The Happiest Refugee: A Memoir (39 page)

What a coup!
These guys were all-time legends. If it had been a soccer film this would have been the equivalent of having Maradona, Pele and Beckham in your movie.

The best part of
Footy Legends
was having my whole family join in the making of it. Apart from Khoa and me, Mum acted in a few key scenes and my sister, Tram, was the photographer for the shoot. Suzie played the part of a nurse in the film. She carried a small curly-haired boy with a bandage around his head—this was our son, Xavier, who was two at the time, so it was indeed a huge family effort.

Over three freezing winter months we filmed this little battler Australian comedy that wore its heart on its sleeve. I am incredibly proud of it. There isn’t a week goes by that I don’t have someone, from a kid to an old lady, come up and say to me, ‘
Footy Legends
 . . . I loved it.’

Well, I loved making the film, and truly had the time of my life. There was only one moment during the whole process where I could have gotten myself into serious trouble.

In the opening scene I had to come out of a river with a turtle I’d just caught in my hands. It would go on to become a pet for my little sister in the film. It was quite a starring role for a reptile. We scoured all of Australia and found that, believe it or not, there was indeed an acting turtle, called Bob. I met him and it was clear that Bob thought he was a human. He stuck his head out to look at you, gave you kisses and even had little turtle chats with you. Bob was perfect, and really the only option because turtles naturally bury their heads inside their shells when people pick them up. Without Bob, it would’ve looked like my little sister was keeping an empty shell for a pet.

The day we filmed the scene of me ‘catching’ Bob turned out to be the coldest day of the previous three years. We rocked up to Georges River National Park at 7 a.m. and it was so bitterly freezing I would have happily spoon-cuddled my mate Steve again. My task was to simply submerge myself in the water, holding Bob, act as if I’d just caught him, and then pop out holding him triumphantly in the air!
Easy peasy
.

I prepared myself mentally—my motivation: ‘catch the turtle, catch the turtle’—and then Bob’s owner/agent passed him to me and I jumped into the water. Immediately my breath was taken away and my entire body screamed for me to get out. My teeth chattered and I shivered uncontrollably, but I swam to the middle of the river using just one arm because my other hand was holding a turtle.

The director, my brother Khoa, called ‘Action!’ and I went under. As soon as I was submerged, both my legs cramped up. I couldn’t move properly and was thrashing about desperately with my non-turtle holding arm. It was no use and I started to sink.

It was an interesting dilemma I was faced with: Do I let go of Bob and save myself, or do I hang on till someone saves me? A little voice inside piped up,
Hold on to the turtle or it will swim away up the river. Don’t lose the only acting turtle in all of Australia
. So I continued to flail about like a one-armed, legless torso.

On the riverbank, Khoa said to his assistant, ‘Geez, Anh’s over-acting.’ He shouted to me, ‘Anh, just go down and come up, holding the turtle.’

‘Help, help,’ I shouted. Khoa looked pissed off.

‘Tone it down, Anh, this isn’t the time for ad-libs.’ I looked up at him, all snuggled up in a blanket, with a heater, and his continuity girl handing him a skinny latté.

‘Cramp, cramp!’ I called out. The safety man standing on the river’s edge could see I was in trouble and he jumped in and saved me. I got out of the water and gave Bob back to his owner. Khoa was laughing his head off.

‘I thought you were over-acting!’

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Footy Legends
was the turning point. Phone calls started coming in soon after it was released. First, it was
Thank God You’re Here.
The producer called my manager and said, ‘We want Anh.’

What a moment. It’s a show that many comedians watched at home and said to themselves,
I wonder if I’d be any good at that?
It’s at once a performer’s ultimate dream and worst nightmare. The basic concept is that they throw you into the middle of a scene where you’re the only one who’s completely unprepared. You step through a door and someone says, ‘Thank god you’re here.’ From there you play the scene as if you know what the hell’s going on, with a live studio audience watching, expecting, actually demanding, you to be funny.

I have always prided myself on being well prepared with my comedy material, but to go on a show watched by millions with a totally blank script was like jumping out of an aeroplane without a parachute and then quickly knitting one on the way down.

‘Tell them I don’t want to do it,’ I said to my manager.

‘Anh, I’m not going to say that to them now, I’m going to call you back tomorrow, let you sleep on it.’ My manager Andrew is a smart operator and knows me well. He knew my commonsense would override the initial fear.

