Despite being busy on the promotional trail for his new book Plum, a fictional story of an ex-NRL player living in Cronulla, award-winning writer, actor, director, and fanatical Sharks fan Brendan Cowell found time to pay a special visit to PointsBet Stadium earlier this week.
An actor with a long list of credits to his name, in theatre, television and movies, included amongst them appearances in Game of Thrones and the upcoming Avatar 2, Cowell toured the Sharks facilities alongside CEO Dino Mezzatesta, bumping into some of the Sharks NRL squad along the way.
Cowell met the Sharks big boys in Andrew Fifita, Braden Hamlin-Uele and Royce Hunt while they were sweating it out in the gym, dropped by the office for a chat with coach Craig Fitzgibbon, then caught up with new recruits Nicho Hynes, Matt Ikuvalu and Jayden Berrell, as well as their Sharks teammates Toby Rudolf, Aiden Tolman, Jesse Ramien and Blayke Brailey.
While the boys wanted to talk of Cowell’s experiences on movie and television production sets, Brendan was more interested in discussing their progress during the pre-season and the Sharks prospects for the year ahead.
Conversation then turned towards Cowell’s latest piece of work, that being the novel Plum, the story of Peter ‘The Plum’ Lum, a 48-year-old ex-NRL star living with his son and girlfriend in Cronulla.
Plum features a lead character who starts his day with a jog along the beach, followed by a shift at the airport towing the planes out onto the tarmac, before heading off to the pub for beers and bets with his mates.
Perhaps some would consider him to be living the dream, that is until the day he suffers an epileptic fit at work, nearly directing a plane full of passengers into a landing aircraft.
Plum discovers he has a brain disorder as a result of the numerous head knocks and concussions suffered on the footy field and according to his neurologist, needs to make some changes or he’s heading for dementia.
A story about men, about footy, about the beauty of words and the healing nature of poetry, Plum is mostly about what it takes to be a decent human being after the final whistle has blown and all you’re left with is yourself.
Plum, Cowell’s second novel, is available in all good book stores (and as Brendan says “in some not-so-good ones as well”).
