Peter Andre stars in the New Zealand-created Prime Video series The Sunshine Murders. Photo / Dan Kennedy
Fame was instantaneous when Peter Andre burst on the scene, all shiny abs and singing about a Mysterious Girl. Fast-forward 30 years and, as he tells Emily Brookes, it is a role in a new Kiwi-created TV show that has helped make even older dreams come true.
It’s not unusual for overseas celebrities to tell Kiwi journalists they love our country. But when Peter Andre says it, he really seems to mean it.
“I love New Zealand,” he enthuses from his home in Surrey, just south of London.
“I haven’t been there since the 90s ... and I’ve always said to my management, I don’t understand why I’ve never gone back to New Zealand.”
Andre is refreshingly genuine. He’s a delight to talk to, chatty and forthcoming, even suggesting we switch from voice call to video “so I can say hello”.
You could forgive him were he even a little bit jaded. After all, Andre has been in the entertainment business for nearly 40 years, internationally famous for 30, since his 1995 reggae-infused pop hit Mysterious Girl made him a household name (the music video made the then-22-year-old’s sculpted pecs and abs famous in their own right).
But today, people stop him on the street for all kinds of things.
“They stop you because you’re ... a personality,” he says with a modesty that feels in no way faux. “A bit of a jack of all trades, master of none.”
Andre was a massive UK reality TV star of the early 2000s, arguably the genre’s peak. He’s performed on the West End, written several memoirs, even a series of children’s books.
What he hadn’t done until very recently was screen acting.
“I’d studied acting in Australia when I was a kid,” Andre says. “But it just so happened that I went on a talent show, and then the music side was the dream ... But I always said, when I get to my 40s, I would get back into acting.”
The talent show was New Faces, on which 16-year-old Peter Andrea, as he was then known, the UK-born son of Greek Cypriot parents who had moved their family to Australia 10 years earlier, made history by being offered a recording contract live on television.
That led to Mysterious Girl, as well as two UK No 1 hits, three albums, and a whirlwind few years of recording, touring and partying.
And then, in 1998, a breakdown.
“A lot of my 20s are a blur,” Andre, now 53, says. “It was crazy and manic and wild and amazing, but also the breakdown sent me on a bit of a spiral.”
That might be an understatement. For about six years, Andre disappeared from the public eye as he grappled to find a way out of the spiral.
At the time, he says, the topic of mental health was “really taboo ... [In] those days, we couldn’t talk about it and our parents had no idea what we meant, and you’d go see a doctor and he would just think that you were loopy”.
His devoutly Jehovah’s Witness parents “would say ‘Oh, you’re not feeling well, have some lamb’.”
A combination of medication and various kinds of therapy – “I’ve tried it all” – brought Andre back. His star soared with a 2004 turn on hit UK series I’m a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here!, while a re-release of Mysterious Girl saw it top the British charts.
About eight years ago, he was diagnosed with a panic disorder.
“But that’s life. And I’ve spoken to my kids and I’ve said, whatever you do, please, come and talk to me, because I don’t ever want them to go through what I went through.”
Another reason Andre is stopped on the street: for being Princess Andre’s dad.
Both of Andre’s two children with glamour model Katie Price (once known as Jordan), to whom he was married from 2005 to 2009 and with whom he starred in no fewer than nine reality shows, have followed their parents into entertainment.
Princess, 18, is now a reality star in her own right, with UK show The Princess Diaries, while Junior, 20, signed a record deal in 2021 and has released several singles.
Did their dad encourage them into it?
“I neither encouraged nor discouraged,” Andre, who is reportedly estranged from his ex-wife and doesn’t comment about her publicly, says. “I said to them, kids, you’re going to do what you want to do, but I’m going to tell you the pitfalls and the good and the bad.”
His advice includes always being polite, not getting arrogant, learning to accept failure, and diversifying.
“I said, don’t just stick to one thing. You know, like with me.”
Which brings us back to the acting.
True to his word, Andre took his first scripted project in 2019, when he was 46, as the lead in a short film. A few projects later, he is now appearing in his first TV show – and it has a killer New Zealand connection.
A cosy murder mystery in the vein of Death in Paradise, Prime Video’s The Sunshine Murders was created by Kiwi Emily Corcoran, who also stars as Shirley, a chirpy farmer who travels from New Zealand to Greece in search of her birth father. Instead, she discovers her half-sister Helen, a repressed and curmudgeonly detective, and a nascent talent for investigating murders herself.
Somehow, Sir Richard Hadlee finds himself in the series as well.
Andre has a supporting role as George, a police toxicologist who has a will-they-won’t-they romantic tension with Helen.
When Corcoran first approached him about the role, Andre says, he baulked at the idea of playing the character with a Greek accent, even trying unsuccessfully to convince Corcoran he should play the part as Australian.
In the end, he based the accent on that of his father, Savvas, who told Andre after seeing the show, “‘Well, the acting is good. The accent, I’m not so sure.’ I said Dad, but I sound like you!”
These days, Andre considers himself primarily a family man. He’s raising three children with his second wife, physician Emily MacDonagh. (It was MacDonagh who informed Andre that his character in The Sunshine Murders was a toxicologist. “I thought I was a pathologist.”)
But he can’t imagine retiring. Ironically, on stage “is the only place I feel 100% like anxiety can’t get me”.
“I don’t want to sound in any way big-headed,” he says, “But I’m very fortunate that I’ve got properties and I’ve built up enough that I could easily stop working, if I really wanted to. I could stop working tomorrow. But the problem is I don’t want to stop.”
Let’s hope he never gets jaded, either.
The Sunshine Murders is screening now on Prime Video.