Matt Okine

Brisbane, a Ghanaian father and a drama degree instead of the AFL

Matt Okine was born in Brisbane on 12 April 1985. His father had emigrated from Ghana; his mother died of breast cancer when Okine was twelve, a fact that has sat underneath a great deal of his work since, usually at an angle rather than head-on. He went to Ironside State School and then Brisbane State High School.

He was good enough at Australian rules football to be invited into the AFL's NAB Rising Stars programme, and turned away from it to study drama at Queensland University of Technology, graduating with a bachelor's degree in acting. That training shows in the stand-up: the material is built as narrative with characters in it rather than as a run of set-ups and punchlines, which is also what has made the jump to scripted television comparatively easy for him.

Speaking on the For the Love of Play podcast in March 2026, Okine talked about the pain he suppressed after his mother's death, about becoming a father, and about the pleasure he takes in writing music for children — the three threads that the current touring show pulls together.

Breakfast radio, an ARIA, and a first novel

Okine's national profile was built on triple j. He co-hosted the network's Breakfast show with Alex Dyson from 2014 to 2016, taking over from Tom Ballard. The pair's on-air relationship has outlasted the job itself; their Matt and Alex podcast now sits on LiSTNR.

The stand-up credentials predate the radio. He took the Melbourne International Comedy Festival's Best Newcomer award — shared that year with Ronny Chieng — along with the festival's Director's Choice award, and has been nominated for a Helpmann for Best Comedy Performer. In 2015 his album Live at the Enmore Theatre won the ARIA Award for Best Comedy Release. He has also co-founded Diver City, a children's music project that has drawn ARIA and AIR recognition.

In 2019 Hachette Australia published his debut novel, Being Black 'n Chicken, & Chips, which reworked the autobiographical ground of his early solo hours into fiction. The same year he appeared in the Hollywood adaptation Dora and the Lost City of Gold; other screen appearances include Stateless and Nine Perfect Strangers.

The Other Guy, then rebuilding Mother and Son

The work that moved Okine from comedian-who-acts to writer-producer was The Other Guy, which ran on Stan from 2017 to 2019. He wrote it and starred as a radio host whose relationship has just collapsed — material drawn from his own life — and it was picked up internationally, including by Hulu.

Then came the bigger swing. Okine created, with original author Geoffrey Atherden, a new version of Mother and Son for the ABC, playing the adult son opposite Denise Scott's mother. He writes it with Sarah Walker, Tristram Baumber and Tim Spencer, and executive produces. Series one premiered on 23 August 2023 and ran eight episodes to 11 October 2023. Series two, six episodes, premiered on 24 September 2025 and finished on 29 October 2025.

The awards attention has followed the show rather than the stand-up. Okine was nominated for Best Lead Actor in a Comedy at the 2024 TV Week Logie Awards, losing to Rob Sitch for Utopia. Mother and Son was nominated for Best Comedy Series at the 2025 AACTA Awards, and Okine and Baumber were nominated at the 2025 AWGIE Awards for the episode Bad Influence. Two further screen projects, Class Clowns and Gnomes, are listed against his name for 2026.

Where things stand in late 2026

Nothing has been announced about a third series of Mother and Son. What Okine has done instead through 2026 is go back out on the road properly for the first time since 2020, with No. 10 Hope St, billed as his first national tour in six years and promoted on the line that his job is "making mistakes so that you don't have to".

The run has been deliberately unglamorous in scale and spread across the whole year rather than banked into one festival season. It opened at the Brunswick Picture House in Brunswick Heads on 5 March, played HOTA on the Gold Coast on 19 March and the Courtyard Studio at Canberra Theatre Centre on 21 March, then took a six-night season in the Fairfax Studio at Arts Centre Melbourne from 7 to 12 April for the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. After that: The Rechabite in Perth on 8 May, the Comedy Store in Sydney on 15 May, the Augathella Spiegeltent for Wynnum Fringe on 27 June, Adelaide's Rhino Room on 14 August, two shows at The Hound Small Bar in Cairns on 16 August — the 6.30pm one sold out and a 4.30pm matinee added — Kings Beach Tavern on the Sunshine Coast on 3 September, Comedy Store Too in Sydney on 4 September, and Tasmania at the start of October, the Greek Club in Hobart on the 2nd and Du Cane Brewery in Launceston on the 3rd.

The year ends with something closer to his radio life than his comedy one. Okine and Dyson have revived 5 Raves in 5 Days, a stunt from their triple j Breakfast years, as a tenth-anniversary tour announced in early August 2026: Crowbar in Brisbane on 29 October, Manning Bar in Sydney on 30 October, Amplifier Bar in Perth on 31 October and 170 Russell in Melbourne on 2 November, doors at 6pm.

What No. 10 Hope St actually is

The show is a tight hour — the Adelaide listing timed it at 7pm to 8pm — and it is sold on a three-word summary that the venues have all repeated without elaborating: family, failure and full-body ringworm. That last item is the engine of the thing, a domestic medical humiliation used as the way into the other two.

The rooms have been chosen to suit that. Fairfax Studio, the Rhino Room, a small bar in Cairns, a brewery in Launceston: these are listening venues rather than big comedy barns, and the material is confessional enough to need them. There is no support act billed on most dates; the Cairns and Sunshine Coast shows were presented by local promoters as single-hour bookings.

No published review of No. 10 Hope St had appeared as of early October 2026, which is a fair reflection of how the tour has been run — scattered single nights in regional and secondary markets rather than a reviewed festival residency.

What critics have said about him before

The most useful critical record of Okine as a solo performer is also the oldest. Reviewing his debut hour Being Black & Chicken & Chips at the Soho Theatre in London, theartsdesk gave it three stars on 30 August 2013, calling him an assured performer but finding the storytelling long on set-up and short on punchline, and arguing that he backed away from the material about race and family history that was the most interesting thing in the room.

That criticism is worth holding up against the current hour, because the thirteen years since have been spent almost entirely on the thing he was accused of avoiding: a novel about a mixed-race Brisbane adolescence, a sitcom built around a son and his mother, and now a touring show whose stated subjects are family and failure. Whether the stand-up has caught up with the screen writing is the open question, and the absence of reviews from this tour leaves it open.