Greg Fleet says his dad really did die this time. For real.
Not that the funny man is losing any sleep over the passing of his distant father, just over a month ago.
“It was quite odd, it wasn’t at all sad to me. No more sad to me hearing the finance minister of Ecuador had died,” he says.
“It was just a person who died.”
He’d lost contact over the years with the man who famously faked his own death to escape financial difficulties and a strained marriage when Fleet was just 10.
Three years later, he saw him working at a real estate agency in Melbourne.
The apparent rise from the dead was chronicled in Fleet’s candid autobiography, These Things Happen, released last September.
A brutally honest look back on 30 years as a functioning drug addict and comedian, Fleet says he began to see the similarities between father and son during the writing process.
“I realised I was more like my father than I ever realised,” he tells Star Weekly.
“I didn’t do a lot of the things he did, but I was still quite absent and not very hands on (as a father).”
The idea for a tell-all came when Fleet regaled a housemate’s friend – a publisher from Pan McMillan- over dinner one night, about his near-death experience in Scotland.
“These guys were going to f*ck me up, I was there buying drugs,” he says.
“At the very last second, this guy was about to hack me with a razor and he goes ‘Hang on, weren’t you in Neighbours?’
“Having been in Neighbours pretty much saved my life. It (the book deal) came from that really.”
He said writing his life’s tale was easy, cathartic but also confronting.
“It wasn’t like fiction where I had to think about the story and how characters meet and fall apart and come back together,” he says.
“I wrote 2000 words a day. I was usually done by 11 am.
“(But) I realised that I’d wasted a lot of great opportunities.
“I also realised writing the book was the best therapy I’d ever had. Better than rehab, better than therapists.”
The past year has been a tumultuous one for the NIDA-trained actor and comic.
A recent, heavily publicised court case, where he was accused of stealing jewellery from former housemate Fairfax Media columnist Wendy Squires, was the boot up the arse he needed.
“It was very public and it was pretty humiliating,” he says.
“It was one of those things that effect the way people view you for the rest of time.
“They suddenly see you as a criminal … which is probably true I guess.”
A clean skin until that point, Fleet says it’s a miracle he’d never been in trouble before.
“I’d managed to live 30 years of that life without running foul of the law,” he says.
“I didn’t think I was going to go to prison, but it was the next step if I kept going.”
It also took a toll on his family, including his 14-year-old daughter.
“It was difficult for my daughter. One of her teachers said to her ‘I’m really sorry to hear about your dad’,” he remembers.
“She didn’t know anything about it, it was horrendous for her.
“She’s a very well-behaved child which is amazing when you consider she’s mine (laughs).”
Fleet says avoiding the big house “solidified my resolve to do the right thing”.
But he’s “no puritan”.
“I still have wine and the odd joint and stuff,” he says.
Fleet says the relationship with Squires may never be totally healed.
“I sent her some money. I don’t think money was the issue, it was the trust,” he says.
“We don’t hang out anymore. Hopefully, at one point we might be able to again. I respect her decision on that. I think she handled herself with a great amount of dignity.
“She was angry but I’d be angry about it too.
“I’d say 80 per cent of people have been incredibly forgiving and twenty per cent who are like ‘Sorry man, you’ve crossed too many lines’.”
Set to appear at the Brimbank Writers and Readers Festival next month, Fleet’s one-on-one with Roz Hammond is sure to be a major draw card.
“It’s pretty much no holds barred,” he says.
“I don’t know what she’s going to ask, there’s nothing that she can’t ask, there’s nothing off limits, it’s very open.
“I can’t really think of anything somebody would say to me that isn’t public knowledge, there’s literally nothing I have hidden anymore.
“I don’t know how healthy it is to not have any secrets, but I know it’s pretty unhealthy to have too many.
“I’m really well (at the moment), quite possibly the healthiest I’ve ever been.”
Greg Fleet appears at the Brimbank Writers and Readers Festival on September 7.
