When Hugh Sheridan got his big break, never in his wildest dreams would he have imagined it would have lead to stardom, Logies and video shoots with sexy women and sand dunes as far as the eye can see. Packed To The Rafters has become a bona fide hit and for Sheridan who plays Ben Rafter in the show, it’s opened doors to a whole new world.

Now after earning the praise of his adoring fans and the nation at large, the young actor is turning his hand to music. It’s been a passion since his youngest days and it’s no surprise to see the young multi-tasker carrying it off so effortlessly.

Sheridan caught up with RedHotPie recently to have a chat about his new album Speak Love and his penchant for getting nude on set.

(RHP) Well let’s kick things off with a story we heard about Packed To The Rafters which involved you rocking up on set starkers…

(Sheridan) Yes, absolutely, it’s called Naked Surprise.

Naked Surprise eh?

Yeah, it’s this thing some friends of mine from the UK invented where basically, say if someone left the room to answer the phone or something, everyone who’s left in the room gets naked.

So it’s a spur of the moment kind of thing?

Oh yeah, so everyone says, Naked Surprise! They all get naked and then continue to do whatever they were doing- you know, cooking, reading the paper, anything. So when the person comes back into the room they totally freak and go ‘what the’.

Generally they don’t notice for a second. Obviously I couldn’t get Rebecca Gibney and all of those guys to get naked, so George Houvardas (Nick “Carbo” Karandonis in Packed To The Rafters) and I decided to do Naked Surprise on them and do one of the scenes as we would normally do it, but naked. So we waited until there was a scene that everyone was in, you know, Grandad, Michael Caton, everyone, we waited until they were filming, we got completely naked, George walked in and was like ‘hi Mr Rafter, Mrs Rafter’, and you know, it actually takes people a second to realize that you’re naked because you’re not running in and going ‘ta-da’ you’re actually just walking in as you normally would be but you’re starkers.

I tell you what, it was the funniest thing; so that became a tradition, we did it again this year, we did it for Telethon, everyone just loves it; we’re really putting Naked Surprise on the map. Naked Surprise sounds like a winner

Yeah, you know what, it sounds like a dessert, ‘no thank you, I won’t have the banana split, I’ll have the Naked Surprise’.

Now another skeleton in the old closet Hugh, you used to do ballet?

Oh yeah, I did everything. The ballet came about because at a very young age I decided I wanted to become a singer or an actor, well both actually, singing came first and then I moved into acting. My parents were somewhat hesitant, I think they were just a bit worried basically that I would never get a job, so they said to me ‘if you really want to do this then you have to do everything, dancing, singing, everything otherwise you just won’t get a job’. So I think it was a bit of a test too, to see if I really wanted to do it. So anyway I did it, and I kept singing and acting at the same time to hone my skills.

All my friends at football used to give me shit, they’d be like ’going to do your ballet are ya’ and I’d be like ‘ok, so you guys go and wrestle each other in the mud in your short shorts, I’m going to lift girls wearing next to nothing up onto my shoulders, and my hand may slip, that’s all I’m saying’.

No it was good, I don’t regret it at all, I only did it for five minutes, like a year or something, intensively, maybe a year and a half actually. After that I knew it wasn’t what I wanted to do so I auditioned for NIDA which is what I’d been aiming to do for my whole life and thank god I got in.

Ballet eh, what a way to pick up the girls, a totally untapped market, and you’d think a lot of the chaps in the ballet companies would be chasing each other wouldn’t you?

I tell you what, I thought they would be but no, I mean there were a few dancing around each other but there was actually quite a few hard core skater types, like real skin head guys and they’d get in there and be doing like hardcore pirouettes and jumping about. So yeah I think they’d all cottoned on to the ladies thing, they knew there was some good talent there so they’d get into it and then hop on their boards and skate off. I was like ‘what the hell is going on? Has Billy Elliot really changed the world this much?’

Well let’s skate over to your music, hearing the tunes and seeing your publicity stuff, you seem more Rat Pack than pop star.

Yeah I think it’s in that vein, I knew I didn’t want to do a pop record

That was a conscious decision then?

