Hayley Sproull on the art of comedy, anxiety and advice for Shakespeare

Hayley Sproull. Photo / Dean Purcell

She started on Jono and Ben, has hosted local television shows The Great Kiwi Bake Off and Have You Been Paying Attention?, starred in local sitcom Golden Boy, co-hosts ZM’s breakfast radio show Fletch, Vaughan and Hayley, and has been a regular on comedy panel shows including 7 Days and Patriot Brains. Ahead of her new stand-up show at the Comedy Festival next month, Hayley Sproull speaks to Greg Bruce.

Hayley Sproull says her body has about 3.5 times the normal level of cortisol, the body’s stress hormone: “My cortisol levels are humorous,” she says. When her doctor saw her cortisol levels recently, the doctor’s reaction was, “F***, Hayley, what are you doing?”

When Sproull asked how to fix it, the doctor said to sleep more, meditate and do yoga. She rolled her eyes. She wants to live life faster, not slower, she says. She knows this is part of the problem, but that doesn’t mean she wants to do anything about it.

“I’ll be in yoga. I’ll be like, ‘Move it on! Like, let’s get out of this pose and into the next one, let’s pep it up a bit, guys’ – which is the whole antithesis of what yoga is and what it’s for. So I was actually getting more worked up than if I hadn’t.”

She suffers from anxiety, which she sometimes finds crippling (“the sickness and the dread and all that stuff is horrendous”), but also sees it as “a bit of a superpower”.

“It’s just like this kind of energy, and you get stuff done because you can’t stop moving. I know it’s really bad for your body and your head and stuff, and you should be doing the opposite, but sometimes – like writing a Comedy Festival show – inevitably, as you get closer and closer, you’re getting more and more stressed, under more and more pressure, and I’ve always just had that ability to keep working really hard up until the end. And I think sometimes anxiety can manifest as energy for me in a strange, uncomfortable way. You can’t always run away from it, so sometimes you just harness it and make it temporarily worth running like that.”

She is working on a comedy festival show right now. It’s called Ailments. Earlier on the day we talked, she had written a note titled “Joke” on her phone. She showed it to me. It read, in its entirety, “Curious wank.” She said: “I know exactly what that’s about.”

Ailments represents the first time in five years that she has been on the roller coaster of emotions that is stand-up comedy, which she describes thus: “This is going to be easy… Oh my God. I’m not funny… I’ve never said a funny thing in my life…No one’s going to come… Oh my God, too many people are coming…I don’t want anyone to come...”

The show deals with all the small things that go wrong with her body, inside and out, which are multitudinous: “It’s definitely not a mental health show,” she says, “And I don’t dwell on anything too long. It’s not a show about my vagina.”

Sitting down: Not Hayley Sproull's natural state. Photo / Dean Purcell

She loves an audience and is grateful to have one at home – her fiance, Aaron Cortesi, an actor and theatre director. “He’s a great audience member,” she says, “in that, he loves to be entertained by me.”

When she’s writing for television, or performing on stage, she says, she has a tendency to try to construct something or to overwrite. “Whereas with Aaron, at home, I’m just trying to entertain him 24/7. It’s exhausting for him. Can you imagine? You’re just trying to hang out on the couch and I’m like, ‘Aaron!’ And I’ll do a dance and a performance.”

They have been together for 12 years and engaged for four. They met at drama school. She says she was attracted to him first for his appearance, second for his power, and third for who he is as a person. The reason their relationship works, she says, is that they never broke up.

“Sometimes, we’re like, we don’t have much in common, we think we don’t have much in common or whatever, but the thing we have in common is that we really like each other and we just kept showing up, and whenever it was crap, we didn’t leave. And now I guess that we’re just here forever.”

There are two main reasons they’re not yet married, she says: They’re renovating their house, and they can’t agree on the kind of wedding they want.

“I originally wanted a carnival, like a full A&P show style, with a Ferris wheel, like a bit of a fiasco. And then Aaron wanted to run away and invite no one.”

She expects he’ll win, and that they’ll go to Italy or Thailand. She says they once had a magical night in Thailand, where they got in a tuk-tuk with a couple of bottles of homemade pina colada and asked the driver to take them around the streets for half an hour, with no particular destination. The tuk-tuk was souped up and lit up, and – because it was the king’s birthday – the city was lit up in gold. It was one of those perfect scenes – it only needed a soundtrack.

