AKTA INTERVIEWS : JOE TRACINI – TO ALL ACTORS WHO FEEL LIKE THEY'RE FAILING

Writer: Takunda Muzondiwa

Joe Tracini on Mental Health and the Art of Being Bruised and Beautiful

Joe Tracini (Photo: Akta Photography)

I An Introduction to Honesty and Vulnerability

Rarely is it that someone's work tears you open like a cut fruit left out in the sun, equal parts sweetness and bruise. Joe Tracini’s work does that. It brutalises you in the gentlest way, leaving you tender, aware again of your own fragility. Even more rarely is it that, within the same breath, that work coaxes laughter from you. Laughter that pries the jaw open, laughter that rises from some secret cavity in a belly thick with joy, laughter you believed you had exiled during the long shadow of adolescence. A ghost hovering over your adulthood.

That contrast, the ache and the absurdity, the wound and the wonder, is what it feels like to witness Joe. His work lives in that impossible space where despair and delight hold hands. To watch him perform is to be reminded that joy does not cancel sorrow; it survives it. And that, somehow, is more moving than either on its own.

II The First Flicker

Many first met him as Dennis Savage on Hollyoaks, where his comic precision and emotional clarity made him one of the show’s most memorable characters. Others know him from Coming of Age, My Spy Family, or his stage work in Spamalot and the Norwich Theatre pantomimes. 

But Joe’s most profound work is his most personal. His memoir Ten Things I Hate About Me and the award-winning Channel 4 documentary Me and the Voice in My Head, in which he performs opposite “Mick,” the embodiment of his Borderline Personality Disorder, have made him one of the most honest and necessary voices in British storytelling. 

Joe introduces himself plainly: “I’m an actor, primarily. I’m also a presenter and a writer.” The simplicity is disarming, mostly because the truth behind it is far messier. Performing is not something he chose; it is something his life insisted on. “I’ve been performing for as long as I can remember. I was making jokes before I could talk properly, doing magic tricks by the time I was ten. None of it was planned — it was just what I did to get through the day.”

Later in life, he would come to understand just how essential that instinct was. After a decade of consistent work, he stopped booking jobs. It was sudden. It was painful. That stretch, he says, is when he first recognised performing as a lifeline, not just a career.

“When I stopped getting work, I realised, oh sh*t, I desperately need this. I’ve got no idea who I am without it.”

III Learning to Be a Person Without a Role to Play

Joe’s relationship with creativity is not romantic. It is pragmatic, raw, and rooted in childhood survival. “Growing up, I created because it helped me get through every day,” he says. “My head was noisy. Performing let me build something quieter.”

As an adult, that instinct became a career. Until suddenly, it did not. That long period without work left him feeling quietly dismantled, piece by piece, until he barely recognised the shape of himself. He couldn’t watch TV, couldn’t bear to see other actors succeed. “I hated it,” he says. “I was so resentful, and I didn’t want to be. But I didn’t know who I was without the job.” It was not simply unemployment that hurt him. It was the collapse of a structure he had used to understand himself. Work had always told him who he was, where he belonged, and where to place his emotional weight. Without it, the days lost shape. Time became gelatinous. Every hour felt like a dare. And in the absence of any script to follow, the quiet in his mind, which performing had once softened, returned with sharp edges.

This was the beginning of a difficult education. He had to learn how to be a person without a part to play. He had to separate self-worth from visibility. He had to exist in rooms where no one was waiting for him to transform. It required confronting a truth he had long avoided. When the industry fell silent, he still had to live inside the same brain, the same body, the same history. Creativity had always offered him a way out. Now it demanded he learn how to remain.

IV The Mind as Both Companion and Opponent 

Actors spend their lives trying to understand human behaviour. Yet when the harshest behaviour comes from your own mind, where do you turn? 

Joe speaks candidly about his experiences with BPD, how hostile his thoughts have been toward him, and how that hostility has shaped the kind of work he accepts. His openness about mental illness began out of necessity. His early posts about his mental health struggles online carry the texture of rupture. The words spill in jagged, insistent bursts, the way a wound floods before it can clot. It is not curated or polished. It is a man choosing sound over suffocation. He shares because the alternative, the quiet and the isolation has proven itself far too deadly.

His openness about suicidal ideation and intrusive thoughts has made him a vital voice in mental health conversations, even though he never intended to become one.

“I talked about my head because I had to,” he says honestly. 

“The most dangerous thing for me would have been to stay quiet.”

Yet that honesty also carried professional consequences. “People want to employ people who aren’t maybe going to kill themselves,” he says, not flippantly but bluntly. His social media presence; brutal, funny, exquisitely transparent, became a double-edged sword. It helped people. It also made him terrified he’d never book again.

He smiles, but the reality behind the sentence is sharp. By being honest, he risked being categorised. By being vulnerable, he risked being dismissed. His social media became both a lifeline and a liability. 

Slowly, he began to understand that creativity had always been something his brain generated, whether or not the industry validated it. “Sometimes my creativity goes quiet,” he says. “Sometimes it saves me. But it always comes back.” That truth, he admits, is more comforting now than any professional milestone.

“It paralysed me for a long time,” he admits. “Not because I was ashamed of being honest, but because I was so worried I’d never work again.”

Finding a boundary took years. He still doesn’t pretend not to care what people think. “I wish I didn’t care, but that must be a different life”  but he no longer lets that fear determine his honesty. He protects himself now not by staying silent, but by telling the truth in a way that’s intentional and measured.

His rule is simple: anything that safeguards his wellbeing comes before optics.

And sometimes safeguarding looks like something as practical as an app that locks him out of social media until 1pm.

V Men Are Not Born from the Ashes of Martyrdom

​​The history of acting is littered with stories of breakdowns, burnouts, and disappearances. The industry consumes such narratives with a voyeuristic appetite. Yet rarely does it ask what it means to build a life inside that tension, to find a language that can hold both performance and pain without collapsing. Joe has.

One of the most important things Joe says, the thing he repeats with complete clarity, is this: your trauma is not artistic material.

“I’ve seen people dig into trauma because they think it makes them better actors,” he says. “That’s not acting. That’s just reliving things in front of people. Alone.”

He refuses to be one of those actors. “I might have been a better actor if I had,” he says, “but I wouldn’t have been a safe one.” Instead, he approaches craft the way he approaches honesty: with intention, not sacrifice. 

“I spent years trying to die. Now I try to make peace with my brain, and I do it in public.”

There is no triumphant arc in Joe’s story. No clean recovery. What he offers instead is something far more meaningful: the courage to keep choosing better, tiny decision by tiny decision.

Every day, he chooses transparency over silence. Boundaries over burnout. Craft over chaos. Life over the alternative.

“What makes me resilient?” he repeats, thinking it over. Then he shrugs. “I’m still here.”

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