Oh yeah, absolutely, it wasn’t so much going for a Rat Pack vibe, I just wanted to stay away from the pop album thing. Music had been such a huge part of my life; obviously going from TV into music I was worried about losing a lot of musical integrity. I didn’t want people to be like ’oh here’s another loser from TV bringing out a pop album’ which is kind of what everyone expects you to do.

The album varies from heavier R&B stuff through to heavier Robbie Williams, and at times there are songs on there that are slower and more ballad like that maybe could be from that Rat Pack era, but they all have a heavy beat which keeps things contemporary.

I think part of the challenge of bringing out the album was that I wanted to create something that my fans from Rafters would like, but the challenge there is that the demographic ranges from grandparents through to kids; how do you find something that will work for all of them, the image we’ve gone for and the music is something that can appeal to everyone, that’s been the difficult thing, but I honestly believe there is something in the album for everyone, I really think we got there in the end.

And are you writing the material or sourcing songs written by other producers?

Actually I wrote as a kid and hated it, I knew how terrible I was, so when I started speaking to Sony about making an album they were like ‘are you going to write it?’ and I said ‘look, I don’t think I’m a very good writer’, and they really encouraged me to write.

The first song I wrote was track number six on the album called Never Let You Go. So I took it into them and they were like ‘You’ve got to keep writing, this is really a new part of you’. So then I wrote Your Love which is on the album and then Speak Love which ended up being the album title track.

The only problem we faced, was that when you’re creating something from scratch, getting everything together takes about four times as long because you have to create the whole song from nothing, where as if a song’s already been writing for you and comes in all produced then it’s just a matter of tweaking it and making it your own so I had to stop writing there and I had to source some songs because we just didn’t have long until Christmas which is when we wanted to release the record. So yeah, I think it’s probably been my favourite experience of the whole process, discovering that writing is my new favourite thing in the whole world.

And what’s your writing process like? Do you strum away on the guitar or tinker on the piano?

I play almost everything but really bad (laughs). For my birthday this year, I saved up and I bought myself a piano, so I’ve been spending quite a bit of time on it and I am getting better, so my aim is to keep sinking my teeth into it, but yeah, I don’t play anything well enough to play on the album you know, I didn’t want to punish anyone by making them listen to me play.

So how are things with Team Sony? How have you found it working with the label so far?

Pretty scary but it’s all good. I’ll be honest, I mean going to Sony, from my perspective, initially looked like this huge machine that had all my favourite artists when I was growing up, they were all signed to Sony, and in Australia, I mean there’s Idol, they get the kids and then they have an album and it’s all happening. So yeah it seemed like one huge machine, so I was scared to go in there because you hear those stories, people would be saying ‘you’ll end up singing other peoples songs, they won’t let you do what you want’, but honestly, I’ve never found that. I mean they encouraged me to write and they brought that side out of me; they’ve never once pressured me into doing something I didn’t want to do musically, I just feel really lucky. Now I just hear horror stories about other labels and I think thank God I’m with Sony.

So it’s a good fit

Yeah I mean initially I had a bit of trepidation, especially coming from a TV show, I was thinking ‘I know Delta’s made a lot of money but how much did she have to sacrifice?’ (laughs)

And how did you find the actual recording process? Were you working with some good crew?

We did it in Sydney in this little studio and when I went to do my very first demos, JD who was my A+R guy from Sony took me in to this studio and introduced me to this big dude with dreads, big, scary guy but he turned out to be a legend, he helped with my writing and I said to JD straight away ‘look, I think I want to do the whole album here with these guys’. One of the things I didn’t want to do was to produce with heaps of different people and get all these different sounds, especially since so many of the songs on the record are quite different. So that’s one of the great things about the record, that consistency, it’s a quality that can really make an album sound like an album.

So that’s where we did the whole thing which was pretty hard work when I was still doing Rafters you know. I’d do 5am till 6pm on Rafters, then head over and do whatever I could manage at the studio you know, it was crazy because that was when we were filming the wedding on Rafters, it was nuts.

So what’s next then?

I just want to keep writing, obviously I have the next series of Rafters to shoot but I don’t have any plans to leave Australia or anything. People keep saying ‘so when are you going to move to L.A and I just think ‘why would I leave a country that is supporting me?’ I just don’t see the point so I’m just going to stay here and keep at it.

Hugh Sheridan’s new album Speak Love is out November 27 through Sony Music.