Why Osher Günsberg torpedoed his life
WHILE his career reached new heights, TV host Osher Günsberg’s personal life was plummeting towards an unspeakable low. Now he’s revealed just how far the fall really was.
Stellar
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AS a little boy, Osher Günsberg lived in fear. Visits to homes of his parents’ friends left him panicked, hiding beneath his mother’s skirt. First days of school were stress tests. At times, he would spiral so hard into panic that he would start fearing the feeling of fear itself. And a simple trip to the shops, which most children see as an opportunity to entice a toy or free snack, could be upended by the thing he feared most: a stranger.
So it is with great pleasure that the 44-year-old TV host now welcomes strangers into his home on a regular basis. It’s at his kitchen table in a homely, unassuming apartment not far from the beach in Sydney’s eastern suburbs where Günsberg sits down with them to record his titular podcast. And it is his home office that he has chosen for an expansive, hour-long chat with Stellar.
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It’s a humble space, cluttered with guy stuff. “All the voice-over stuff, I do here,” he tells Stellar. “Earlier today, it was: ‘Previously on... The Bachelor!’ Bondi Rescue, too — it all happens right here. I like being here. It’s warm, it’s safe, it’s comfortable.”
What it is not is fancy. And Günsberg likes it that way. “I lived too much of my life with my ego running the show, kind of spraying money around with a fire hose as a way of trying to make things better — trying to make me feel better. There was a time when the big-house thing did happen.” He lets out a rueful snicker. “Managed to torpedo all of that.”
Günsberg torpedoed a lot of things as he climbed the ladder of success on radio and then TV, where he earned fame as a Channel [V] presenter before going on to host Australian Idol and eventually The Bachelor/The Bachelorette franchise. He let a marriage slip out of his hands, sabotaged professional relationships and trashed his body with an overabundance of food, a litany of drugs, years of casual sex and rivers of booze — and all while conveniently ignoring the long-precarious state of his mental health.
He has never been shy about his shortcomings, but now Günsberg has written a book that lays out just how bad things were before he went sober in March 2010 — he claims to remember neither accepting Idol’s first Logie in 2004 nor filming the bulk of its second season soon after — and how much worse they got afterward.
His struggles with psychotic breaks and suicidal ideation make for a confronting, claustrophobic read. That was the goal, he says.
“Addictions are, in my opinion, avoidant behaviours,” he explains. “They become a solution. Not a problem, but a solution. And eventually it can become so big it will cause great jeopardy, pain and damage in your life. If you’re lucky, like me, you reach a point where you stop — because the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the fear of change.”
So what happens next? “Now all those things you were avoiding roar to life. And you have to figure out how to live with the things you’ve been blocking out. In my case, since I was a teenager.”
Günsberg opts not to look back with sadness. “I don’t want to forget the past — whatever past I can remember. But I’m disappointed when I meet people from that time in my life and they’re excited to see me again... and I don’t remember who they are. The hurt in their face, that makes me sad. But it’s important that it happens, because it reminds me what’s waiting for me if I get lazy. Do I want to be the person who causes that wreckage again? Nope. So I’ll do the work.”
Pharmaceuticals helped pull Günsberg out of the murk, but it was Audrey Griffen, a make-up artist he met on the set of The Bachelor, who made the biggest difference.
“She absolutely saved my life,” says Günsberg, who married Griffen in 2016 and became stepfather to her daughter Georgia, 14. “She was the first person who told me I’d be OK and I believed her.”
It helps, too, that he still loves hosting TV’s most famous dating show — even if it may have created some misconceptions.
“It’s not my job on the show to get up there and express all this stuff,” he shrugs. “I’m there to count some roses, break some hearts and hand out some date cards. If that’s all you’ve got to go off, you’ve probably decided what kind of person I am. But if you want to scratch deeper, you’ll find there’s way more to me. One in four Australians is affected by complex mental illness. It’s well worth time to talk about it, a whole lot more.”
Back, After The Break (HarperCollins, $32.99) is out tomorrow.