The mysterious case of Mike Minogue
We know him as a floundering paranormal cop, but, writes Bridget Jones there’s more to this funny man than meets the eye.
IT was a cryptic message. ‘‘Phone would be good, but maybe even better to meet.’’ Just 48 hours earlier, over ‘‘a kilo of tofu’’ and black coffee, Mike Minogue had shared the hilarity of his zero sperm count. He had explained why getting fired from his first lead role was the second best thing to happen to him (behind meeting his wife), and how he got kidney stones while filming the final season of Wellington Paranormal. We talked about how patchy the Sex and the City remake is, too. But that wasn’t enough. There was one more thing he wanted to get off his chest. In person.
‘‘I’ve decided I’m going to go back to uni to study medicine,’’ he says with the sincerity of a man who has had a life-changing epiphany after too much vegetarian curry. Really? I ask. ‘‘No, I’m not.’’
That’s the thing with Minogue. He’s as straightfaced as they come. But also as playful. Listeners of his Radio Hauraki drivetime radio show or cricket’s Alternative Commentary Collective will know exactly what I mean. Everything is fair game, almost nothing is as it seems – until it is.
Because that’s the other thing about Minogue. When he drops the funny-guy facade, it’s sudden, and actually just a subtle shift. But a sincere one. He’s someone who can turn the serious silly, and the silly, serious. He’s also a man who seems to have few boundaries about what he shares with the world. In fact, his motto is something along the lines of ‘‘the worse the story, the better the yarn’’. And he certainly has a few of those to share.
Minogue, 45, is something of a renaissance man – if da Vinci and Michelangelo were big on cheeky cricket commentary, boundary-pushing drivetime radio, film producing, television writing and acting, too.
He’s best known as the bumbling, bump-in-thenight hunting Officer Minogue, a role he’s played on and off for almost 15 years. The character first wandered into Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi’s film What We Do In The Shadows, before making the leap to the small screen with crime fighting partner Officer O’Leary (Karen O’Leary) in Wellington Paranormal. The season starting on screen this week will be the last.
Minogue has played other cops too, in dramatic, award-winning roles. Such as the Springbok tour drama, Rage.
‘‘That’s how I got the audition for Shadows. Jemaine was watching it and thought, this guy is funny. But it was a drama. And I got nominated for best supporting actor in a drama… but he thought it was funny.’’
Minogue hadn’t been acting long when he got the role, but the chemistry with O’Leary was dynamite, and there was soon talk of a television show. That conversation went on for five years before anything actually happened.
‘‘If your boyfriend is saying to you, I’m going to propose to you, it’s going to happen, I promise. I’m just waiting for this other relationship to finish, and if it’s been five years of that, you think, actually, I don’t think it is going to happen,’’ he says.
It did happen, of course, and the show has gone on to win fans – and awards – here and overseas, including Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, via heavy hitter networks The CW and HBO Max.
‘‘Karen and I didn’t want to be in the first thing that Jemaine and Taika made together that sucked,’’ Minogue admits.
‘‘It would have been a funny story one way or the other. That’s the way I try to look at things. You’re just gathering more stories to be able to tell your mates at the pub. And the best ones are the disaster stories.
‘‘So even if it didn’t work out with Paranormal, it would have been another good story. But I am very pleased it turned into a boring, good story.’’
Minogue grew up in Levin with his brother and mum, who worked as a night duty nurse for close to 20 years. He counts many of his childhood mates among those closest to him today, 40 years on. It’s those friends who honed his sense of storytelling.
‘‘[In Levin] there was nothing to do, so we skateboarded and talked s… and I think that sharpens, certainly your tongue, but you’ve got to be really quick-witted when you go around caning each other for, in my case, big ears, big nose, big head. That’s how we knew we loved each other, because we were saying horrific things about each other.’’
When he wasn’t whispering sweet nothings to friends, he was watching – and imitating – Billy T James skits and eventually, auditioned for the St Joseph’s primary school production of The Halfmen of O. He went for the lead, and was cast as Rock Number Three. ‘‘I had one line and the director screamed at me for not saying it loud enough. That sort of put me off any [acting] dreams,’’ he says.
‘‘What we also did was move all the chairs into place, and that’s what really sparked my passion for furniture removal… you know, this feels like a bit of me.’’
It’s no joke. Minogue spent four years (‘‘not a couple of months, not a year – four years!’’) working as a furniture removalist in Sydney, before the lifestyle of ‘‘heaps of gigs and lots of partying’’ ran its course. He returned home to work behind the scenes on films such as Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. It was eventually a suggestion he audition for Tom Scott’s 2009 film, Separation City – and the fear that gave him – that sparked the acting bug.
