Ten of the best RNZ celebrity interviews of 2024

From the worlds of comedy, literature and television, RNZ welcomed guests from across the artistic spectrum this year. Here are 10 of the best.

How Oscar Wilde helped save Stephen Fry's life

In an interview with Jim Mora for RNZ's Sunday Morning, Stephen Fry described "tormented, tortuous and absurd teenage [years] that involved being expelled from large numbers of schools, ending up in prison, how by the skin of my teeth I managed to get to university where I was lucky enough to meet two remarkable people..."

Those people were Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson, his first comedic collaborators. That serendipitous meeting gave him one of his first runs on the boards of show business, with the two-person act Fry and Laurie.

But his teenage years were troubled.

"It was a horror, because I knew that gay people were despised and that they lived lives of shame and mockery and contempt and isolation and I saw that as being in my future in life," Fry said.

It drove him to the library, where he first read about Oscar Wilde, the poet and playwright. Wilde's bravery to live publicly as a gay man sustained Fry as a teenager, while in prison and through his early years in show business when he lived a celibate life.

"I realised I wasn't alone. There was hope."

Bree Tomasel: 'In that moment I truly believed that I was going to die'

Australian-born Bree Tomasel is best known on this side of the ditch as the co-host of Celebrity Treasure Island and a radio host on ZM.

But behind the banter, Tomasel has battled anxiety, ADHD, struggled with her sexuality, and survived a harrowing attack as a young child. She shares her story in her new book UnApologetically Me.

The attack she endured as a nine-year-old child has echoed through her life, she told RNZ's Sunday Morning in October.

She concludes at the end of this "non memoir", which she calls "silly scribblings", that success comes when you have the courage to accept who you are.

"I feel like this is one of those moments where it really, truly pushed me to be completely and utterly myself. And I hope that I've done that in the book with how honest I've tried to be."

Russell Howard: 'British people look like dropped pies'

Britain is an island of people who maybe aren't the best-looking in the world, but they have the gift of being funny, British stand-up Russell Howard told RNZ's Jim Mora in February.

"I think the Brits are very good at taking the piss out of ourselves. If there's any kind of tragedy, if there's a funeral, if something sad has happened, straightaway all the WhatsApp groups - all these kinds of jokes. And that's kind of the currency.

"Because we are, as a species... we look like dropped pies. We're not a particularly good-looking bunch. But we are kind of funny and sort of pisstakey.

"Whereas you go to Scandinavia - beautiful people, cheekbones for days, they don't need to work on their personality."

Howard, who was in New Zealand for a series of shows, loved the friendliness of New Zealand, even if it's a little too friendly at times.

"I was in Tauranga and a man stopped by in a pickup truck and said, 'You're my wife's weird crush' and then kind of narrowed his eyes and went, 'What d'ya reckon?'

"So that's taken friendliness to a real level, where you're kind of offering your wife. But I felt great. It says a lot about the male ego that you're like, 'Ahh that's quite nice'."

Harlan Coben: Bringing back Myron Bolitar

Reprising his famous character Myron Bolitar feels like "fun vintage", novelist Harlan Coben told Jesse Mulligan in May.

Bolitar, the basketball player turned sports agent who often plays detective, was first introduced to us back in the 1990s. Coben said it was time to bring him back.

"Myron feels a little bit like fun vintage. I just thought it would be interesting to try to write a thriller where it has the thrills and the twists and turns, and you will be completely shocked by the ending. I guarantee you will not guess whodunit in Think Twice.

"But more than that, you might just want to spend some time with some friends, some nice people, some people that you would want to share a pint with at a pub. And that's kind of what I think Myron, Win, Esperanza and his team do."

Ed Byrne: Finding the funny in personal tragedy

The death of a sibling might seem like unpromising material for a comedy show, but Ed Byrne got some of the best reviews of his career for his Tragedy Plus Time show.

His comedy has always reflected what's been happening in his life, he told RNZ's Jim Mora in June. In this case, it was the death of his brother, a recovering alcoholic who lapsed during the Covid lockdowns and subsequently died.

"He was cremated, and when he rolled into the furnace, at his insistence, we played 'Disco Inferno' by The Trammps, the chorus of which is 'Burn Baby Burn', which would be funny for anyone to do. But bearing in mind, our surname is Byrne, and he was the youngest in the family. There you go. He was a comedy director, and he was determined to get the last laugh."

