“Dad used to tell me to audition all the time. I was younger then, but he always said, ‘When you get old enough I can see you on this show, Chad.’ I think he thought I’d be good [for it] because I don’t take myself too seriously.”
Chad was by Neil’s side when he passed away on May 30, 2017, from advanced cancer that began in his bowel before spreading to his lungs and liver.
Chad had just started on a week-long photoshoot for Myer in Melbourne when his mum, Helen, phoned to tell him that his father had gone into palliative care, and that he needed to come home to Sydney.
“She pretty much told me, ‘He’s going in and he’ll never come back out.’ I cancelled the job and spent the last two weeks with him in palliative care,” Chad tells.
“That was the hardest part. It’s a bloody ugly process. They literally just become skin and bone and they can’t talk from all the morphine.”
Growing up in Campbelltown in Sydney’s south-west, Chad worshipped the ground Neil walked on.
He fondly remembers the road trips they used to take, along with Chad’s big brother Matt, to various sporting events, and tells New Idea he considered following his old man into the police force, before realising his “passion” was being a tradie.
“My dad was my role model. He was the best dad. As I get older, especially after he passed, that’s when you really start realising how good a dad he was. The hardest part is not being able to ask him for advice. I always went to him. But now I don’t have that person.
“I’m very, very similar to dad. We love the same way, we show affection the same way. My mum tells me the way I treat my girlfriends is the same way dad would treat her. It’s weird. We’re not much talkers, we’re not very good at showing emotions and stuff like that.”
He hopes to be just as good a dad and husband when he settles down and starts a family of his own.
“The way dad brought us up, he didn’t tell us what to do, he just had faith in us. He wouldn’t scream and say. ‘You can’t do that!’ He’d be disappointed if you did something wrong but knew that me and my brother would always do the right thing.”
Chad also hopes his own marriage will be a reflection of his parents’ union.
Neil and Helen had been married for “thirty-plus” years at the time of Neil’s death and Chad boasts that his parents were “madly in love with each other. They were best friends.”
Chad’s mum Helen, or “Ma” as he affectionately calls her, is as proud of Chad as Neil was. And if Chad wins Big Brother, he plans on using the $250,000 prize money to make life a bit easier for her.
“There are two things I’ll do with the prize money. First, take the boys away on a trip to Vegas. We’re all tradies and hard workers, so it’ll be good to get away. And then pay Ma’s bills for as long as I can. She doesn’t work, so if I can at least pay her monthly bills, I’m bloody happy.”
While Chad says Ma is his “queen”, he openly admits that he’s looking for a wife to also shower with love and affection.
Despite striking up a romance with housemate Sophie Budak, Chad hints that perhaps she’s not The One for him.
“For a wife, you have to be best friends with them, that’s the main thing. You can’t just be physically attracted to them. You have to have the same things in common, not take each other too seriously and joke around.”
For more, pick up a copy of New Idea. On sale now!