'How do I feel about celeb culture? I live in the woods'

Murray Bartlett, fresh from satirical thriller 'Opus', talks to Louis Chilton about his Aussie soap opera regrets, coming to America and becoming more visible with 'The White Lotus'

- Louis Chilton

"I can give you a little taste of forest if you like," says Murray Bartlett, grinning as if he were getting paid by the tooth. The Australian actor - whose wily, charismatic presence graced several of the past decade's best TV shows, from The White Lotus to Looking to The Last of Us – picks up his webcam and spins it around. Gone is the plain white interior of his Massachusetts home. In its place: a window overlooking a wooded vista. “It’s very cold,” he says. “But beautiful.”

He spins the camera back around. Bartlett does have the vaguely rustic air of a man who has turned his back on civilisation. The 53-year-old is styled almost as you might a cartoon lumberjack: ungroomed beard, a red-and-black-plaid shirt under a green fleece. It’s the sort of look that served him well in his effusively received one-episode role in HBO’s post-apocalyptic thriller The Last of Us – playing a kind-hearted apocalypse survivor who falls in love with a sexually inexperienced Nick Offerman.

That was the latest in a run of prominent gay roles for Bartlett, who came out himself early in his career. He was already in his forties by the time he was cast as Dom, a world-weary late bloomer in Looking’s queer San Franciscan bohemia. By the time he found wider recognition – and an Emmy win – as the psychologically unspooling hotelier Armond in the first season of The White Lotus, Bartlett was 50. Amid this burgeoning fame, his bucolic home in Cape Cod, shared with his partner, has been a godsend. “But I’m not Brad Pitt,” he says. “I have a manageable level of notoriety. If I go into cities, I might get a few people saying they like my work. I’m never mobbed. But if you’re sort of on the edge of celebrity, like I probably am, I find it useful to be able to step into it, enjoy it, and then step away.”