AS A red-headed bucktoothed kid with thick glasses, comedy was pretty much Luke McGregor’s only option for survival growing up in the Hobart suburb of Glenorchy.
An unfortunate jaw problem (later fixed) meant his teeth stuck out and he couldn’t close his mouth, leaving him looking “permanently surprised”. Adding to his social woes, his school was the only one in the area with a uniform, and it was a particular twee one at that.
“I was a bit of a target,” he says as we live it up on the ABC’s hospitality budget with two small takeaway coffees.
“I just wasn’t very confident. Before I had comedy I didn’t really have anything of value. I wasn’t very good at sport. I was OK at school, I was kind of average at everything and I didn’t know what to do.”
Picked on mercilessly, he started using humour to try and disarm the bullies.
“If I could make them laugh, they’d either not beat me up — or they’d beat me up softer,” he says.
Aged 10 he remembers getting into a fight after another kid stole his Kit Kat, Trying to get it back, he inadvertently pulled off the bully’s elastic tie, embarrassing him. Soon a circle of other students had gathered around to watch the fight.
“I just started making jokes to him and the crowd and that kind of dispersed it a little. And then he didn’t’ want to fight anyway, he got really close and said ‘I don’t want to do this, let’s just make it look real’, and we started rough housing.”
McGregor’s difficult experiences growing up made it tough to form relationships and left him paralysed with anxiety about intimacy. Earlier this year he bared his soul — and everything else — for ABC series Luke Warm Sex. Having never overcome the uncomfortable adolescent phase of sexuality, it allowed him to explore and overcome his many sexual hang-ups through education and exposure therapy: everything from naturalism to a crash course in bringing a woman — one of his friends — to orgasm.
“I had sex twice before Luke Warm Sex,’ he explains.
“I got a girlfriend within a month of doing that show and we were having regular sex within three weeks. Eight months (later) we’re still dating and now we live together.”
McGregor, 33, met cardiac nurse Marie (“she gets really embarrassed if I talk about her too much”) at a wedding and they’ve since found themselves a nice two bedroom place in Hawthorn, halfway between her work in Clayton and his comedy gigs in the city.
Her difficult job is a reality check when McGregor comes home to complain about a long day of comedy. “She’ll talk about how she worked 12 hours and someone died or was bleeding out. It reminds me what I’m doing is not that stressful”.
McGregor doesn’t have much of a filter on expressing his innermost thoughts — he happily admits to worrying he hasn’t had enough experience to know if she’s ‘the one’ and wonders if he should get a few more relationships under his belt before settling down. (He’s decided “as long as I’m enjoying being with her more than I am being single I’ll stay with her.”)
There are other benefits than just sex of course. Marie’s presence has helped soothe his anxious thoughts and negative self-talk. And it’s helped curb his obsessive compulsive ticks. Sometimes when he’s in a room he’ll feel compelled to walk out and back in for no good reason. Other time he just gets strange fixations in his thoughts: “Like if I don’t pick up a bit of paper and it’s near some stairs that someone will trip on it and they’ll die. So then I’ll pick it up and put it in the bin but then I get germ OCD where I think ‘what if I get a disease from this?’ ”
Every night he hops from one leg to the other — ensuring he’s fully in the air — before getting into bed, otherwise he’s wracked with anxiety “like I was trapped in an elevator”. When they first got together, McGregor would wait until Marie was asleep before getting up to perform his bedtime ritual. He’s never sought help for his OCD. “The only time it got bad was one time I started pushing my adams apple in and it started to cause pain and bruising. That was one where the pain of doing it was worse than the pain of not doing it. Other ones are stuff I can do and it doesn’t affect my day or I can keep it hidden.”
“(But) slowly my OCD is started to leave just from being around her, because all of the stuff I normally think of a night time, where I worry I’m going to go crazy, it helps because she’s there,” he says.
“Even just going to bed and someone is there, or just that someone likes you or loves you is constant proof that you’re OK because this person values you, So yeah it definitely helped. Huge.”
In person, McGregor is a bundle of neurosis and nervous energy. Unshaven, in a cardigan and brown slacks, he talks in stammered half sentences and makes constant jokes.
