Melissa Leong is having none of that business about how you’re supposed to downplay the significance of a Gold Logie nomination.
“It’s potentially a big deal,” the MasterChef judge says of the fact she has a shot at becoming the first woman of Asian background to win Australian television’s biggest popularity contest. “People go, ‘Oh, it’s just the Logies’, but it’s a mirror being held up: Who are we watching? What stories are we watching and experiencing through the course of the past year?”
Melissa Leong photographed at her stylist’s South Yarra apartment.CREDIT:SCOTT MCNAUGHTON
This being the first Logies since Tom Gleeson stunned everyone with his irony-fuelled win in 2019, you can make that the past three years. And that just happens to be the span over which Leong has gone from a freelance food journalist to one of the most recognisable faces on Australian television – and one of its most distinctive.
“The fact I am the only person of colour in the Gold nomination is surprising to me,” she says when we meet in her stylist’s office, a tiny apartment in South Yarra that’s absolutely packed with racks of clothes and shelves piled high with shoes. “The fact Waleed Aly is the only person of colour who has won a Gold Logie so far saddens me. It shocks me that Deborah Mailman doesn’t have a Gold Logie. So it does weigh a bit more for me.
“I’m very pleased to just be here so we can have these conversations about representation – that in and of itself is a win,” she adds. “But if I did win, then that’d definitely be a moment in Australian history, and that’s a pretty cool thing to be a part of.”
Leong, who was born in Sydney to Singaporean-Chinese parents, faces stiff competition, not least from Hamish Blake, the host of the massively popular Lego Masters, whose chart-topping podcast with Andy Lee and huge social media following (570,000 on Twitter, 1.2 million on Instagram) makes him a serious chance of repeating his 2012 win.
She’s a shoe-in: If Leong does win Gold, she will be the first Asian woman to do so.CREDIT:SCOTT MCNAUGHTON
Industry insiders think she’s a strong chance to better Lee Lin Chin, the former SBS newsreader who became the first Asian woman to be nominated for Gold in 2016, the year Waleed Aly became the first man of colour to be nominated, and the only one to win (he has since been nominated twice more).
Leong has a second solo shot at a Logie on Sunday – she’s also nominated for the newly minted Bert Newton Award for most popular presenter – while the show she co-hosts with Jock Zonfrillo and Andy Allen is in the running for most popular reality program, and the industry-voted most outstanding reality program too.
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Gone are the days when network publicists ran from newsagent to newsagent buying every copy of TV Week they could find, then taking them back to the office to clip out the voting coupons and fill them in by hand. These days you need to register your phone number before you can vote online; short of buying a stack of burner phones, hacking the vote has become almost impossible.
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So it is that Ten’s publicity team has squeezed me into a packed schedule of interviews in the final days of the Logies race. Voting in the popular categories is open until the telecast starts at 7pm on Sunday, so every last appearance in the media and on the socials could help.
When I arrive, our photographer is already snapping away. Leong is a fashion designer’s dream, always willing to play dress-ups. Coupled with the warmth and empathy she projects on screen, and a tendency to tear up when contestants share their food “journeys”, it has helped make her the standout among the three judges who took over when Matt Preston, George Calombaris and Gary Mehigan left in 2019.
She’ll be wearing vintage Collette Dinnigan on Sunday, but for this shoot she’s opted for “oxblood patent leather, because why not”.
It could come in handy for drinking red wine, I imagine.
“You just get a Chux and you’re fine. So for long sessions and unpredictable nights out – or, I guess, working in my office – this would be quite useful for a quick clean-up.”
With her fellow judges/hosts, Jock Zonfrillo (left) and Andy Allen.CREDIT:CHANNEL 10
Given the range of designer clothes she cycles through on the show, and the vast amount of eating the job demands, splatter must be a real occupational hazard. What’s the secret to avoiding an expensive mess?
“Small bites.”
There is a whiteboard in the wardrobe department, she reveals, with the names of the three hosts, and a running tally.
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“It starts at the beginning of the season, and you get a point for each splatter, and whoever ends up having the most points at the end of the season has to cook for the wardrobe department,” she says. “It’s almost always Andy, but we all have our off days. There was a recent episode where we were cracking crab and there was just carnage.”
Win or lose, Sunday night could get messy – “isn’t it a tradition that you’re still drunk if you’re doing press the next day?” she asks – but she’s determined not to get ahead of herself on that score.
“I know it sounds like a cliché to say it’s a thrill just to be nominated, but I’ve been doing this for half a second in comparison to some incredible people who have been plugging away at this for decades,” she says. “It was very unexpected, it’s an amazing class of people to be associated with, and it is a thrill.”