Marty Sheargold on drunken regrets, mental health, quitting breakfast radio and the joy of Fisk

Triple M and Fisk star Marty Sheargold reveals why he re-evaluated his lifestyle choices following an alcohol-fuelled blow-up at last year’s AFL Grand Final.

Marty Sheargold admits he wasn’t travelling too well this time last year.

It will be 12 months tomorrow since the comedian, actor and radio host announced he was taking an extended break from his popular Triple M breakfast show to work on improving his work/life balance and to deal with the mental exhaustion that had arisen from his many commitments across TV, radio and stand-up.

Things had come to a head a few weeks earlier at the AFL grand final when after several months of sobriety, he fell off the wagon with a thud. After a messy, and reportedly sweary, incident in a corporate box, he left the game early, which he insists was “under my own steam”. And while he says he was annoyed by the coverage at the time saying he’d been ejected or escorted from the ground, freely accepts he’d acted like a bit of a goose.

Marty Sheargold as Ray Gruber in Fisk.

“I am not about to start making excuses but I had been sober for about three or four months and my grand final day got very large on me very quickly,” he says. “Every now and then in life you think you are bulletproof and then someone taps you on the shoulder and reminds that you are not.

“Sometimes you have to know when your day is over – but I certainly made a tit of myself, there’s no getting away from that.”

The incident and the media storm that followed not only made Sheargold reassess some of his work and lifestyle choices, it also made him reconsider his on-off, “love-hate” relationship with alcohol, adding that he has been sober since June.

“Unfortunately I am not one of those people that can have two glasses of wine and go ‘gee that was a lovely lunch’. I’m one of those people who have two glasses of wine and then goes ‘well surely no one is going anywhere – we’re going to stick around aren’t we guys?’ It’s only taken me 53 years to realise it’s not actually a friend of mine.”

Aaron Chen, Julia Zemiro, Marty Sheargold and Kitty Flanagan in Fisk.

A year later and Sheargold says he is tracking well mentally, feels “much less scattered” than he did and has found a healthier work routine. After returning to his breakfast show briefly in January, he quit the high-pressure gig for good in July and shifted to the national drivetime slot so he could spend more time with his two teenage kids. He’s also close to finishing a marathon national stand-up tour with mates Sam Pang, Mick Molloy and Lawrence Mooney, and will be back on TV screens on Sunday with the third season of the hit homegrown comedy Fisk.

But he was glad he was able to take on stigmas around mental by publicly admitting he needed help – and thankful for the support network of friends and health professionals that he thinks many Australian men his age lack.

“Men in close male friendships can say ‘mate, I’m not travelling well’ and certainly I have been able to do that,” he says. “But I think once it moves outside that friendship space it becomes difficult for men to really navigate their way through how they are feeling and what will help … and part of the problem for men is I’m not sure that we understand what helps look like.”

Certainly one of the high points of the year for Sheargold has been pulling on the Hush Puppies, grey slacks and comfortable jumper once again to play the affable probate lawyer Ray Gruber in the third season of Fisk. After the first season of the workplace comedy created by three-time Logie-winning comedian Kitty Flanagan and her sister Penny became a lockdown-era highlight in Australia in 2021, the second season was embraced globally the following year thanks to its exposure on global streaming giant Netflix.

Of the core cast of Flanagan, as the awkward, brown-suited lawyer – now firm partner – Helen Tudor-Fisk, Julia Zemiro as Ray’s sister Roz and Aaron Chen as probate clerk/Webmaster George, Sheargold was the last one on board and the hardest part to cast. Flanagan and her sister had written the character based on someone they knew and loved, but everyone who had read for the role had made him sound “horrible and grubby”, to the point where they considering rewriting it.

“He was our favourite character and we were thinking ‘this is terrible – what are we going to do?’,” says Flanagan. “Roz was working, the Webmaster was working, but every time we got to Ray it was ‘I hate this guy’.”

Flanagan and Sheargold had known each other since their early stand-up days, and a chance meeting at a small Melbourne comedy club where both were working up new material proved to the be the happy accident the show needed. Sheargold agreed to put together an audition tape – mainly as a distraction for his children during one of the city’s many lockdowns – and nailed the part.

The Comedians: Marty Sheargold, Sam Pang, Mick Molloy and Lawrence Mooney.

“I thought it was a good way to kill three or four hours with the kids,” Sheargold says with a laugh. “So they filmed it on an iPad and it was like a half day where I didn’t have to pretend to understand maths.”

As for what’s new in season three for the character he calls “a cultured simpleton”, Sheargold nominates his “Ray bae”, played by Justine Clarke, one of a roster of guest stars that also includes Glenn Robbins, Carl Barron, Claudia Karvan and Tom Ballard.

“He has a romantic interest now and I think with that, as most men will tell you, comes a certain amount of change,” Sheargold says. “I know that Ray isn’t entirely dressing himself anymore, which could be a good thing because he does wear some ordinary gear.”

Sheargold is delighted that Fisk now has fans across the world, and puts its success down to the relatability of workplace comedies, as well as the quality of the scripts written by the Flanagan sisters.

“Parts of each character are identifiable for people,” he says. “They can sit at home and think ‘oh my god, that guy is like Gavin …’

“It’s so beautifully written by Kitty and her sister Penny Flanagan and I think the script does all the heavy lifting and I think there’s an innocence to it that people love. There’s a camaraderie between the characters that people enjoy.”

Marty Sheargold considers radio to be the spine of his career.

And while he doesn’t mind getting bailed up in public by the country’s many Fisk fans, he’d like to make it clear that he also still has a day job that he considers to be “the spine of his career”.

“There was a point where there was too much ‘I love Fisk’,” he laughs. “And I was like ‘hang on guys – I’m doing a radio show 220 times a year, would one of you like to mention that at this point?’”

Fisk, Sunday, 8pm, ABC

Originally published as Marty Sheargold on drunken regrets, mental health, quitting breakfast radio and the joy of Fisk