There’s a lot for Paul Henry to smile about right now. He’s just returned from Palm Springs and London, and is soon to head to Fiji when the Weekly catches up with him over lunch.
He’s also about to return to our TV screens, but his face lights up most when we talk family – he has found love and married businesswoman Diane Foreman, and he can’t get enough of his three daughters.
“I love them more than I’ve ever loved them,” he says. “It’s just unbelievable. I’m so proud of them. I’m just so desperately in love with them and they’re all in different stages.”
Paul and Diane with his girls (from left) Sophie, Lucy and Bella. “I’m so proud of them,” he says.
His eldest daughter Lucy, 34, is married to Frank, 41, and living in Melbourne working as an oncology nurse, and is mum to Reihan Henry, five, and Mina Olive, two.
“What we always do for birthdays is send balloons because if you can’t be there, send them an inflated helium balloon – or 50 – because children love things like that!”
But when Reihan turned five recently, things didn’t exactly go to plan.
“Diane told me it was his birthday and we organised huge multi-coloured balloons. So I phoned Lucy to tell her the balloons would be arriving the next day. She said, ‘Why tomorrow? Have you decided to start the birthday a month early?’ That’s how good a grandad I am!”
But little Reihan wasn’t convinced it was a planned move. “He didn’t accept it because he doesn’t think that way. That’s the beauty of being a five-year-old, having a singular vision – ‘But it’s just not my birthday yet, Grandad.'”
Middle daughter Sophie, 32, is still in New Zealand and her dad says she “is gorgeous and has an eclectic life, and is just finding her way still, as middle children often do”.
Meanwhile, his youngest daughter Bella, 30, who married Julyan Collett, 34, in 2020, has just built a home and will be moving into it soon. She has dogs but Paul says children may not be far off. The pair recently took a 8000-kilometre road trip from his base in Palm Springs to Chicago in less than two weeks.
“My job was to find a place to stay the next night and hers was to find two interesting things to do,” Paul tells. “We went to Abraham Lincoln’s Memorial and stood right next to his body, and crazy things like visit Cadillac Ranch, where the cars are buried in the mud. We had our chakras done and visited a Buddhist temple. Bella and I are both Buddhists, although Bella has signed up to multiple religions.
“We had the best time. I’ve come to think that the reason there are so many bizarre and interesting things in America is there’s so much barren-ness and emptiness that you’re reasonably meaningless unless you’re the president or you bury Cadillacs on your ranch.”
Paul and Bella on their road trip from Palm Springs to Chicago.
Paul will return to New Zealand this month for publicity for The Traitors NZ, a new show he is hosting on Three, but for now, he’s taking his yacht to Fiji, where he’ll be joined by Diane, and friends and family in the coming months.
“That’s the magic of boating,” the 62-year-old says. “You create this world that just travels around.”
The 90-tonne vessel is named Olive after his dear mum, who passed away in 2016.
Paul on board Olive (named after his beloved mum) with daughter Bella.
“She’s still sitting there on the boat because she’s baked into it,” Paul tells. “It’s not just named after her – it is her. She always wanted to do a cruise and never did, but now she’s constantly on the water.
“I have a lovely stainless steel work of art, and in the middle there are olive leaves cut out of it and in the middle of that, there’s a hole with a dome of glass with her ashes in it. It sounds kind of tacky, but it’s just lovely.”
It’s a fitting tribute to the woman who raised him.
“I was fundamentally brought up by my mother with the backdrop of my father, who was an absentee, very bad father and very bad husband,” shares Paul.
“She was a magical person in every way and when I look back at the way he treated her, it was abusive. But she built him up in my eyes and he was an extraordinary figure.
“When I was going to a horrible school literally dug out of the ground in industrial Bristol, with inadequate clothing and inadequate food, I looked around and I could always remember being inspired by him because I was the poorest person in the whole school – and it was a poor school – and I’d think, ‘My God, you people are all losers. You have no idea… My dad is an explorer.’
“Mum told me a million times that I’m as good as anyone I meet because I think she was frightened of me becoming like her. And the great thing is, before she died, I was like all of the other people.
