About Bryan Cooper is an actor, filmmaker and writer for both stage and screen based in Naarm/Melbourne. His writing spans multiple genres: political satire, horror, black comedy and drama. He is a graduate of the VCA Masters of Theatre Writing (2023).
His work is focused on pushing form and the writing itself, and combines comedy with foreboding. With a focus on shared humanity, mortality, and the weight of memory, mental illness and family, Cooper’s work asks the question:
‘What will people do when what is precious to them becomes threatened?’.
Cooper is a graduate of University of Melbourne (2015; 2019) and the Victorian College of the Arts (2023), and has worked extensively within university theatre (UHT, MUSC, FLW), and within the Melbourne independent theatre. In 2021, Butterfly Club produced his 2019 political satire The Coal Story, a medieval allegory for the inept Morrison Government. From this, Cooper pursued a collaborative experimental verbatim work with Plain English Theatre Company, called The Year of Our Lord, which was staged at MC Showroom in 2022. In 2022, Cooper staged his OCD debut in-yer-face work, Have a Good Night, Walter! at La Mama Courthouse. In 2025, Cooper staged a horror remount of Walter at the Butterfly Club, directed by Gabrielle Ward.
In 2023, his excerpt of his VCA graduate play, SIBLIN6S, was shortlisted for CYBEC Electric, and in 2024, shortlisted for the Australian Plays Transform We Write, We Rise Program. In 2024, an early version of his play The Euthaniads was shortlisted for the Martin Lysicrates Prize.
Screen Cooper’s work spans stage, and screen. His 2021 debut short film AVELINE won the August 2021 Award for “Best Original Screenplay” in the Paris International Film Awards, and was selected for the Venezia Shorts Official Selection.
In 2026, Cooper has been working on his second short film, ALAMEIN, a dramatic short of four monologues told by four people who all knew a man called Alamein, and the effect he has had on their lives.
Acting Cooper has acted extensively across classical and contemporary works. Cooper performed solo in Victoria Winata’s one-person play ‘no title’ at Gasworks for this year’s June ‘Open Studio’ Series. Earlier in 2026, Cooper acted in Stephen Packer’s TROPFEST finalist short ‘Unprompted’, and was featured in the Dumbhead music video for ‘White Knuckles’, directed by Finn Morris.
Cooper is currently unrepresented. For his showreel go to his Showcast page.
