Shaun Micallef on ageing, identity and finally being himself

After decades spent playing characters and carefully constructed versions of himself, Shaun Micallef tells Starts at 60 why getting older has him looking back, and why helping others uncover their past has revealed something unexpected about his own life.

For more than 30 years, Shaun Micallef has known the version of himself Australians see on television.

There have been characters, satire, deadpan delivery and the peculiar, impeccably controlled television persona that has carried audiences through everything from Mad as Hell to Talkin’ ’Bout Your Generation.

But while watching Micallef’s latest series, his partner noticed something different. She heard him laugh.

“Oh, that’s you,” she told him.

Not the television version, nor another character or comic construct. Just Shaun.

And at this stage of his life, Micallef seems increasingly comfortable letting audiences meet him.

“I made a decision after Mad as Hell finished to be in the service, if I could, of other people’s stories,” Micallef tells Starts at 60.

“Rather than just writing my own stuff and presenting my own stuff, and this very much plays into that promise I made myself.”

That promise has led to Shaun Micallef’s Origin Odyssey, the SBS series in which Micallef travels with well-known Australians as they explore their ancestry and the people and places that shaped their families.

It has also required something unusual from a performer who has spent decades expertly controlling what audiences see.

“I can’t be my usual persona. I can’t be the guy that I’ve been presenting as me for the last 30 years on television,” he says.

“It wouldn’t be right for me to be a pretend character. So I’m more or less myself.”

His partner can apparently tell the difference.

“When I do laugh in this series, if I laugh or I react to something, she says, ‘Oh, that’s you. Yeah, that’s you,’ rather than me being a construct,” he says.

Perhaps most revealingly, Micallef admits there was once some uncertainty about whether the man behind the construct would be interesting enough.

“I was worried for years that people would not think that was enough,” he says.

“But in this case, I’m secondary to the story, so I’m quite happy being myself when I am myself.”

‘There’s less road out ahead of you’

Those stories have also prompted Micallef to think about something familiar to many people as they grow older: the increasing pull of the past.

Parents and grandparents who once simply existed in the background of our lives become people whose choices we want to understand. Questions we never thought to ask suddenly seem important.

Micallef has felt that shift himself.

“When there’s less road out ahead of you, I think you have a tendency to turn around and look back at that longer road you’ve already travelled,” he says.

“And back waving you goodbye, I suppose, are your parents, and then beyond that are your grandparents.”

When life is dominated by earning money, paying school fees and putting food on the table, Micallef says there is little time for such introspection.

Later comes the luxury of asking different questions.

“We wonder whether we’ve given purpose and meaning to our own lives over the course of it,” he says.

“I think looking back at what we’ve all done ourselves in our lives, and then beyond that, might help satisfy this need to work out who we are.”

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It is that idea that sits beneath Origin Odyssey.

Rather than simply finding names on a family tree, Micallef is fascinated by the moment an ancestor decided to leave everything familiar and make Australia home.

“Sometimes we’re lucky enough to have a guest who’s about the same age that their ancestor was when they decided to leave, so they can really put themselves in the shoes of their ancestor,” he says.

“What would that have felt like, to have made that leap into the unknown?”

The answers can be deeply personal.

Tony Armstrong knew little about his maternal ancestry before travelling to Ireland, where he met relatives for the first time. Kate Langbroek’s journey to Jamaica, meanwhile, confronts a family history encompassing both enslavement and plantation ownership.

For Micallef, physically returning to these places gives history a power that documents cannot quite replicate.

“There’s still something about standing on the same earth that helps those stories resonate a little more than if they were just looking at photographs back in Australia,” he says.

Knowing when to leave the floor

Micallef’s job is sometimes to guide those moments and sometimes simply to disappear from them.

“I’m a dance partner,” he says. “I’ll lead when I need to and I’ll be led when I need to, and I’ll leave the floor when I have to.”

“If I’m basically just standing there and listening, I’ll move out of shot, because it does feel too personal,” he says.

It is a very different role for a performer whose career has so often depended on being the funniest or most unusual person in the frame.

But perhaps that is also part of getting older.

Micallef believes we spend much of our younger lives looking forward, convinced of our individuality, before eventually reaching a point where we can turn around and recognise the pattern behind us.

“When you reach some vague destination, you can look back and go, ‘Oh, that’s how we got here. That’s interesting.’”

Only then, he suggests, do many of us fully appreciate what our parents gave us — and recognise what we have consciously chosen to carry forward or leave behind.

“At some point we have agency where we say, ‘Well, I’m not going to be like my mum or my dad’, or ‘I will be like my mum and my dad’,” he says.

Micallef isn’t pretending he has solved the bigger questions raised by all this travelling, history and introspection, but at this point in the journey, he knows roughly where he stands.

“I haven’t got all the answers, but I think I’ve got a good map now,” he says.

“Here’s the good. I found the good, and if I can’t find the good, then I’ll hopefully try and make it. You try and hammer it together yourself and be a force for some sort of positivity, which is, in my small way with TV, what I’m trying to do now.”

Shaun Micallef’s Origin Odyssey airs Tuesdays at 7.30pm on SBS and is available on SBS On Demand.