Celebrity Treasure Island winner JP Foliaki says he prayed hard for the win. “It’s a really big moment, not just for myself and my family, but for the culture,” the Tongan-Kiwi star tells Woman’s Day.
He hadn’t won many challenges all season and seemed to be up against all unstoppable players. “But by the time we made the top six, I was visualising finding it,” says JP, 30.
He made himself a promise. “If I was to win, I would say a prayer just to show that this is God’s work, and this is the work of the community and everyone who has backed me. Never pelu – never fold, never give up. When I finally hit the treasure, it was surreal. I just felt such immense gratitude.”
With his CTI grand prize and challenge wins combined, JP has delivered a total of $110,000 to his charity ChildFund. That’s equivalent to 440 families in the Pacific each getting 6000 litres of safe water a year. “It’s 2024 – you’d think that everyone really should have the basic human right of clean water,” says JP.
As the season was airing, the Red, White & Brass and Far North actor was beside his sick grandmother in hospital. They were watching CTI on the ward TV – she even read his Woman’s Day story.
“I’m so lucky and so blessed to have my grandparents around,” says JP. “Seeing her face light up was such a cool feeling and because it’s reality TV, I’m not playing a character, so she’s really seeing me. Just to give her that bit of joy while she’s there in the hospital.”
The singer-actor is thankful for his family and the village that raised him. He knows it’s because of them that he can stand strong in his values on national TV and even be labelled a “celebrity”.
His time on CTI reminded him of life in Tonga. “There’s a different sense of home when you touch down on the island,” he says. “Being on the island itself is absolutely the best thing for your mind, body and soul. Just laying in the sun and feeling like time can stand still for a little bit.
“Our idea of time on CTI was when the sun was setting and rising, that’s when we would wind down or get up. I was like, ‘This is how it’s supposed to be,’ minus the anxieties of what was happening in the game.”
When people ask JP why he struggled with CTI when he’s an island boy by nature, he’s quick to correct them – he’s actually a “tropical” island boy. When he returned to everyday life having lost weight, people assumed he’d been working out. “That’s just the rice and beans,” he laughs.
But JP adds that his Tongan culture saved him throughout the competition. The hymn he sang in his mind during his face-off with Duncan Garner and Millen Baird was the same tune performed in his breakout film Red, White & Brass. When he found the treasure, he sang it again – a full-circle moment.
“Forming those life-long friendships and connections with people that I grew up watching on screen is crazy,” says JP. “My brother was like, ‘Man, you stopped playing rugby way before us. Now you’re the one that’s passing the rugby ball to Christian Cullen!’”
His “auntie” Suzanne Paul had a bouquet of flowers delivered to JP’s dressing room when he debuted in the Red, White & Brass play back in June. And of Boy actor James Rolleston, JP says, “That’s my bro. The fact that we’re good mates now is crazy to me.”
Once Wairangi Koopu left CTI, James would go fishing and JP dived for kaimoana. He told himself, “I guess I have to stand up and become the hunter-gatherer that I was born to be.” However, JP laughs that very little of it was captured on film – apart from a scene where “James is cleaning an eel and I’m doing the hard work of watching”!
The former Popstars finalist is working on new music. He says CTI has changed his life by introducing Kiwis “to who I am and what I’ve done, which means eyes on my community and the charity”. He enjoyed celebrating Pasifika culture with fellow contestants Bubbah and Gaby Solomona, whom he knew beforehand.
“It was really cool to bring our culture to the forefront in everything that we were doing, whether it was singing a song, saying words in our languages or flying our flags up high.”