Upfront
Phil Keoghan
by Sarah Barnett
TV host.
A former host of such New Zealand after-school essentials as 3.45: Live and Spot On!, Phil Keoghan popped back up a couple of years ago, American accent firmly in place, as host of The Amazing Race – for which he has just picked up his second Emmy. Since leaving New Zealand nearly 20 years ago, he has been busy – a raft of adventure shows for Discovery, including New Zealand: Movie Paradise, a soap-opera stint and even a tour of duty as a “Road Warrior” for a breakfast show on the FX channel. The Listener rang the 38-year-old while he was on a rare holiday in New Zealand.
Where are you? I am in Blenheim, en route down the South Island to go snowboarding. Today, I’ve been scallop diving in the Sounds, and my daughter has just been riding a sheep.
As you do. A friend of mine has a farm here, so, yeah.
You finished shooting for Discovery in March. What have you been up to since then? I’ve just finished doing Race eight, doing a whole lot of speeches, pushing my book. And I’m also in the middle of writing something with my wife – a small feature film.
Set in New Zealand’s movie paradise? It’s a New Zealand script set up north over about four days and it’s something that we’ve been wanting to do for a while. We haven’t had a lot of time, but we’re excited about trying to get it done.
The latest Amazing Race is a family edition. Yeah, we have teams of four. It’s a different kind of race, because you’ve got younger people, so you can’t do certain things. But they certainly have more energy than older people, so we’re doing more the kinds of things that families, as opposed to a couple, might do on an adventurous vacation.
Do families go skydiving together now? More and more families are doing things like that. They’re white-water rafting and they’re going for helicopter trips and they’re sledding and it’s very different from what kids were doing even 10 years ago.
What’s happened in those years? When I first started bungy-jumping in the 80s, everyone was thinking it was an extreme, dangerous sport. Now, we have a little more perspective and it’s really not extreme. Now it’s hard to impress somebody by doing it.
Does bungy-jumping get boring after 20 years? If you’ve never done anything in your life and you were suddenly to leap off a bungy bridge, then that is going to take you to a place, mentally, that is very extreme. Take shark diving, which I’ve done. It’s about pushing your mind to a place that it hasn’t gone to before: “Oh my God, they’re gonna eat me, they’re gonna kill me. Can I do this? Will I be okay? Will they leave all my limbs alone?” Because you have taken a mental leap with something that is quite primal and quite physical, you’re more likely to take another challenge.
So, the mental challenges still stand out as the toughest? Going to New York with a backpack and not knowing anybody and trying to get a job in the industry at a time when it was unheard of for a foreigner to get work was a big thing for me. Then my time at FX, when I was live every day around the country doing everything from the real extreme to talking to a woman who had delivered thousands of babies down in Pensacola, and a pottery expert in Zanesville, Ohio, and the guy with the world’s longest ball of string.
Then you got in the running to host Survivor? It was at a time when not a lot of foreigners were given an opportunity to do something like that. One of the reasons I was told that I didn’t get the job was that I was a New Zealander.
What changed between then and landing The Amazing Race? They gave me a shot, but they asked me to Americanise my voice. What’s really changed it is things like American Idol with Simon Cowell. Having an Englishman with an English accent on a top reality show in the US was a real tipping point. It’ll be a while before you hear a pure New Zealand accent in American television. You’ll sometimes have Rachel Hunter in a smaller role, but her accent has also been bastardised and it’s certainly not like a real hard Kiwi accent.
Do you make it back here very often? This is our fifth or sixth trip back this year, so that’s pretty frequent, and I have a lot of contact with people at home. I just hosted an event in San Francisco for the Toi Maori exhibit – I love keeping the connection. My wife and I have a home out at Whitianga in the Coromandel. We have a house in New Zealand and an apartment in America. We’re in a little denial.
You’ll be stocking up on Kiwiana to take home? I love Wattie’s baked beans, so normally I get half a dozen cans, a few Peanut Slabs, a box of Weet-Bix, a big jar of Vegemite –
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