Viewers see his cheeky Irish charming side at the helm of the Studio 10 morning show but Tristan MacManus says behind the scenes he has coped with multiple brushes with death and depression.
The 40-year-old former dancer from Bray says his actress wife Tahyna and three kids now give him a reason to live.
Opening up about a string of heart attacks, emergency operations and car crashes, MacManus now takes it on the chin.
“I’ve always had a mentality that stuff happens to ya. And you can’t control things that happen to you but you can try and control how you react to it. Things are very different now. I have a positive outlook on most things but I am not ‘happy, happy’ all the time,” he said.
Stopped in his tracks in his twenties, he admits he wasn’t fussed which way life or death went.
“They happened at different times in my life,” he says. “I had a heart attack in Vegas in my late twenties. At that time I was like ‘yeah, I could probably explain that one’, you know. It was at a time when I was like ‘whatever happens, happens’ – I wasn’t in a good space at the time. If I got through it, great. If I didn’t get through it, great. That was just how I felt at the time.”
When his appendix burst he admits “again that was like ‘whatever happens, happens’.” In between there were a couple of car crashes “that weren’t great”.
“The one that really hit me was the last heart attack. I had the other one four years ago. That one hit hard because I was a father at the time and a husband at the time. That scared me,” he said. “It’s just one of those things right now.”
On top of it all – his biggest hurdle has been the demons in his head.
“I’m like most people, I fight through depression a lot, like a lot of people. Sometimes it creeps up on people. That’s why it is there. What I have embraced now, which I didn’t earlier, is trusting the people around me and myself to be open with them.”
The former Dancing With The Stars judge says his kids give him a reason to stay strong and back himself.
“Like most people I have grown up with a ‘why?’ And also not feeling like you’re enough. That’s what I focus on now. The reason being is because I see how much my wife is and my daughter is and my boys are. The worst thing that could possibly happen in my life is that my kids grow up not feeling they are enough. That’s what I focus on now. You can’t instil that in someone if you don’t feel it within yourself. That’s my why. That’s my focus now. I might seem positive all the time but I’m struggling like a lot of people are. But that’s life, isn’t it.”
He likes to keep family close with tattoos of his wife and kids’ names on his Gaelic tattooed body. “I have one on my back. David Bowie, my dad’s favourite artist. It’s Starman which is his favourite song,” he adds.
MacManus is an accidental TV star. He jacked in his life as a TV dance pro for a new life in Australia which led to being a gardener and a tradie in WA.
“We moved to Australia, we’d fallen pregnant we were just about to have a family. I decided I’d figure out what to do when I got here. I had nothing,” he said.
“I stayed in Werribee where we were working on the solar farms. I absolutely loved it. Me and my mate Luke lived with a lovely lady Maria.
“I went back to landscape gardening which I love. I have been lucky enough to always appreciate what I am doing. You have to earn a crust. My priorities had changed. I had a family to look after.”
Channel 10 then invited him to be a dancer on Dancing With The Stars before its move to Channel 7. But he rejected it and said he wanted to be a judge.
“I have no fear or shame in finding something that I want to do and contacting them and letting them tell me ‘no’ or how I can do it,” he says.
After Dancing With The Stars ended during the COVID pandemic lockdowns, MacManus found himself shovelling manure again before he was invited for a screen test to be a host on Studio 10. He blagged his way through to success.
“I got a phone call saying ‘what are you doing?’ I said: ‘I’m literally shovelling s….’ in someone’s back garden. They said ‘I want you to remember this phonecall, this is the phone call offering you a contract to work at Channel 10’. I said ‘yep’ and hung up.”
As for handling TV stardom he says, “People look at television and dancing as not a real job. That’s not the reality. It’s very hard.”
Luckily he flies under the radar off camera to enjoy his hobbies and family. “I am very unassuming. I can float through people without people recognising me.”
And does he have any tips for his Sunrise rival, newcomer Matt Shirvington on how to handle a hot seat and tricky customers?
“I can’t give any tips to anyone. We’re all insecure,” he admits. “Everyone is insecure with everything and as soon as you get to a position, is when you start hearing from absolutely everyone about who can do it better, who should be doing it and why you shouldn’t be. That’s part of life. That’s the thick skin you have to grow. I’ll be nice to whoever is nice to me and if they aren’t, f-em!”