Lloyd has been a familiar face on New Zealand screens for more than a decade, after starting as one of the co-hosts on after-school show Sticky TV before fronting the weather on Newshub’s bulletins for three years.
But it was her role as one of the co-hosts of The Project, Three’s 7pm current affairs-entertainment show, that saw her become a household name. The show ran for seven years, and made headways in key demographics in the ratings battle with TVNZ 1′s Seven Sharp, but was cancelled at the end of 2023 in a cost-saving exercise.
Speaking to Paula Bennett on her Herald podcast Ask Me Anything, Lloyd revealed for the first time that she was already considering her future before the cancellation decision came through.
“What probably nobody apart from me would have paid attention to is that I had actually just a couple of months before we got the news had dropped down to four days a week. And I actually haven’t said this anywhere, but I was in hospital last year with a stress-related condition.
“I kind of kept it all under wraps and honestly forgot about it a little bit. And so I just decided, the math isn’t mathing, I’ve got a kid at home, I’ve got this really high stress, high visibility job, I need to take the pressure off a little bit.
“So I was working four days a week and I was starting to think, ‘what’s next? I don’t know if I can sustain this’, and so ... it wasn’t a shock but it was deeply sad, more for the people around me. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a part of me that was like, ‘Oh, that decision’s been taken out of my hands’.”
Kanoa Lloyd with her former co-hosts Jeremy Corbett, left, and Jesse Mulligan. Photo / Three
She also hopes that the end of the show isn’t something that follows her around forever.
“I also don’t want to be a person who had this incredible job, who like the only thing I talk about for the next 10 years is like, ‘Oh, poor me, my extremely amazing job’. And I meet people in the supermarket who are like, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry to hear about what’s happening with you and the TV show.
“And I’m like, ‘don’t worry about me, mate. Like, we’re fine. We’ve all got redundancy. We’re sweet.’”
Lloyd stressed that she misses the amazing people she was around every day, and the fact people would open their doors to her and the team and trust them to tell their stories.
Having her evenings back has allowed her to spend more time with her daughter, Nikau.
“I didn’t know how much I would love being able to pick her up from daycare, make her dinner, sit at the dinner table with her. I wasn’t doing that. I didn’t put her down to bed, my husband did that five nights a week. And that’s just what our family did, and we fit into it, and I’m sure there was some voice saying like, ‘this is weird’, but when I stopped and felt just like the huge change, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m sorry, babe. I’m sorry. I haven’t been here for all this’.”
Lloyd said her husband told her she had been a better person since the show ended, and she has learned to calm down and relax more since then.
But she also needs “a little bit of electricity at my bum” to keep her motivated. She recently worked with Dave Letele behind the scenes on his documentaries, and is looking at other projects but is not rushing to get going.
“But to come back to that living-in-the-moment thing, there’s no emergency. The house isn’t burning down. I actually don’t have to do it all today, or like even next month, I can just take it one step at a time.
“It’s something that I do have to get my head around because I don’t want to go back to hospital because I’m running this race that only I am like aware that I’m running.”
Listen to the full episode for more from Kanoa about her career, adjusting to life post-The Project, and why this year is about meaningful outcomes.
