Sam Mac: Channel 7 Sunrise weather presenter’s rise to the top
How a battler from Adelaide who never set out to be a weatherman won a plum spot on Australia’s top-rating breakfast program.
SA Weekend
Don't miss out on the headlines from SA Weekend. Followed categories will be added to My News.
Before auditioning as weatherman with Channel 7’s all-powerful Sunrise program, Adelaide’s Sam Mac Googled a glossary of terms to give himself a passing familiarity with the topic.
When no questions were asked and even later when the job was almost his, he worried that a meteorology quiz would be thrown at him and he would fail.
That didn’t happen either.
While the trend in weather reports here and in the US is towards expert meteorological commentary – his rival on ABC News Breakfast, Nate Byrne, is a meteorologist, oceanographer and Royal Navy lieutenant – Mac walked into one of the biggest jobs in morning TV without even a TAFE course in isobars under his belt.
Mac’s weatherman style is aimed at people on the move who want a bit of entertainment while also being told whether to grab a coat or umbrella on their way out. He has on occasions been known to forget even that until David Koch or Sam Armytage, or more recently Natalie Barr have pulled him up on air.
“I’m not a meteorologist, I never set out to be a weatherman,” Mac says on a trip to Adelaide. “I accidentally stumbled into this role which has given me the opportunity to see 800 places in Australia, to meet amazing people, characters with stories, and learn a bit about myself along the way as well.”
His role evolved through the particular combination of Sunrise’s commitment to showing a positive side of Australian life and Mac’s own personality and background. It never came with a job description and it still means something different every day. On the Adelaide trip he was larking about on stilts one day while talking to circus troupe Gravity and Other Myths, the next he joked along with a Scottish palaeontologist who sings shanties at the South Australian Museum.
It was not something he trained for growing up in Adelaide’s north where he was a talented soccer player, representing Australia at the national level when he was a schoolboy. He came close to turning professional but his obsession at school was with making video presentations and editing what in the late 1990s were videotapes.
“I was making things. My sister’s boyfriend had a video camera and couldn’t get it off me so I guess I was always training myself and learning content,” he says. “I was making mini-TV shows really.”
A psychology degree at the University of Adelaide was never finished but he was taking radio courses and was active on campus, writing for On Dit and getting involved in community TV. Luck and raw talent gave him his biggest break. He won a competition at SAFM, Who Wants to Be a Co-Host, and the prize was a trip to Edinburgh where he reviewed acts, filed reports and when he got back was offered a job, driving the promotional Black Thunders and going to air late at night. Then he moved to daytime, introducing segments of music and working the 30 to 40 seconds break between songs as hard as he could.
“You might do something funny with a call, you might promote something coming up in 10 minutes,” he says. “It was challenging to be creative in really tight time constraints.”
Mac has never lacked self-belief and backed himself in a move to Sydney on the strength of a late night, limited TV contract appearing on the music-based entertainment show The Big Night In, with John Foreman. He picked up radio work as well, in particular on Wil Anderson and Anthony “Lehmo” Lehmann’s drive time show where Anderson encouraged him to write sketches and flex his muscles outside of his role as panel operator.
“Wil was selling out shows and he was the biggest comedian in the country and I was working with him every day and seeing how he worked,” Mac says. “He encouraged me to be more on air which was heard by the big bosses.”
That led to breakfast radio in Perth in 2008 with comedian Em Rusciano, a huge learning trajectory which taught him to have an opinion on everything and understand how to create content. He started small on TV with The Project as part of their national weekend whip around to find out what was happening in the capital cities.
“You’d have 45 seconds standing with a guy and a camel, or talking about a festival that was on, and I would put so much into that slot,” he says. “I would spend all Fridays writing jokes, getting props, paying for things with my own money to make sure my 40 seconds stood out above all the others.”
It worked and he started to appear on The Project’s panel which was enough for Mac to back himself again and try for the big time. He had saved enough to last him a year without work and within two months of moving back to Sydney he was on Sunrise.
He has now written a book, Accidental Weatherman, which he finished during the lockdown when the collapse of travel kept him in one place.
The book covers everything from the spectacle of Uluru to being photographed butt naked and his close relationship with producer Sean Flynn who Mac calls “the human emoji” because of his charismatic energy and expressive manner.
He does everything with Flynn both on air and off, sharing every flight and pub meal that goes with the job. Mac calls him the engine room of Sunrise weather because he knows how to get the best out of every guest and every town.
Mac also answers the question he is most often asked by curious members of the public: what time do you have to get up in the morning? For the record, Mac has three alarms so he can ease himself into the final moment with the first set for 3.47. There is the first, brutal alarm that no one should sleep through, except him. The second is 10 minutes later at 3.57 and then at 4.07 goes the final, non-negotiable alarm which is saved in his phone under “do it for Kochie”.
For a night owl, a job on Sunrise was an interesting choice. “Back then, (before I got the job), if I was out of bed before 9am I must have wet it,” he jokes in the book.
He brings this morning person memory to the show, approaching his audience like someone he once was, a little fragile and unfocused and looking for something for a lift up. Projecting that mood into living rooms requires an enormous amount of energy which even Mac, a naturally up person, struggles to maintain.