“The only song I had on my phone downloaded was Rawhide – Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’! – and Aaron was like, ‘Oh my God, this is so embarrassing.’ And I put it on, and the guy just cranked Rawhide. So we were sitting there, a little bit drunk in the back of a tuk-tuk, and now when we think about the wedding I’m like, ‘That would have been perfect.’”

Aaron Cortesi as Ali Williams in the film The Kick about the All Blacks victory at the 2011 Rugby World Cup. Photo/Supplied

Sproull studied drama at Toi Whakaari, New Zealand’s preeminent drama school for serious actors. She did well, and she’s won some awards for her theatrical acting, but she has never loved being serious, although that hasn’t stopped her from having strong opinions about serious theatre. For instance, she believes King Lear needs a “good edit”.

“I love Shakespeare because that’s how it started. I did Shakespeare at high school and then I went to the Globe Theatre with the Sheilah Winn Shakespeare Festival and stuff. So I’m a huge Shakespeare fan. I just had beef with him over King Lear and I was just, like, ‘It needed another edit, William.’”

When asked what she thinks it needs, she says, “More jokes. More jokes, less crying. Gags – a bit of a wink to the audience every now and then. Like, at the end when King Lear’s losing his mind and he’s in the storm, there are gags there. He’s the king and now he’s lost his mind. I’d do a comedy edit. I’d do a comedy pass.

Performance face. Photo / Dean Purcell

“I went and saw it at the Royal Shakespeare Company; it was boring. I saw it at the Globe Theatre; it was boring. I was in it; it was boring. There’s just something about that play. And it’s three and a half hours long. When I went and saw it at the Globe Theatre, how old was I? Nineteen, 20 years old. I was a groundling. So you just stand and watch. I sat down. I slumped down on the side of the stage and I was like, ‘Hurry up.’”

Asked how she would feel if someone did that at one of her own shows, she says, “I’d be like, ‘Get up,’ but then I would never do a boring play.”

When asked to compare stand-up comedy with Shakespeare, she says, “I think stand-up comedy is so pure. Shakespeare, and I say this as a massive fan, can be a bit contrived, whereas comedy is so simple: ‘Here’s an observation that I think is funny, and I think you’re going to think it’s funny, too.’ Pretty simple.

“I don’t mind complexity in comedy, but fundamentally, the end of comedy, the mark of its success, is: ‘Did it make me laugh?’ Not: ‘Did it make me think?’ Or: ‘Did it make me weep, cry, or view the world in a different way?’ Sometimes that happens with comedy, but if you’re not laughing, it’s not comedy.”

She takes high-quality SSRIs to help manage her anxiety, and as she says their name, she gives a chef’s kiss, but more and more these days, she feels the need to turn off her brain. Recently, she was watching two contrasting television shows: the critically acclaimed highbrow zombie drama The Last of Us and the exploitative reality show Married at First Sight Australia, when she discovered her clear preference was for Married at First Sight.

“It’s not a reflection of who I am,” she says, “it’s more a reflection of my head space at the moment. I want short, sharp entertainment. Not TikTok, not that short, but just simple, so I can watch it and then go to sleep.”

She also spoke highly of the new season of The Kardashians, a show she had never paid much attention to before.

“I was like, ‘This is very captivating watching, and I can’t wait for the next episode,’ and I don’t even care that I’m saying that. Same with Married at First Sight. My partner, Aaron, is always like, ‘Oh, my God, why are you watching that s***?’ I was like, ‘Because it’s wild. These people are mad, and there’s a voyeuristic streak in me that wants to watch them get hurt and cry.’

“It’s such a bizarre thing, especially when you’re like, [pretentious actor voice] ‘I started out in Shakespeare and I went to drama school and I make theatre!’ But also, Married at First Sight! Like, I literally can’t wait to wrap up this interview so I can go home and watch the second final vow ceremony.”

Hayley Sproull’s Comedy Festival show Ailments runs from May 9-13 at the Q Theatre Loft, Auckland. The Sex.Life podcast with Morgan Penn and Hayley Sproull is out now on iHeartRadio.

Hair and makeup: Claudia Rodrigues. Styling: Annabel Dickson. Hayley wears Kate Sylvester red Suska dress, Meadowlark earrings. Charcoal snake Jojo Ross top and skirt, Zambesi jacket, Meadowlark earrings, Silk & Steel necklace, Bronwyn boots.