In her role as the stern, inscrutable Governess, she's one of The Chase's biggest stars. But it took decades before Anne Hegerty learned to understand her unusual mind and manage her life. Ahead of The Chase New Zealand launching on Monday, Hegarty talks to Emily Simpson.
Anne Hegerty’s life might have been a whole lot simpler if she’d understood from childhood that she was on the autism spectrum.
Such a diagnosis was rare in the 1960s and seldom handed out to children without clear developmental delays. But it would surely have eased Hegerty’s path through some tough years – the awkwardness of being a teen who didn’t just struggle to make friends, but to understand why you’d bother. The messiness of being an adult who, despite her obvious intelligence, had trouble with paying bills and keeping jobs.
By the time a doctor confirmed that 47-year-old Hegerty was autistic, it came as no surprise. “I’d diagnosed myself at 45 but I wanted a formal diagnosis,” she says via Zoom from Sydney.
The Governess's royal connecton: Watch this story on TVNZ+
Her suspicions were sparked by a TV programme on autism. “Something about it just clicked with me. I thought, oh, hang on a minute, there's an awful lot of stuff here that I either do now or did when I was a child and nobody understood what it was about.”
Take her inability to remember faces. “People say, oh yes, I always have difficulty putting names to faces... No-no-no-no that's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is actually not being able to recognise faces. If I've been talking to someone for half an hour, and they go out of the room and then come back, I'm not sure [it’s] the same person.”
More useful, in light of her future career, was her tendency to get obsessed with a singular topic. “Absolutely fascinated,” she says. “I can’t really function thinking about anything else, that sort of thing.”
As an under-employed, middle-aged loner, the newly diagnosed Hegerty couldn’t have known that she’d soon find a role that would fit her rare and remarkable brain as perfectly as a puzzle piece. A role that would catapult her into semi-international stardom, with romantic approaches flooding in from fans, albeit ones who tend to mistake her as lesbian. (For the record, Hegerty doesn’t even consider herself a feminist, once explaining to a reporter. “I don’t really like women very much; that’s the brutal truth.”)
Permission to be a loner
Not that Hegerty falls easily for men, either. A comment she made – about finding characters easier to love than real people – is often quoted, but she clarifies that she doesn’t delude herself she’s dating literary creations. “I’d just think, you know... Regardless of what anyone else thinks about this book, it’s the character I want to know about. And very often I would completely fail to actually be able to pick up on the plot, because I was just skipping through to see when my character next appeared. I read Lord of the Rings when I was 14 and absolutely adored Sam, he was just fabulous.”
At around that time Hegerty's family went away for Christmas. “We all went to my grandmother's, and she said that nobody was allowed to hide away reading books; we'd all got to, you know, stay together and play games and everything. My mother managed to sabotage that unintentionally by giving me Watership Down as a Christmas present. So I just almost literally went down the rabbit hole. And I was hiding under beds, you know.”
She wasn’t unhappy – or wouldn’t have been if she’d been allowed to be her true 14-year-old self. “If I had just sort of given myself permission to be a loner. To sort of say, you know what? I'm absolutely fine just kind of doing stuff on my own, I'm not actually lonely. It doesn't matter whether I'm socially awkward because, as a matter of fact, I'm really much happier just being on my own and not really having any special friends... You're under so much pressure to do the correct teenage things. So it was quite uncomfortable.”
If the teen years (she boarded at school) were tough, adulthood sounds worse. Hegerty told a Guardian journalist that 2008 was her rock bottom. Her work as a copy editor had dried up due to her repeated failure to meet deadlines, and she was living in a flat full of unopened mail, the rent overdue.
The role of a lifetime
Hegerty's life could have carried on down that spiral but for a few lucky twists: a proactive social worker, a foray into the UK quizzing scene, meeting Mark Labbett (aka The Beast) who told her about a recently launched show called The Chase. When she heard they were after new Chasers, she applied and won a role – playing the stern, inscrutable Governess seems the perfect outlet for Hegerty. “I love being The Governess,” she says. “It is a character, but I'm always having great fun doing it.”
As a Chaser, she's able to carry herself with ease in the social situations that arise with a successful show. Interviews, dinners, functions. Hegerty enjoys them, she says. “I'm actually quite happy being in a big room full of people especially if there’s purpose to it, like it's an awards ceremony and The Chase might win something... that's absolutely ideal for me.”
She doesn’t mind the fans either. Sometimes she has to “lay down boundaries a little bit” but mostly it’s just the right amount of connection. “Because, by and large, people like you, but they kind of, in a sense, keep their distance,” she says. “It’s a nice combination. I've got all the friends I want and all the social life I want, and I can still get left alone most of the time.”
Left alone to delve into the topics that fascinate her. Her specialties are history and literature. Specifically, "old" popular culture, royal history (the late Queen Elizabeth is her 19th cousin), and the Bible, which she clearly reads a lot.
Is she religious?
“What?” (It’s a bad moment for the Zoom connection to falter.)
“Religious!”
“What?”
“RELIGIOUS.”
“Oh, I got to church, yes,” she says. “It’s not really something I talk about a lot unless it’s sort of the main focus of the interview.”
Okay. Is she a royalist? “I quite like the fact that we have a royal family,” she says. “I can't really see that a president would be any better. I find them entertaining, and sometimes I think they're idiots and want a smack.”
The Governess's royal connecton: Watch this story on TVNZ+
Asked what she does to keep her mind swift and sharp (apart from constantly feeding it with facts), she doesn’t expound, as another high-performing competitor might, about yoga or protein powder, but instead explains how the very basics of life and maintaining her two homes (one in Watford, another in Manchester) keep her well occupied. “I had my flat in Manchester redecorated, literally about 10 years ago, and I'm still sorting things out. I'm very slow. I don't think fast, so I'm still sort of thinking, right, these books have to go away and things like that. I am actually the slowest Chaser. I mean, I hope that doesn't show, because I'm faster at answering questions than most people [and] most quizzers, but most of the actual Chasers are faster than me. I tend to have to think a bit.”
She doesn’t drink (doesn't like the taste) and tries to get enough sleep but beyond that, it’s enough to get to work on time. “One thing about being on the autistic spectrum is that you have a thing called executive dysfunction, which means that everything you have to do is sort of divided into little bits, and it feels like there's this massive hurdle,” she says. “So it can be quite a challenge just simply to get myself, you know, up and showered and dressed and out of the house and to the studio.
“And then once I'm actually on the floor being miked up, I'm like, Oh right. Well, I've done the difficult bit. Now all I have to do is answer some questions.”
The Chase New Zealand premieres on Monday, November 3, 7.30pm on TVNZ 1, and streaming on TVNZ+.
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