“It’s hard, it’s a big challenge, and you have to be disciplined during the week so I get to bed early, at 8.30, like a child really,” he says. “Also, I think I’ve learnt that you’ve got to be smart with your energy distribution … sometimes I need to take a phone call or a walk for 15 minutes just to chill a bit.”
He prefers his segments to be broadly organised but still loose and unstructured so surprises can creep in and liven things up. Mac’s job is not to be a reporter and focus on facts, it’s more about finding quickly what is great or funny or clever or unexpected in a situation and sharing that with an audience. He prefers not to rehearse his stunts either because if something goes wrong that becomes part of the fun. He backs this up with a story of Australia’s strongest woman who was bench pressing Mac above her head live on air for the first time.
“What happened was she lifted me up fine but because my weight was going to one side, she only had one place to hold and it was … there,” he says, pointing to his groin. “And that makes amazing television but if we had rehearsed that, you wouldn’t have had that moment.”
He isn’t fearless but for some stunts he has to pretend to be. On his first day on air, he had to do a bungee jump and he calls it his worst experience in the job and possibly in life. He genuinely hated it and says every part of his body was telling him not to do something that he had agreed to, while everyone watched.
“I’m not an extreme person with that kind of activity but at the same time it made good TV because I was genuinely scared and a lot of the audience could connect with that because they would feel the same,” he says. “So that makes you relatable.”
He has a serious side which he sometimes shares on air or through his social media. Twelve years ago, a radio friend and comedy writer from Adelaide, Richard Marsland, committed suicide and it affected Mac deeply. Marsland had taken the trouble to encourage Mac while he was still at university and trying to get into radio, and they later worked together and were good friends. His funeral, Mac wrote, was like a sledgehammer to the heart.
Mac became an RU OK ambassador and uses his platforms on TV or social media to encourage conversations about mental health. He has to turn down most requests to support charities or share posts – he gets around 50 offers a week – but takes time for those causes he feels a personal connection to.
Animal rescue is his other passion, one he shares with his good friend Dr Chris Brown. Mac has two rescue cats, Coco and the blind Catra, and he lends his name to animal welfare charities when he can. Coco, who is part chinchilla and was found abandoned and starving at a disused property, is on the cover of the book, has thousands of Instagram followers, fronted a Fancy Feast cat food campaign and was Mac’s date at the 2019 Logies when he was nominated for a Gold Logie. He says their love affair was meant to be.
“When I feel something in my gut and it’s real then I post,” he says. “Otherwise, my feed would be 10 charities a day and that’s not what I’m doing.”
One of his least funny experiences was being hacked at the end of 2019, something he realised only when he started getting texts from friends asking if he was all right. (His favourite was “Dude, what’s happening! You’ve gone full Kanye?”) When he opened his page, he found the text changed to Arabic with a profile picture of men cheering in front of an ISIS flag. He was so appalled that time stood still, then panic set in. He was unable to log back in and it wasn’t just Facebook; he was locked out of Instagram and Twitter as well and all of his passwords had been changed.
“I had no control, I had no way of communicating except via phone and text message,” he says. “Also, I have quite a large following and I didn’t know what they were going to do next.”
Mac lives a lot of his life on social media and was so unnerved by the experience that it took four or five days before he could think about something else. Getting control back was slow and frustrating and even with Channel 7 behind him, it took days, partly because Facebook’s staff are based overseas. Losing control of his voice scared him particularly because he worried the hackers would post something offensive and he would lose the following he had worked hard to build.
“I can kind of laugh about it now but at the time …” he says.
Finally, Facebook allowed a cyber security adviser to change the codes and shut his accounts down for a day so passwords could be changed and the hackers couldn’t get back in. None of it was easy, all of it was stressful and Mac came out of it rethinking how much of his life and energy he poured into posts.
“I think I was a little bit too consumed by it,” he says. “Don’t live your life completely on the screen, not when you’ve got friends who you haven’t caught up with in real life. You should be putting a bit more energy there.”
More than a year later he still uses social media less, although having met his new girlfriend, fashion stylist Rebecca James, through Instagram and getting to know her during last year’s lockdown over Zoom, it has edged back into favour again.
“She’s from Victoria and she couldn’t leave and I couldn’t go there because they had the world’s toughest lockdown situation so it was a blessing that social media helped me out there,” he says.
He wrote the book, he says, because he has seen more of Australia than most people and met more of its characters than just about anyone. A lot of people travel but only Mac meets 100 people from the one town in the course of a morning, including the mayor, the lady who runs the cake stall and the kids from school.
“I love getting to a town in the morning and not knowing who is going to be there and then people roll up,” he says.
“The job has always been there but Sean and I have put our stamp on it and crafted it in a way that plays to our strengths and showcases Australia.”
‘We hope it ends soon’: Power couple on brutal private battle
Ben Cutting and Erin Holland are facing a battle they admit is “emotionally, physically and financially taxing”.
This is the most selfish thing drivers do – I blame you all
People can leave their brains behind while driving – and this annoying habit proves it.