Rhys Mathewson. Photo \/ Dean Purcell<\/p>\n
When he\u2019d first gotten sober, he\u2019d thought: \u201cif you put enough days on the pile, eventually you\u2019ll be like, \u2018I never want it again\u2019.\u201d After that visit to the therapist, he knew he would have to reconcile himself to the idea he\u2019d been wrong about that. <\/p>\n
He came home, ordered \u201ca shitload of Uber Eats\u201d, then went out and ran into Jeremy Wells. <\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you\u2019ve just gone \u2018f**k I\u2019m at the lowest point I\u2019ve been in five years\u2019, the first person you see to be like one of the loveliest blokes and also one of the most successful comedians in New Zealand: you can really feel the gap.\u201d <\/p>\n
He didn\u2019t tell Wells what had happened. Too polite. <\/p>\n
Mathewson had a gig booked at the Classic Comedy Club the next night, for which he had been workshopping material. On the way to the gig, he decided to throw it all away and start again. The show might still be comedy, but it would be completely unlike any comedy he had performed before. From now on, he decided, he was going to be honest. <\/p>\n
It was 11.50pm on New Year\u2019s Eve 2018 when he smoked his last joint. Marijuana had been his drug of choice for years, \u201cfrom the moment I wake up until the moment I go to sleep\u201d unless he had to go to work, and sometimes even then. <\/p>\n
It had also offered an escape route from feelings like disappointment, sadness, anger and shame, numbing him to all of that. It had also made life an adventure. \u201cIf you\u2019re really stoned,\u201d he says, \u201cyou\u2019re not just making a sandwich \u2013 you\u2019re making the best sandwich.\u201d <\/p>\n
But during his last year of use, it lost its magic.<\/p>\n
Rhys Mathewson says he had no forward momentum when he was a regular marijuana user. Photo \/ Dean Purcell<\/p>\n
While he had some good things in his life, he says, they were things that happened to him rather than things he made happen. \u201cI had no forward momentum,\u201d he says. \u201cI was very ineffective, I was very flaky, I was very distant to a lot of people, I think. <\/p>\n
\u201cI felt really sad and really trapped and I didn\u2019t know how to get out and I felt really incapable of asking for help from anyone.\u201d <\/p>\n
Another big wake-up call came during a comedy gig during which he said \u201cI\u2019m not a big drinker\u201d and a table of his comedy colleagues burst out laughing. <\/p>\n
A big believer in New Year\u2019s resolutions, he just thought, \u201cI\u2019m going to stop\u201d, and he did. <\/p>\n
Smoking that last joint, he felt very melancholic. He lay low for the next three months. If there was a party invite that said 6 \u2018til late, he would turn up at 6 on the dot and leave by 6.45 so as not to be tempted. <\/p>\n
His sleep cycle was \u201cf****d\u201d, he produced too much saliva and he had \u201cthe craziest dreams\u201d. But he also saw immediate benefits. \u201cWithin a week, I felt so much more stable, emotionally\u201d. No longer would he swing wildly between joyful and sulky. <\/p>\n
But that doesn\u2019t mean it has been easy. \u201cI do miss it,\u201d he says. \u201cI miss it a lot. God, it would be good to do. I\u2019m jealous of people who can still do it and fully function.\u201d <\/p>\n
Rhys Mathewson. Photo \/ Dean Purcell<\/p>\n
If sitting with dozens of others in a darkened room listening to someone express the emotional and physical pain of addiction and relapse sounds like the opposite of comedy, that might be because comedy has evolved in recent years. <\/p>\n
Mathewson describes it as a \u201cmovement towards authenticity\u201d, possibly caused by the rise of internet culture in the mid-2000s and the fact that almost any joke you could think of about any given subject had already been published online. <\/p>\n
\u201cWith the amount of comedy that was out there, it\u2019s like, \u2018How do I maintain the value of mine?\u2019 And it\u2019s to tell the things that only I can tell.\u201d <\/p>\n
Driving to the Classic the day after his therapist dropped the hammer on him, he realised those things were addiction and relapse and the emotional and existential rollercoaster that accompanied them. <\/p>\n
\u201cI think audiences can always sniff when the comedian\u2019s leaving something out or they\u2019d rather be somewhere else or something like that,\u201d he says. \u201cI had this thing that I was just constantly thinking about 24\/7, and then to go on stage and go, \u2018Who plays Lotto?\u2019 You know? I couldn\u2019t stomach it.\u201d <\/p>\n
He got up on stage and said he\u2019d had a relapse and that was the moment his career began again. <\/p>\n
At 19, Rhys Mathewson became the youngest winner of the Billy T award. Photo \/ Dean Purcell<\/p>\n
Mathewson grew up on Auckland\u2019s North Shore, the son of a pilot who flew the fabled Skyhawk fighter jets in the RNZAF and later became a captain at Air New Zealand. \u201cThere\u2019s two kinds of kids who grow up in the Air Force,\u201d he says. \u201cOnes who really love planes and ones who couldn\u2019t give a s**t about planes. I truly could not give a s**t about planes.\u201d <\/p>\n