Alone star Gina Chick: 'We're connected to something so vast'

Gina Chick has been through some "pretty massive things" in her life, she told Mihingarangi Forbes on Saturday Morning in October.

Many people may know Gina Chick for being the first winner of the survival reality TV show Alone Australia, but her life story is full of dips and turns that started long before she ever went on the competition.

Her memoir We Are The Stars traces her childhood as a self-described strange child who was extremely in tune with nature, as well as the heartbreak and tragedy in the years that followed.

"We're connected to something so vast and beautiful and wonderful that when we can kind of relax into that connection, we can get nourished by every single strand of the web and ultimately realise that we are actually made of stars."

How the 'Dark Destroyer' became a lifelong All Blacks fan

The Chase star Shaun Wallace revealed in July to RNZ's Saturday Morning who it was that made him an All Blacks fan for life.

It was the "late scrum-half Sid Going" that caught his eye and got him hooked.

"I remember watching the Lions tour of 1971, and although [Lions captain] John Dawes' team was victorious, he was absolutely fantastic. We used to have a sports programme called Grandstand, and when they used to show the New Zealand rugby union team, Sid Going was fantastic. So he was always one of my heroes."

The All Blacks are the standard-setters for the game, Wallace said.

"So I've always followed New Zealand rugby 'cause I've always thought they are and still are - even though they've not won the most World Cups - they are the blueprint, the standard of how rugby should be played."

Despite his imposing 1.91m frame, Wallace never took to the sport himself.

"I wasn't really a rugby player. Although, strangely enough when I was a captain of my house sports team back in school, from the ages of 12 to 15, we had to play rugby, so I was the centre of our rugby team.

"We weren't very good, but my crowning moment was when we got a penalty… I was playing centre at the time and I converted it. And that's still one of my ... greatest sporting achievements - at the age of 13. But that was the last time I played rugby."

Bob Geldof on 'white saviour complex'

Bob Geldof, the rock legend behind Band Aid and Live Aid, is looking forward to heading to our shores in 2025 for shows celebrating his life, and continues to bat off accusations of "white saviour complex".

Live Aid, one of the largest satellite link-ups and television broadcasts of all time, reached an estimated audience of nearly two billion people in 1985, across 150 nations.

It was the biggest aid programme ever mounted, raising millions of dollars and saving a claimed two million lives in Africa in the mid-1980s, after a devastating Ethiopian famine that occurred in the middle of the longest-running war of the 20th century.

Geldof told RNZ's Jim Mora it was in response to his feelings of "disgust, rage, anger, shame and horror" to a BBC report on the famine.

Tim Winton: 'We're on the razor's edge'

West Australian writer Tim Winton told RNZ's Saturday Morning about the barbaric and blistering future depicted in his epic new novel Juice, in October.

The "terrifying feeling" of being under the sun at 50 degrees Celsius is something the Australian writer and climate activist knows from personal experience.

"We're not built to live like that and we won't. I'm afraid most of us won't live like that."

In Juice, the 64-year-old drops his readers into a dystopian desert culture where chaos reigns and life is cheap.

"Let's just hold our noses and go into this world for a while and see how it feels and see if there's anything we might learn from it," he told RNZ.

"What we do now in the next six or seven years will probably determine the fate of the earth," he said.

"It's hard to know which way we're going to go. My fervent hope and belief is that we will find ourselves, that we will do the right thing."

Anthony Field - the 'Blue Wiggle' - on his mental health ride

Before Anthony Field was the famous 'Blue Wiggle', he was in a band fresh out of school with his brothers, called The Cockroaches. Those bandmates gave him the nickname Happy.

For more than 30 years, Field and his Wiggles bandmates have toured the world, entertaining children.

But through much of that time, he has experienced chronic pain and at times debilitating depression, he told RNZ's Kathryn Ryan.

But on stage, he said, it's a different story.

"We've done over 5500 shows over the years and I cannot tell you one time I didn't enjoy it.

"On stage you're not alone, working with the men and women on stage that are part of The Wiggles and looking out and seeing the families ... it's a real show for us in the audience ... the children's energy is just contagious."

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