mitcham was so uncomfortable with his homosexuality, he physically tried to suppress his feelings for men.
“I was so scared of it that I would actually tie a rubber band around my wrist, and every time I had a gay thought I would snap it, to try and associate pain and suffering with the gay thought. To try and train myself out of being gay” he told BBC in 2021.
For a while, the only place where Mitcham felt comfortable was the pool. But over time, he started to resent his sport. He couldn’t take hiding his sexuality any longer.
“Diving became this darkness which permeated the rest of my life,” he said. “I really hated it.”
Even after publicly coming out in 2008–right before the Beijing Games–Mitcham couldn’t escape the darkness. Fighting addictions to drugs and alcohol, his life was in a state of never-ending relapses.
“Every single time, because it was so awful, I would just promise myself with every single cell in my body that I would not use drugs again after that competition,” he told PinkNews in 2021. “And every single time I just couldn’t keep that promise to myself, because being inside my own head was so unbearable.”
Mitcham’s candor is one of the biggest reasons why he’s one of the most revered Olympians of his time. He doesn’t just present a manufactured image of himself.
Mitcham exposes himself to the world, warts and all.
He’s going to feel right at home on stage.
“We’re already perceived as superheroes—we do these amazing things. Nobody knows what’s going on inside our heads until we actually communicate it,” Mitcham told Vice News this year. “So nobody knows we are not that resilient, or we don’t know how to handle this, or we have really bad self-image, and that we are using all of these external things to make ourselves feel better. Nobody knows that, until we actually talk about it.”
Earlier this year, Mitcham decided to reveal his full body–along with his soul. He started an OnlyFans page in February, with a mission of spreading sex positivity (his boyfriend, Luke Rutherford, also has a popular OF account).
“The world isn’t sex-positive as it ought to be, in my opinion,” he told Outsports. “Celebration of the body. I think it’s a beautiful thing.”
The 34-year-old enjoyed instant success on the subscription-based service. In less than one month. he was in the top .86 percentile of OnlyFans creators.
His page certainly induces positivity, and a lot of other feelings, too…
Though it might be hard to imagine, Mitcham once had a tortured relationship with sex. For years, he battled chemsex addiction, an insidious problem in the LGBTQ+ community.
Today, the Olympian volunteers with the organization Controlling Chemsex, which works to combat the reliance on drugs in sexual encounters in the LGBTQ+ community, especially for gay men.
“Using drink and drugs is a really powerful way to change the way you feel,” he said. “Going to rehab, I learned lots of other tools to change the way I feel–much more effective ways to change the way I feel–that don’t have these added consequences.”
It’s apparent that being open is one way for Mitcham to heal himself, and help many others in the process. He thinks self-celebration should be encouraged, as long as it comes with self-awareness.
“Vanity is only a problem when it becomes out of balance,” he said. “Otherwise, I see it as a celebration of the human body. If you can get that balance right, and just celebrate beauty in the human form, then I think that’s a wonderful thing.”
They say the whole world’s a stage; and so far, Mitcham’s performance has been top notch.
We can’t wait to see what he brings to the theatre.
Scroll down to see what he’s already bringing to the camera…
m
Perfect
Rikki Roze
Thanks, Queerty, for featuring a gay man in an article instead of a str8 guy trying to make money off gay guys. This article is especially interesting because he is a good role model for the many gay men who are trying to kick chemsex and any other kind of addiction. He did it and his life has definitely taken a positive turn. He seems like a nice man. Good luck to him in his theatre career.
nm4047
100% with you there.
abfab
@ Rose
Straight guys have been making BILLIONS off of Gay guys for decades! More! It’s not like it’s a new thing. But knock yourself out trying to fiddle with demographics and mass media. It’s a done deal. Where have you been and why are you so naive?
I get your point tho so good luck with that. Q could care less. In fact, they appreciate your input.
banditboy
I’m waiting for just one Qweerty article where they tell an nice story and all the photos of the person being profiled are of him fully clothed in regular clothes rather than a bunch of nudes and skimpy clothes designed to get us all hot an bothered.
mujerado
Anybody who visits Queerty with any regularity knows what to expect. This spread shows Matthew in everything from fully dressed to nude, again, not surprising. Queerty knows who its audience is, and the people it features don’t seem to mind.
nm4047
and yet you keep coming back. Why?
flim
maybe don’t click on an article about an ex olympic diver then seeing as most of his professional life was spent in speedos
Pietro D
I’m not impressed. Queerty should have another approach or develop one to present its readers; just looking at tons of naked/semi-naked photos of one dude doesn’t cut it!
abfab
@ PD
Go else where then, and please don’t send us even one photo of you. I can only imagine what actually does impress you. You are demanding and impossible to please. You must be a joy in bed.
pete54
Great to see “our” Matt’s story. Just one quibble:
Luke is his husband, not his boyfriend. They were married a few years ago.
Joshooeerr
It’s always lovely to see naked pix of Matthew Mitcham. But the play he’s appearing in is not anybody’s idea of “an Australian classic”. It had a successful Sydney run in 2005 (not 2016), a previous production in London, and one or two regional productions. But it is not widely known or widely produced.
welshwind01
I thought Matt and Luke got married about a year or two ago…