Last King of the Cross gives Tim Minchin a mullet and a moral code and both suit him

Tim Minchin has a mullet. I need you to sit with that for a moment. Tim Minchin, the man who built an entire career on being the sharpest person in the room while barefoot at a piano, has a mullet and a gold chain and a linen shirt unbuttoned to a point that suggests the costume department had a specific brief. He plays Ezra Shipman in Last King of the Cross, and he is very good, and the mullet is also very good, and I am not entirely sure which of those things surprised me more.

Last King of the Cross premiered on Paramount+ in 2023, a ten-episode crime drama set in Sydney’s Kings Cross during the 1980s and early 1990s. The show is adapted from John Ibrahim’s memoir (co-written with Joe Hildebrand), which tells the story of a young Lebanese-Australian man’s rise through the nightclub scene at a time when the Cross was the most dangerous square kilometre in the country. Lincoln Younes plays John Ibrahim, and the show positions him as the moral centre of a world that does not really have one. Minchin’s Ezra is the older figure, the nightclub owner who takes Ibrahim under his wing and teaches him how the Cross works, which is to say: how to be violent strategically rather than indiscriminately.

Minchin’s dramatic range is no longer a surprise

Look, after Upright this should not catch anyone off guard. Minchin’s performance in that show, opposite Milly Alcock, demonstrated that he could carry dramatic weight without leaning on irony or distance. But Upright was a road movie, warm and slightly eccentric, and it allowed Minchin to play a character who was essentially a version of himself: smart, funny, emotionally avoidant, eventually sincere. Ezra Shipman is none of those things. Ezra is charming in the way that people who have done terrible things are charming. The smile arrives before the threat, and the threat arrives before you have finished processing the smile.

The show understands this dynamic and builds its first three episodes around it. You meet Ezra at his most generous, his most fatherly, his most reasonable. He is the man who keeps the peace. He is the man who knows everyone’s name. He is the man who buys you a drink and asks about your mother. And then, incrementally, the show reveals what that generosity costs, and who pays for it, and Minchin calibrates each shift precisely. He does not play the reveal. He plays the consistency. Ezra is the same person in episode seven that he was in episode one. The audience’s understanding changes. Ezra does not.

Lincoln Younes and the weight of the central role

Younes has the harder job. Ibrahim is the protagonist, the point-of-view character, the young man navigating a world that wants to use him. The performance requires Younes to be reactive for long stretches, watching and learning, absorbing the rules of the Cross before he starts to break them. It is not a showy role. It is a structural one. He holds the show’s perspective in place while the more experienced performers (Minchin, Callan Mulvey, Matt Nable) do the louder work around him.

The risk with this kind of character is passivity, and Younes does not entirely avoid it. There are episodes in the middle run where Ibrahim feels less like a character and more like a camera, moving through set pieces without shaping them. But when the writing gives him agency, particularly in the final three episodes, Younes finds a register that is specific and physical and genuinely menacing. The transformation from observer to operator is the spine of the show, and by the end it has earned its destination even if the middle episodes take the scenic route.

The Cross as a crime drama setting

The 1980s Kings Cross has been waiting for this show for two decades. Underbelly (2008) covered Melbourne’s gangland wars and became the benchmark for Australian true-crime television, but it never spent serious time in the Cross. The Cross got its own mini-series in Underbelly: The Golden Mile (2010), which covered the same era as Last King but from the police corruption angle. That show was fine. It was competent. It had the production values of a long-running franchise in its fourth iteration, which is to say: adequate.

Last King of the Cross has better production values and, more importantly, a better understanding of what the Cross actually looked like. The neon. The narrow streets. The specific way that a nightclub at 3am in 1987 sounded and smelled and felt. The production design team has built a Cross that is seductive and claustrophobic simultaneously, and the show’s directors (particularly Kieran Darcy-Smith, who handles the first two episodes) use the geography well. You feel the density. You understand why control of a single block mattered. You understand why the strip was worth killing for.

Is Paramount+ the right home for this

Honestly, I do not know. Paramount+ has struggled in Australia, caught between the local players (Stan, which has a clear identity, and the ABC’s iview, which has institutional loyalty) and the global giants (Netflix, Disney+, which have scale). Last King of the Cross is the kind of show that Paramount+ needs: distinctly Australian, adult-skewing, high-profile enough to generate conversation. But generating conversation requires people to find the show, and finding the show requires people to have Paramount+, and having Paramount+ requires a reason, and the reason is supposed to be shows like this. It is circular.

The show deserves a wider audience than it is likely to get. It is not perfect. The pacing sags in the middle, the supporting cast is uneven, and the show’s relationship with Ibrahim’s real-life story raises ethical questions it is not particularly interested in addressing. But Minchin is extraordinary. Younes grows into the role. The Cross is vividly rendered. And the mullet, honestly, the mullet is doing more dramatic work than most wigs in the history of Australian television. That has to count for something.