A-List Confidential: I’ve spent $40K tattooing my favourite celebs on my body
Troy Kellahan has turned his body into a tribute to his favourite Hollywood heroes. This is why.
Confidential
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Word that Zac Efron quietly slipped into Brisbane last weekend excited many fans around town – but no one more so than Troy Kellahan.
The 32-year-old operations manager from Brisbane’s northside has around $40,000 worth of tattoos profiling the faces and autographs of the celebrities he idolises, including an uncannily realistic portrait of the Hollywood heart-throb.
He has two portraits each of acting trio Holly Marie Combs, Alysa Milano and Shannon Doherty from the TV series Charmed and another of Australian singer Delta Goodrem.
While he has travelled interstate and to the US to meet the actors, who he now maintains regular contact with, Efron is the only celebrity he has tattooed on his body that he is yet to meet.
“That tattoo was actually a dare. My friend didn’t think I would do it,” Kellahan said, explaining that pop culture gave him an escape growing up as a gay teenager Brisbane.
“Twenty three years I’ve been a fan of Charmed. Zac I’ve idolised him since I was little as well. It’s something that helped me with my life and I wanted to show my love and passion for something.”
“I’ve kind of lost count (of the tattoos).”
Kellahan, who goes to Bokarina’s Ink Attack, got his first celebrity portrait in 2016, costing up to $1800 each and taking from six to 12 hours to complete.
He’s also spent around $40,000 on memorabilia from the Charmed series.
“I get a lot of negative comments in regard to why would you do that, especially in regards to my Delta tattoo,” he said.
“At the end of the day it’s my body and it makes me happy. I’m proud to wear these idols on me. It’s no different to someone getting Hulk, Superman or Batman.”
After seeing the tattoos at fan conventions, the Charmed actors kept in contact with Kellahan and regularly sent video messages and flowers to Kellahan during his late mother’s battle with cancer.
“It’s just the support they’ve seen I’ve given them,” he said.
He is hoping to have a chance to meet Efron while he travels Australia filming the second season of his Netflix series, Down to Earth with Zac Efron, so his next tattoo can be the actor’s autograph.
NO COASTING THROUGH WITH NEW HOME
After a chance trip to Queensland seven months ago, Australian actor Todd Lasance has never gone home and now plans to permanently settle his family on the Gold Coast.
The former Home And Away star, who’d spent 10 years travelling between Australia and Los Angeles, was riding out the global pandemic in his hometown of Newcastle when he landed a lead role in Port Douglas thriller Kidnapped, which was among the first projects to go back into production in July.
“Everyone felt that disconnect and loss of income and opportunities and the industry just completely shut down. This opportunity came up, which was incredible,” Lasance, 36, said.
“It was weird timing that the border was going to close and we had to get out of NSW with 24 hours’ notice, so we flew up to stay in Palm Beach on the Gold Coast.
“My wife fell in love with the area, I fell in love with the area.”
“We packed our bags to shoot a film and we never went home. We still haven’t been home. We got my family to send our stuff up (from Newcastle) and we put all our LA stuff on a boat.”
Lasance and his wife Jordan Wilcox relocated back to Australia from Los Angeles in mid 2019 for the sake of their daughter Charlie, four, who had never had a permanent home.
After wrapping Kidnapped and settling on the Gold Coast, Lasance quickly landed a role on thriller Black Site, alongside Jai Courtney, Michelle Monaghan and Jason Clarke.
“I’d just moved to the Gold Coast so to ironically land a US feature in my new home city was pretty incredible, especially having the family here which is a really rare experience,” he said.
“Charlie has just started school … this is the first time we’ve ever had our own place. It’s crazy. It’s been beautiful, we are really thriving on it and soaking it up.
“The plan was to live for a year and get a feel for it and then decide which area we’d like to buy in. We’d like to settle down here.”
Lasance next stars alongside Michael B. Jordan in Hollywood blockbuster Without Remorse, an adaptation of the Tom Clancy novel, which premieres on Amazon Prime Video on April 30.
He will appear at the Supanova event on the Gold Coast today.
SHOWSTOPPING
An accidental stint on Dancing With The Stars might have derailed Matty Johnson’s wedding plans once again, but it’s set to pay dividends.
The former Bachelor was due to wed Laura Byrne before she fell pregnant with their daughter Lola, now two months, and then he began training for the reality show’s All Stars season – the offer for which he thought would never eventuate – five days after she was born in early February.
The couple, who met on the 2017 season of The Bachelor, got engaged two years ago, shortly before they welcomed their first child, daughter Marlie-Mae.
“It (the wedding) is locked in for end of year. I’ve been pretty bad organising it. My background for work is events and marketing in Brisbane. I said ‘I’ll take the reigns, don’t worry, I’m all over it’,” Johnson told Confidential.
“Dancing completely derailed any plans. Now it’s my number one priority, and there will be special attention to the first dance. It’ll be a showstopper.”
“That was something I was most fearful of before, but now I want it to be a medley – a foxtrot, turn it into a samba. Laura is like, ‘I’ve created a monster’.”
It took Johnson a few weeks to find his feet during rehearsals, training six days a week to prepare for the show, during which he once accidentally slipped and dropped his partner during a lift.
When he first saw one of his competitors, Kyly Clarke, he initially wanted to withdraw.
“It almost paralysed me with fear. I was like, ‘What am I doing here? All I’ve had is four weeks of practice. I need to find a way to pull out right now’,” he said.
“But I look back at the cha-cha and I think back to my last performance versus when I first did that in week one and it’s worlds apart.”
HUMBLE BEGINNINGS
Brent Draper’s MasterChef journey started out of pure survival, living in a share house of tradies with a diet of fast food and pizza.
The Beaudesert-born boilermaker learnt to cook while living with three other apprentices when he started out his career.
“It was a survival sort of thing,” he said.
“None of us could cook. We were pretty much buying pizza, McDonalds and KFC every day. An apprentice wage is about $300 a week so I couldn’t keep doing it for much longer. I just said, ‘Righto ,I’ll learn how to cook and you boys can pay for the groceries’. I found I actually enjoyed it.”
Evolving into a passion, the now 31-year-old husband and father to two-year-old son Archie decided to apply for this season of MasterChef in the hope he can move off the worksite after 12 years working as a tradie.
“The biggest motivation was my wife, she sort of pushed me to go through it,” Draper said.
“I got to a point I my life, I’m 3, I’ve just got to do something. If I don’t do something crazy like this I don’t think I’ll ever get out of the trade.”
“It’s not my passion and food is a great passion for me. It was just to do something crazy and put myself out there.”
When it comes to home life, Draper admitted he was definitely in charge in the kitchen.
“We’ve agreed she (my wife) has cooked twice in a 10-year relationship so she’s got it pretty good,” he laughed.
MasterChef Australia starts on Monday night on Channel 10.
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