McGregor is painfully honest about his personal failings, which forms an integral part of his appeal. Everyone knows what it feels like to be on the outer and to lack confidence — and McGregor mines the territory for laughs. No matter how anxious or uncomfortable you’ve felt, McGregor has a story that will top it. “All stand-up comedy is a kind of therapy, but it’s never been more true than in the case of Luke McGregor,” wrote The Herald Sun’s Michael Ward about McGregor’s 2013 comedy festival show My Soul Mate is Out of My League.
His first comedy gig came about by accident, when a Raw Comedy entrant pulled out at the last moment and he filled in with zero preparation. He spent most of the spot telling awkwardly telling people how funny he was about to be, and though he didn’t exactly slay them, he was instantly hooked.
“First gig, none (no anxiety). It wasn’t my world, I didn’t have any stake in it. And then I thought well that was fun, now I want to do it again, the second gig I had slightly more anxiety and now I have more anxiety than when I started, but I know how to manage it.”
He got in the Raw Comedy finals in 2008, he was a ‘buzz act’ at the 2013 Melbourne International Comedy Festival (winning Best Newcomer) and he’s gone on to perform at Edinburgh, Montreal and appeared in It’s A Date, Time of Our Lives and Legally Brown.
Given his history of anxiety and panic attacks, it’s something of a minor miracle he’s managed to go on to have a successful comedy career. But the audience’s laughter gives him the social approval that was denied so long. He admits to using jokes as a social crutch. “Even doing this interview, if I haven’t done a joke in a while I’ll start to feel subconscious — that’s what I can do, that’s what I bring. You should see me on dates.”
“Even at my first eulogy I started putting in jokes. It was my Nan’s eulogy and I was crying as I was trying to do jokes. It was a disaster.”
Aged 30 he chucked in his job as a performance analyst at a superannuation firm to pursue comedy full time. “Full time comedian” is often synonymous with ‘flat broke’ in Australia.
“I’d saved a little nest egg, I think it was about 10 grand and just lived off that. I felt that was a brave choice,” he says. “For the first year of doing comedy with no cash coming in and scared, I felt better about myself than I have my whole life.
“The worst day of my comedy job was better than my best day on my superannuation job.”
Ed Kavalee, from Have You Been Paying Attention, caught his act one night and got McGregor his big break when he brought him to the attention of Working Dog.
“We always keep a radar up for people,” explains Utopia’s star and director Rob Sitch. “We’ve never auditioned really. Ed … said keep an eye out for this young bloke from Hobart. We just said to him ‘do you want to come in for a coffee one day and if a project came up would you do it?’”
McGregor laughs at the memory.
“I thought: Career’s going to skyrocket! And then I heard nothing.” He does one of his nervous high pitched giggles.
Having idolised Working Dog since their D-Generation days McGregot says he felt like an impostor stepping on to the set when he finally got the call to do Utopia. “That was nerve wracking because you wanted to do well by them. I wish I had auditioned because then they could have seen if they liked me or not. But it worked out. I still quote the Late Show. I love it.”
Utopia has helped McGregor reach a comfortable level of fame, where people occasionally stare at him on the tram and once every fortnight or so someone asks for a photo.
“In Tassie it’s different, it’s much more present,” he says.
He became firm friends with Celia Pacquola on the set of Utopia. They share a similar sense of humour and decided to write together. “We wanted a show that was just us two talking rubbish but we didn’t know where to (set) it. A spaceship was probably going to cost too much so we just put it in a small town real estate agency. My parents are both real estate agents and Celia’s from a small town so we just put them together.”
Rosehaven sees Daniel (McGregor) move home to small town Tasmania to look after his forthright, eternally disappointed mother’s real estate agency. He’s joined by his best friend Emma (Pacquola) after her new marriage falls apart on honeymoon. Daniel has to learn the real estate trade and overcome the ghosts of his adolescent past in a town where everyone still sees him as ginger bully bait.
Surprisingly Working Dog had precisely zero no involvement with the series. “We were going to show them the script but … we were just too scared to approach them. We idolise them so much we didn’t want to do anything that might hurt the relationship. We didn’t want to bug them in any way.”
Despite starring in two ABC series in the space of a year, McGregor still doesn’t feel comfortable about the future. He says he still worries endlessly.
“I’ve past the point now where my resume is any use. I think what happens if I run out of money? Or what happens if Rosehaven doesn’t go well?”
He considers this further: “Or what happens if it does go well and we can’t think of anything else?”
Rosehaven, ABC, Wednesday, October 12, 9pm
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