‘So you going to do it, Anh?’ he asked the next day.

‘Yes! Oh my god, tell them yes.’

I went on the show and with a bit of beginner’s luck won the trophy for the best performance. I’ve since been invited back three times and people have often asked me whether it gets any easier. The answer? No. Hell, no. And oh my sweet lord, no.

Just as I’d started thinking,
Right, I’ve done a gig in front of two hundred war veterans, I’ve done
Thank God You’re Here,
nothing will ever scare me again
, Andrew rang.

‘Anh, they want you to be on
Dancing with the Stars
.’

I felt like I was my old corella, Pacino, and Andrew had just said ‘Poo!’

I rushed home to tell Suzie. Her response was pure loving honesty.

‘You can’t dance!’

‘I know!’

Several factors are important here. First, I really can’t dance. Second, I have a short attention span. Third… what was I talking about again? Anyway I now faced my greatest professional challenge yet. If the terror of
Thank God You’re Here
was having nothing prepared, the challenge of
Dancing with the Stars
was exactly the opposite: having to remember three hundred and forty-seven steps as well as arm, neck, head, foot and elbow positions during each step.
Ahhhh!

The only saving grace for me was that they teamed me up with a five-time world salsa champion, Luda Kroitor. She was a battle-hardened
Dancing with the Stars
veteran, having taken several actors past halfway and world boxing champion Kostya Tszyu to the grand final.

‘Sorry you got me,’ I said to her when we met.

‘Nonsense! Show me what you can do.’

She had this thick Russian accent and a wonderful direct manner about her. She grabbed me and we tried out few moves.

‘Oh my god, you are right… you are bad.’

We started practising about a month before the first episode and somehow she got me into pretty decent shape for a guy who’s best move at a dance club had been the ‘drunk grandad side-to-side shuffle’.

‘As long as we don’t get kicked out the first week, I’m happy,’ I said to Luda. ‘Anything after that is a bonus.’

We did better than just surviving the first week. Improving slowly but surely, we somehow found ourselves past halfway.

It was round about week six when I went to visit some kids at the Westmead Children’s Hospital. Every celebrity on the show supports a charity and mine was the Day of Difference Foundation set up by the family of Sophie Delizio, the brave little girl who was twice seriously injured in tragic events. Whenever I got a home viewer vote, a portion of the call cost went towards buying medical equipment for children’s hospitals.

As I drove there I steeled myself. I am absolutely hopeless when it comes to sick children. My wife tells me I freak out and become a useless worrier when my little boys get so much as a slight sniffle. When I have MC’d events in the past for charities like Kids with Cancer, they sometimes played videos of a battling child’s journey, which sometimes ends happily, but most often doesn’t. I always lost composure.

I met a bunch of kids that day including a little eight-year-old boy, Adam, who suffered from a rare disease that struck him suddenly, damaging his spinal cord and paralysing him from the neck down. Up until a few months earlier he was just a kid running round, kicking a footy, then all of a sudden he was fighting for his life.

Little Adam was lying there and his mother told me, ‘I get my strength from him.’ This kid was so weak and tired, but he still tried with all his might to cheer up his worried mum by making her laugh. Adam had been in hospital for a couple of months and was battling this severe disease bravely.

I pulled out some magic tricks, gave him a small toy and we filmed the segment. After I said goodbye I rushed to my car and sat there, crying my eyes out. I thought about Adam, whose big smile reminded me of my own sons’ big grins, and then I thought about Adam’s mother. What would I be going through in her place? You could see that her terror at the thought of her boy dying was only barely masked by her strength as a mum. She was desperately trying to hold back the tears for her son’s sake.

She reminded me of my own mother and a story that my aunties had told me so many times before. When we were on the boat coming to Australia, there was a point where I was sick from dehydration. I was lying very still, my lips cracked dry and my face gaunt from vomiting and diarrhoea. What I needed was water, clean water. Although we were in the middle of the ocean, there was not a drop to drink. My mother faced losing her son, and she held and rocked me all through the night, singing me lullabies and praying for a miracle to happen.

I sat in my car and felt overwhelmed by a deep and profound sense of gratitude for my life and for my mother. I drove straight from the hospital to the dance studios.

‘We’ve been doing four hours of dance practice a day,’ I said to Luda. ‘Let’s bump it up to eight.’

‘Okay. Let’s do it. What happened to lazy guy?’

‘I just realised how lucky I am.’

‘What do you mean?’