Would the real Shaun Micallef please stand up?
HE has had the nation in stitches for a quarter of a century, but comedian Shaun Micallef insists the real gag is that he is deeply, defiantly bland.
Stellar
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FOR 25 years, Shaun Micallef has been a presence in living rooms across Australia. After long days and the dinnertime rush, his sharp wit and expressive face are right there on the screen, night after night, to greet us with a crazed grin. For many, he feels like part of the family. But if you think you know him, you have been mistaken.
Because the real Shaun Micallef isn’t anything like the man we’ve welcomed into our lives, and that’s according to Micallef himself. He’s not gregarious or a prankster, or prone to pulling faces. In person, he is decidedly earnest. His speech is measured and he’s uncommonly intelligent; while he will happily initiate a laugh at his own expense, do not expect the outrageous anecdotes or impromptu cartoon voices that have become his trademark.
In fact, he admits, the Shaun Micallef most of Australia knows and loves is not like him at all. He’s a character, albeit one who shares his real name. “You just amp up the bits of you that are useful as a TV presenter or performer,” Micallef, 55, tells Stellar. “So you just kind of think, ‘This will be helpful if I’m this sort of person now.’”
His most recent project, hosting the Nine Network’s reboot of intergenerational quiz show Talkin’ ’Bout Your Generation, is a “licence to misbehave”, he says. But flick over to the ABC, and you will see Micallef as yet another version of himself, hosting the comedy news program Shaun Micallef’s Mad As Hell. He has been a writer, actor, director and producer. He’s even written a children’s book. But if you’re waiting for the real Shaun Micallef to please stand up, it won’t happen anytime soon. As he admits, “I’m just terribly boring.”
Micallef might be the most stable man in television. His personal life, which he’s kept deliberately private, has no stories of excess or debauchery. There have been no public meltdowns or scandalous affairs. Other than leaving his hometown of Adelaide and a career as a lawyer to become a comedian at 30, there has been minimal upheaval. He’s stayed constantly in work and has been married to the same woman for 30 years — he met wife Leandra at university. They have three sons, aged 20, 17 and 15. “Perhaps the headline could be Shaun Micallef: Still Stable,” he jokes.
Of course, it could have all gone quite differently. “I came to all of this rather late, so I think all my excesses and stupid mistakes, the really bad ones, were done in the relative anonymity of Adelaide when I was in my 20s.” During that decade, he worked as an insurance lawyer, performing occasionally in amateur theatre. He only took the plunge into comedy at his wife’s urging: after listening, night after night, as he insisted he could write better jokes for ’90s comedy sketch show Full Frontal, Leandra finally snapped. “Shut up and do it,” she said, marking a date on the calendar: if he hadn’t become a comedian by then, he wasn’t allowed to talk about it ever again.
So he did. In early 1993 he got a job writing for the Jimeoin show before landing a writer’s gig on Full Frontal. Soon he was part of the cast and had the nation in stitches with his portrayal of brain-damaged boxer Milo Kerrigan and Italian male model Fabio. “I had to pull up tent pegs and move to Melbourne and commit, for what I thought was a year, to see if it would work. My wife stayed in Adelaide and I used to commute for two years. And then I realised we were kind of OK and really, apart from a couple of months here and there, I haven’t really been unemployed since,” he says. Leandra eventually moved to Melbourne, and they’ve stayed put.
Throughout the ’90s, Micallef kept fans laughing with his Logie Award-winning fictional variety show The Micallef Program and performed in a number of acting roles in the noughties, including a stint on Sigrid Thornton’s drama SeaChange. “I’m not boasting, but I think I’ve been really lucky to have had a career longer than my first — it’s 25 years now and I was only a lawyer for nine years.”
His decision to host the first Talkin’ ’Bout Your Generation on Network Ten in 2009 was influenced by having young kids; he wanted a 7.30pm show they could watch before bed. It turned out to be one of the best decisions of his career, rapidly increasing his mainstream appeal and earning him the 2010 Most Popular Presenter Logie. And when the option of a reboot appeared, it was his boys who urged him to do it. “They’re quite nostalgic about seeing the show again,” he says. “They’re looking forward to seeing it because it reminds them of their own youth.”
While his family has continued to push his career along, he also credits them with keeping him grounded in the chaotic world of television. “Family life is just levelling. It gives you the right weight to put on things. Being a comedian isn’t the most important thing in the world; I’m hopefully helping people enjoy themselves, but it’s not life-changing. And what we realise when we have children is we’re not the centre of the universe — they are in fact the whole reason we’re here,” he says.
Despite his success on the small screen, he barely watches television and has never seen a reality show. And that onscreen gregariousness ends the minute he leaves the soundstage. “If I’m in a room of 15 people and having to talk to everybody, I find that a little difficult. I find the one-on-one a little hard. I’m not a closet case or a shut-in, but I’m not somebody who craves attention from other people.”
He hasn’t drunk since he was in his early 20s, deeming it something he “wasn’t particularly good at” and a waste of time; his downtime is usually spent quietly reading and conjuring up his next comedy sketch. He denies being a workaholic, but admits he dreams about his work, using sleep as a way of sorting out which ideas are working and which aren’t.
Those ideas move so quickly for him that when asked to name his proudest piece of work in a trailblazing 25-year career, he finds it hard to pick one. “I’m not nostalgic about what I’ve done; I’d be quite happy for it to burn to be honest,” he says. But he can name his biggest regret: “I probably would have done everything I’ve ever done differently, if I had my time again, but I think it’s that I didn’t listen to advice. That’s the big regret — I should have listened more.”
Talkin’ ’Bout Your Generation premieres 7.30pm, May 21, on the Nine Network.
Originally published as Would the real Shaun Micallef please stand up?
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