“So I think both my parents enabled me to be the greatest person in the world because they both enabled me to think I was already the greatest person in the world, which clearly I am,” Paul deadpans.
Despite his many years of success and wealth – “my wife and I have multiple houses all around the world and some of them are literally palaces” – the memory of experiences such as hunger and no electricity has left a permanent emotional scar.
“It makes me terrible in my family. It makes me terrible because a bill will come or I’ll see how much things cost and it just makes me remember how poor I once was. All the children in my extended family laugh at my angst over money. My wife came from very little, and I’m so enormously proud of all the amazing things she has and does achieve – she is much better though at rationalising spending than I am. Thank God!
“It’s a prison and my kids know that I’m in prison. They can’t fully imagine it because they’re lucky I’ve never put them in the same prison, but I’m in a poverty prison.”
Paul is “enormously proud” of wife Diane, who like him grew up with very little.
Paul hasn’t let those experiences hold him back – he’s perhaps even inherited a sense of adventure from his father. A former war correspondent, he says life on Olive isn’t always smooth sailing.
“It’s confronting,” he shares. “This is what blue water sailing is: unimaginable boredom, boredom, boredom, fear and boredom. It’s so boring, you wish to be afraid and then you’re so enormously afraid, you want to be bored again. I’ve been in sea where we are literally falling off cresting waves into the valley between two huge cresting waves, and then she slips off a wave and the next, and the next in really bad weather.”
He recalls leaving a big sea in the Mediterranean. On board were Sir Michael Hill and his wife Christine.
“I looked around and couldn’t see them… I found them sitting in the cockpit holding onto huge stainless steel posts, with the biggest smiles on their faces, and in the background, there was either an endless view or a wave higher than the boat. They had huge smiles because they knew that this was living.”
Whether it’s raging oceans, stunning views or encounters with wildlife, it seems Olive, like her namesake, adds magic to Paul’s life. He tells stories of being surrounded by dozens of dolphins and a ginormous sunfish.
“You’ll be out in the middle of nowhere and you can see the horizon, so as far as the eye can see, there is nothing, which is lovely,” he says. “And then you’ll be bored. And all of a sudden, a whale will surface and something will happen and remind you that what you’re doing is unbelievable. It’s just such an amazing thing.”
He was on Auckland’s Waiheke Island sipping on a glass of red wine late last year when he received the phone call that resulted in his television return.
The show has 19 contestants playing the ultimate game of deception and suspicion while staying at Warkworth’s Woodhouse Mountain Lodge. Hidden among them are “Traitors”, whose goal is to eliminate the “Faithfuls” by “murdering” them one by one in a bid to win a prize pool worth up to $70,000. Paul is the custodian of the game.
Game master: Paul is back on screens for The Traitors NZ and tells us, “I was brilliant at it.”
“Once that game starts, there is no stopping it,” he explains. “It’s impossible to stop. And because it’s been so well constructed, it has a life of its own, which can only individually be altered by the decision of the contestants based on how they perceive what’s happening around them. It’s fabulous.”
In the Kiwi version, half of the cast are celebrities, including Brodie Kane and Mike Puru, a fact Paul found “completely unnecessary” because “every single contestant, whether a celebrity or not, will be a personality to every audience member.”
But when it came to having favourites, he admits to having two. “I was surprised because neither of them were people that I thought would impress me. But the two of them were astounding. They impressed me. They were living in that game,” Paul says – and no, he won’t share who they are.
It’s a highly-anticipated return for the popular broadcaster, who says this show is very different from his previous shows.
“It’s been Paul Henry in the evening, Paul Henry in the morning – the shows were built around me. Everything I’ve done is essentially me, but this is like Paul Henry acting as Paul Henry.
“I’m not the star – the game is the star. It takes contestants into another world and it displays that world in a way that the viewer can’t help but become a part of it. And I absolutely love that. And I was brilliant at it.”
Stream The Traitors NZ first on ThreeNow from Monday, August 7, and at 7.30pm on Three each Monday and Tuesday.
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