He was a comedy prodigy and at 19 he became the youngest winner of the Billy T Award, which recognises the country\u2019s outstanding emerging comic. He was one of New Zealand\u2019s brightest young comedians with a massive future ahead of him. He moved to the UK to try to crack the big time. It was a disaster. <\/p>\n
He would drive four hours to do \u201cs**t gigs\u201d at pubs in the middle of nowhere to tiny crowds that didn\u2019t care. With 10 other comedians, he once performed a gig at the Edinburgh Fringe to a bar in which there were six patrons, none of whom had come for the comedy. By the time of his set all of them had left, along with the comedians who had already performed. <\/p>\n
He says he didn\u2019t have the emotional maturity to succeed in the United Kingdom. He wasn\u2019t working hard enough, wasn\u2019t forming the right relationships, wasn\u2019t spending the hours writing the requisite emails to potential promoters. He was \u201cjust sitting in a flat, smoking weed\u201d. <\/p>\n
On a trip home to New Zealand for the comedy festival, he met now-wife Chelsea McEwan Millar. At the airport for his return flight to the UK, he cried in front of her and his mum, feeling that he was making a massive mistake. Then he got on the plane anyway. <\/p>\n
After three months of \u201cfeeling like s**t\u201d, he says a friend from back home told him \u201cyou need to go home\u201d, so he did. <\/p>\n
Rhys Mathewson with fellow comedians Irene Pink, Justine Smith and Dai Henwood. Photo \/ NZ Herald<\/p>\n
He has now achieved everything there is to achieve in New Zealand comedy. He\u2019s had hit shows, written for The Project and 7 Days and won the two biggest awards in NZ Comedy: the Billy T and Fred Awards. <\/p>\n
After winning the Fred in 2016, for best New Zealand show at the NZ International Comedy Festival, he became \u201creally depressed\u201d. <\/p>\n
He thought the Fred-winning show was not his best work and was disappointed to hear that people thought it was him at his peak. \u201cIt feels weird to catch the thing that you\u2019re chasing and it hasn\u2019t fixed everything. I\u2019m still me.\u201d <\/p>\n
Several times during our chat he uses the word \u201cdepressed\u201d, although he says he\u2019s never been diagnosed with depression and thinks maybe he\u2019s being too cavalier with the word. <\/p>\n
Instead of numbing his feelings with drugs and alcohol, he now deals with them using techniques learned through therapy: \u201cYou have compassion for yourself and you know it\u2019s normal and everyone feels like this and you\u2019re allowed to feel like this and it\u2019s all going to be okay and then you try not to focus on them, try to hold them lightly: it\u2019s just a feeling; it\u2019s not a gale force wind that\u2019s going to bowl you over.\u201d <\/p>\n
And does that work? <\/p>\n
\u201cYeah. Generally.\u201d <\/p>\n
The show he began performing after his relapse is called 10th Rodeo and he\u2019s now been doing it for two years, developing and polishing it and garnering ever greater acclaim. <\/p>\n
After he\u2019d performed the show for a few months, he came to the realisation it\u2019s actually not about a relapse, but about something much more relatable: mistakes. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve all made mistakes,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019ve made a mistake. Let\u2019s deal with the mistake. And show the people in real time what it\u2019s like to deal with the mistake.\u201d <\/p>\n
By way of demonstration, he opens the show by trying, and failing, to flip a water bottle on to a stool. At the end of the show, after the journey through addiction, sobriety, relapse and recovery, he attempts it again. In 15 shows, he says, he\u2019s landed it once. <\/p>\n
Rhys Mathewson performs 10th Rodeo at Medici Court at Hamilton Gardens on Saturday, February 21, as part of the Hamilton Arts Festival<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rhys Mathewson. Photo \/ Dean Purcell When he\u2019d first gotten sober, he\u2019d thought: \u201cif you put enough days…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":271604,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[579,74,5263,95,6743,795,104829,40367,3682,156,1342,15209,153587,296,700,141551,111,139,69,90,83342,32221,1881,81020,97456,1305,65017,6642,18937,25809,153588,1530],"class_list":["post-271603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-addiction","tag-after","tag-all","tag-and","tag-became","tag-bruce","tag-centrepiece","tag-comedian","tag-comedy","tag-entertainment","tag-five","tag-greg","tag-honesty","tag-into","tag-latest","tag-mathewson","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-on","tag-painkiller","tag-prescription","tag-recovery","tag-relapse","tag-rhys","tag-show","tag-sobriety","tag-tells","tag-threatened","tag-turning","tag-undo","tag-years"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=271603"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271603\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/271604"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=271603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=271603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=271603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}