Inside ANDY’s ‘Can’t Wait’: How a Queer Footy Fantasy Went From Moodboard to Screen

The first conversation about ANDY’s ‘Can’t Wait’ happened over dumplings.

By then, the Australian pop artist had already worked out much of the world he wanted to create. Football would provide the visual language, but its familiar ideas around aggression, masculinity and physical contact would be pushed somewhere more sensual, playful and explicitly queer.

Director Harry Welsh remembers ANDY arriving with more than a loose pitch.

“Andy’s initial concept was so solid, and beautifully laid out in his moodboard,” Welsh says. “I then built a treatment, with what I saw for the video, and it grew naturally from there.”

That first meeting also established the working relationship behind the film. By the time production began, Welsh says the pair had developed considerable trust.

The finished video stars ANDY alongside rugby league great Ian Roberts and former West Coast Eagles player Mitch Brown, with Brown playing ANDY’s romantic interest. Welsh directed the clip, with DIVISION producing.

The film takes recognisable pieces of sporting imagery — tackles, uniforms, locker rooms and bodies colliding — and changes where they lead.

For ANDY, the concept grew from his own experience of growing up gay around rugby culture. He has described an environment where physical closeness between boys could be routine while acknowledging his own attraction carried very different consequences. That tension became the starting point for both the song and its visual treatment.

Welsh’s role was to translate that personal idea into a film.

His visual references drew partly from sports advertising and fashion filmmaking, using the attention both forms give to bodies while taking the imagery somewhere rougher and sweatier.

From there, the production expanded into a much broader collaboration.

DIVISION produced the project, with Juliette Houdent producing and Genevieve Triquet and Alex Cook among its executive producers. Cinematography is by Jack Birtles, with Flora Hadaway on production design, Tori Knowles across creative direction and styling, and Tiggy Treloar on choreography.

Lula Cucchiara created the stills photography and cover imagery, while Geri Docherty edited the film and Wesley Grant handled colour.

Welsh credits DIVISION, the crew and people who volunteered their time across the cast and production with helping get the project made.

The shoot itself was less controlled than the finished images suggest.

“Practically, the shoot was tricky,” Welsh says.

He singles out Houdent, who was balancing production of the music video with her full-time role at DIVISION.

“A huge undertaking, with so many hurdles, and so much quick thinking,” he says. “And it rained all through day one!”

Even with those complications, Welsh remembers the atmosphere differently.

“Regardless, the shoot had a radiant vibe.”

For Treloar, the central problem was movement.

The choreography needed to remain recognisably connected to football without simply reproducing gestures audiences had already seen countless times.

Treloar did not grow up playing football himself, but says he had been surrounded by the culture through games, school sport, television and media.

“Boys culture and locker room culture however, is something I feel like all queer people get to learn their way around pretty quickly,” he says.

Rather than invent an entirely new physical vocabulary, Treloar started with movements already embedded in the sport.

Stretches, tackles, grappling and the proximity between players became raw material.

The question was what might happen if those movements were allowed to continue somewhere unexpected.

Treloar describes the approach as asking: “what if you pressed pause on that moment and took it in a new direction?”

A tackle became one of the clearest examples.

“What if they laid there on top of each other instead of getting up and getting shoved?” he says.

It is a small adjustment, but one that explains much of the film’s movement language.

The starting position remains recognisable as football. It is the expected conclusion that changes.

Treloar describes the process as “amplifying what football already suggests” and taking it somewhere “liberated, queer and sexy”.

The performers also became part of that development process.

Some members of the cast had played football for much of their lives and others still play socially, while Roberts and Brown brought professional sporting experience.

Treloar says that knowledge gave him details and recognisable behaviours he would not necessarily have arrived at independently.

“They were able to make a lot of offers on how the sport works, key features of it, and recognisable moments,” he says.

ANDY says the cast and crew were central to giving the finished film its character.

“The cast giving their time and talent is crucial to the raw authenticity in the clip,” ANDY says. “Without this gaggle of angels and weirdos, the video wouldn’t have the same air. From cast to team it takes a village, and I am beyond grateful for everyone’s talent and time.”

One of the film’s more intricate compositions came together remarkably quickly.

For a tableau appearing at the beginning of the beat drop, Welsh brought Treloar references from Renaissance paintings.

Treloar says he constructed the image in about 10 minutes, using the performers’ individual abilities as part of the composition.

“I was creating from the ground up and was able to use people’s individual and specific skill sets to make things that felt personal to each,” he says.

That willingness from the cast helped a film that repeatedly asks performers to move between aggression, comedy, sexuality and tenderness without treating those ideas as separate worlds.

The creative negotiation continued after filming.

Welsh says the edit became the hardest part of the process.

“Creatively, the hardest part was the edit,” he says. “It’s when we challenged each other the most.”

Docherty guided the team through successive versions — or, in Welsh’s description, became their “Moses-like editor”.

“I think the solution we found was really embracing that conflict as part of the magical filmmaking process,” he says.

The finished video still carries the fingerprints of those separate stages.

The football uniforms connect with ANDY’s wider ‘&e’ project, which explores the identities and expectations people are handed and what happens as those “uniforms” begin to come off.

Treloar’s choreography begins with movements audiences recognise, then changes their destination.

Roberts and Brown bring actual sporting experience into a world that could otherwise have existed entirely in the imagination.

Cucchiara’s photography, meanwhile, extends the visual identity beyond extracted video frames, moving between group compositions and intimate portraits.

What makes ‘Can’t Wait’ interesting as a production story is less the number of names in its credits than the way the original idea remained visible as it moved between them.

ANDY arrived with the concept and moodboard. Welsh developed the treatment. DIVISION and the production team worked out how to realise it. Treloar found a movement language for it. The cast contributed knowledge drawn from their own experience of sport. Docherty helped bring those choices together in the edit.

The concept survived the process without staying static.

What began as a conversation over dumplings became a film that keeps the familiar visual grammar of football intact — right up until somebody changes what happens next.

Watch: ANDY - Can't Wait (Directed by Harry Welsh)