MasterChef Australia finalists famously don’t know who won until the show airs, but in 2025, Laura Sharrad and Callum Hann “struck a little deal with producers”.
While talking all things MasterChef with New Idea, Back To Win victor Laura revealed how she and runner-up Callum managed to negotiate something that is usually off-limits.
When we asked how it felt to compete for a third time and go through the anxious wait for the result, she revealed something unheard of – “I knew that I won”.
“It was a very boardroom kind of meeting,” she tells us, revealing that she found out she’d won months before the public.
“Very like quick and confidential with a few important people in the room, and we were just like, ‘This is what we want. We’ve been here slugging it out for so long and like we both loved the experience’.
“It was just something that we were like, we don’t want to wait three months to know.”
Even though they filmed two endings, designed to keep the results “hush hush”, she says they wanted to find out to have peace of mind.
Surprisingly, she also revealed that the show agreed to it “straight away”, but they both were only allowed to tell one person, which ended up being their partners.
While she was excited about the result and loved being told before it aired, she said it was still “strange” to return home after months of filming, knowing the outcome.
In saying that, she preferred that to waiting.
Even though the final two contestants usually don’t know who has won until the correct ending airs, with multiple having been pre-recorded in advance.
Laura, however, told New Idea that she actually found out the results during her previous two seasons on the show.
“I remember like flying to Melbourne, sitting in a room with like all the execs at 10, and they read out the actual scores to Brent and me back in the day,” she says of competing in the 2014 season.
“And that was a weird experience again, cause it was very much like this setting, sitting around the table, and they were like, ‘We gave you an eight.” And the judges were there, it was just weird.”
After finding out on the day that it aired, she then flew home and hosted a finale party hours later.
This was in stark contrast to when she competed in the 2021 season, which was filmed during the pandemic.
Unlike other seasons, she told New Idea that only one ending was filmed because of all of the restrictions, so she found out immediately.
Even though she’s never had the results kept from her, last year’s negotiation was still a tricky position to be in.
After she filmed the Back to Win season, she said she had a cooking retreat booked in Europe, which she also extended into a holiday, meaning she was away while most of the show was airing.
But that didn’t stop people from approaching her and asking once she returned, when there were only a handful of contestants left.
“It’s down to like the nitty-gritty, and yeah, I was like, ‘I don’t know, watching, what do you want me to say? Yes, I won?” she shares with us. “I’m never going to say that, but it’s really hard to keep it in.”
