Jaquie Brown on her new pop culture show and breaking Hollywood: ‘It’s my soul-calling to do this’

TV presenter and actor Jaquie Brown speaks to Felicity Monk about balloons, special bonds and her new career as a Hollywood screenwriter.

On a mild Monday morning in between Auckland rainstorms, Jaquie Brown and I meet at her local cafe in Morningside. We are here to talk balloons.

Brown is co-presenting brand new television series Blow Up, which starts later this month. It’s a competitive reality show where Kiwi balloon artists (or balloonologists or balloon twisters, depending on your fancy) compete against one another to make the most marvellous balloon creations in order to win a $25,000 prize. The show is lively, the contestants are delightful and Brown is glamorous, animated and warm.

“I was initially drawn to the idea that it would be fun and that it would give something back to New Zealand, but now even more so. I just think the timing of it couldn’t be better.” The balloon art scene was not one Brown was familiar with – she had to ask if there was actually enough balloon talent in New Zealand. “It’s a subculture I’d never even heard of, so it was a lovely surprise to realise that we have this thriving balloon community. And when Dave [Breen], my fellow co-host and judge from New York was brought on board, the [contestants] were like, ‘Oh, my God! It’s the Justin Bieber of the balloon world!’ They were really excited. Like, he’s a big deal.”

The seven contestants are a diverse bunch and include magicians and children’s entertainers. So the extremely clear enunciation, hearty dose of maniacal enthusiasm, snazzy party trousers and the occasional “peow peow” finger guns make perfect sense.

Brown just adores them. “I wasn’t expecting to feel so much for these people. But they are just the most lovely, uplifting, fun, creative people. They’re used to being in front of crowds and bringing the energy, and they’re not afraid to have a laugh and be silly, which is really needed. As Kiwis, we tend to be quite low-key, self-deprecating, so to discover these incredible, beautiful people was a real joy. And they just had so much to say.”

Brown says strong friendships were forged among the contestants and they were incredibly supportive towards one another. “I had to say them, ‘You guys realise you’re in competition with each other, right?’ Because they were whipping around helping each other. I was surprised how deeply affected I was by the elimination. There’s a lot of me crying in the show,” she laughs.

And how did she deal with the relentless balloon-popping? Not well, if the early episodes are anything to go by; there’s a lot of squawking and shrieking. “Oh my God, it was so, so loud in that studio. The first few times it really shocked me to my core.” She reckons by the eighth or ninth week of filming (there were 10 in total) she began to adjust. “But I have deep scars on my insides.”

Before taking the job, Brown asked about the environmental impact of the balloons used on the show: “That was a big concern of mine.” This question is addressed in the first few minutes of the opening episode, where Breen assures viewers that all the balloons used on Blow Up are made from natural tree sap and are 100 per cent compostable. The show’s publicist goes further, saying that none of the balloons will end up in landfill.

Brown is a busy woman. Aside from various presenting gigs, the mum-of-two voices a sweet character called Sorry in the Bafta-nominated children’s television show Kiri and Lou (“it’s such a beautiful show to be involved with”) and is a sometime host on Three’s The Project. Back in January, Brown interviewed friend and comedian Dai Henwood about living with incurable cancer. It is a beautiful, gentle and moving interview. It’s also the only interview Henwood has given about the topic. “It was the biggest honour, truly, that he asked me to be the person to interview him and kind of break the news to New Zealand. I had known about it for a few years, like a lot of his friends. And I was just nervous about making sure that I gave him enough space to say what he needed to say and to ask the questions that kind of brought out what he wanted to say. I’m just so glad that he feels relieved now that he’s been able to do it.”

During the interview Henwood shared deeply philosophical and thoughtful insights around living a more meaningful life, something we could all be doing more of. “Yes!” agrees Brown. “His positive attitude, his deep spiritual work, his understanding of the meaning of life, love, connection – all that beautiful stuff that actually all of us should really be tapping into anyway. It was really special to have a front-row seat to this incredible lecture about life.”

Brown has said in the past that, by nature, she is a private and quiet person. Born in England, it was never her plan to wind up on New Zealand television screens. After moving with her parents to Auckland as a teenager – “we drove around the streets wondering where everyone was and then got sunstroke because we didn’t know how strong the sun was” – she began volunteering at student radio station bFM. From there, she successfully auditioned to be a presenter for brand new late-night TV music show Space. In 2008, she co-created and starred in the award-winning sitcom, The Jaquie Brown Diaries, playing a fictionalised version of herself. And aside from some time away raising her children, it feels like she’s been on TV ever since.

Brown is careful to protect the privacy of her son, daughter and “Instagram shy” husband and doesn’t post any pictures of her kids on social media (aside from a few when they were really young). “I just became very aware of how many eyes are on it. And they didn’t choose to be there, so I felt like it was a bit unfair. They are 12 and 9. I want them to be informed and make their own decisions about their footprint. I don’t want to be the one that sort of thrusts them out there. It can be so toxic. I just hate the idea if somebody didn’t like me for whatever reason and then transferred that on to them because they recognise them. We’re keeping social media away from them, because it’s so horrific.”

For the past six years, Brown has quietly been working away at an entirely new career. She has written two feature films, which she successfully pitched to Hollywood and are now in development. Announcements are imminent: “I will be able to say more soon. I promise!” She began writing when her kids were little. “I started funnelling my feelings of being a mum and feeling kind of left out of my career, feeling irrelevant. And I wrote a script about that. I actually sent it to Three and they rejected it, which was the best thing that could have happened to me because it made me want to improve, to get better and prove them wrong.

“That’s what happened to Flight of the Conchords. Rejection is the most powerful motivating force you can have when you’re a creative person, because it makes you think: ‘I’ve got to work harder’. And so I did, I just worked harder. I did every single course I could think of doing. I took on mentorships. I spent any spare money I had on Zoom lessons, submitting my work, getting notes, improving, and then eventually one of the feature scripts I wrote got into the right hands.”

A couple of weeks after this interview, Brown headed off to LA to meet the producers she’s worked with over Zoom for the past few years. “I’m really proud of myself because I have done this on my own. I’m self-taught. I managed to get my agent, and my manager on my own. And it’s a skill that I didn’t know that I had. But like all the creative fields, you have to have a couple of things going at one time, you have to keep the income coming in. And, you know, seed your dreams quietly in the spare room.”

Brown says she is excited about the idea of women having a second career after the age of 40. “I think there is a lot of stigma around getting older, or you are [limited] to a certain type of person, when so many of us have all these other skills and these other avenues we don’t even know that we can pursue. So it was a really beautiful surprise to me, that I could do something else and that it was received well. It’s the direction I’m going to go in. It’s my passion, my soul-calling to do this.”

Blow Up screens from April 17 on Three and ThreeNow.

Make-up/Serenity Make-Up. Styling/Sammy Salsa. Compostable balloon dress/Maggie @ A Gazillion Balloons. Compostable balloon props/Sharyn Donn.

Jaquie wears: Metallic top from H&M, green jacket from Collision and trousers from Zara. Shoes from Novo. Vintage earrings.

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