‘‘But from that point, I was totally into [acting]. Not enough to want to make it everything, but it was like, hey I’ve found something I really love.’’
And it was all coming very easily. Until it didn’t. Minogue was cast in a big local project that he can’t name for a number of reasons. After years of discussion, and lots of auditions, he won the role – and after a table read the director had told him wasn’t important, he was fired four days before shooting began. He chooses his words carefully, but says it became clear over the following days and weeks that certain members of the creative team were ‘‘less supportive’’ of his involvement in the project than others. The impact was instant.
He and wife Zara, who he met on the set of The Hobbit when she was working in the art department, have a deal: when something goes wrong, they have a day to be gutted and moan about it. Then they get on with it.
‘‘Getting fired was a really huge thing. But it was the best thing that could have happened. I was cruising up until that point, all these things were happening by pure luck and no work on my behalf. Then getting fired from that, it was like, well now I’m going to work. Anything I’ve achieved is normally out of spite, to try and prove other people wrong,’’ he adds with a massive grin.
So he made his own work. He created (wrote, produced and starred in) the web series The Watercooler. Connections made there led to the
2021 film Coming Home in the Dark, which he produced. Last year he also created (and again, wrote and starred in) Talkback with radio co-host Jason Hoyte for TVNZ, while working on Wellington Paranormal.
The work took a physical toll – Minogue was admitted to hospital with kidney stones while juggling multiple jobs, and surviving on about three hours sleep a night.
‘‘I was in pieces.’’
Around the same time, he caused something of a stir when he talked about his fertility troubles on his Radio
Hauraki show.
Almost a year on from that on-air conversation,
Minogue details the
X-rays and procedures
Left: Creator and producer, Mike Minogue with fellow cast member, Cohen Holloway pose with the clapperboard on set of
he’s undergone to figure things out – ‘‘and we have sperm!’’ he says gleefully. ‘‘Now we have to decide how we go about going from there.’’ He and Zara have daughter Frankie, 2, and Minogue says being a dad is ‘‘simply the best thing, ever’’.
Men discussing fertility so honestly doesn’t happen all the time. Even less so on national radio, with a largely ‘‘blokey’’ audience. Minogue just shrugs.
‘‘For me, it’s not a difficult thing to talk about at all. I’ll talk about anything, it doesn’t really bother me, as long as everyone else is OK with it.
‘‘When the doctor gave me the results I asked, how’d I go. She said, it’s zero. That seems low, I said and she told me she’d never seen zero before. But to me, that’s funny, and too good not to talk about – that you have zero sperm.
‘‘It’s just something that’s happened in my life, I haven’t done anything wrong, so I don’t see it as a weakness. I just see everything as funny.’’
So back to that big secret. After all this, Minogue doesn’t exactly seem like someone who keeps things to himself. It turns out he is stepping away from acting and instead starting another family – an alternative acting agency with his mate and longtime collaborator, actor Tim Foley, and some still top secret consultants.
He’s clearly passionate about the move; it’s the last thing he thinks about at night, and the first thing in his head in the morning. The idea came from feeling slightly disillusioned with the status quo, which he describes as being ‘‘a numbers game’’. In his eyes, if agents have enough people on their books, someone’s going to book the job, rather than the model we see on American television, of the pushy agent who works closely with an actor to make them better.
‘‘When I booked Wellington Paranormal, which was not through an audition process, I got a call from my agent at the time, and they said, ‘I heard you booked it. I wondered if I could get the number of the producer because I wanted to try and get a writer on the show’. No celebrating my win.’’
He’s not bitter – although he currently doesn’t have an agent and represents himself – but wants to give something back to the industry, and create a sense of community in what he calls a ‘‘lonely pursuit’’.
‘‘By no means do I think it will be easy – what agents do is really hard. Managing egos, the ups and downs, I’ve got no delusions about how tough it can be,’’ he says.
That’s partly why he reckons it’s probably a bad look for an actor’s agent to be swooping in and competing with clients for the best role. So for now, it’s a behindthe-scenes life that calls, building a team.
‘‘You don’t want to do or make any of these things alone. The thing I can do is help get them across the line, because once I have a project that I’m doing, then I’m almost psychotic. I would hope I’m certainly not hard to work with, but if I’ve set my mind to something…
‘‘I want it to be fun. If it’s not fun, what’s the point? You might as well be a furniture removalist. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!’’
starts Wednesday,
‘That’s the way I try to look at things. You’re just gathering more stories to be able to tell your mates at the pub. And the best ones are the disaster stories. So even if it didn’t work out with Paranormal ,it would have been another good story. But I am very pleased it turned into a boring, good story.’ MIKE MINOGUE