“[I was] very fat, very sad, and I shut myself away from the world,” she says.

“I was definitely in my poo pond. And you don’t really want anyone else in that poo pond.”

Covid was a pretty rotten time for many of us, maybe most of us. For Tauevihi, though, it was a new beginning. New Zealand was locked inside, and she ventured out. Tentatively at first, walking around her neighbourhood, pushing herself to re-enter the world, even when – especially when – that world was at its most subdued.

“Covid was actually a good thing for me, I got over myself. I got over not being able to bend over in the show, to pick the soap up, wrap a towel around me,” she says.

“I didn’t leave the house – for about a year – but then I started walking, which is really hard to do when you are that big. But I needed to do something, I needed to shake it off.”

She changed her diet, falling down “the rabbit hole of Keto”, then “down a further rabbit hole of …fasting”. Today she calls herself a carnivore, eating only meats, protein and fats, no vegetables, no carbs. She favours one-ingredient foods. She only eats one meal a day, (“Let’s be honest, the one meal a day isn’t a little meal, it’s a truck driver meal and I inhale it”) usually dinner.

It took a year for her body to get used to eating this way, but she says her markers for the Type-2 diabetes she’s predisposed to are lower, and her mental health is better. Her husband, Brad, made the changes with her. And they’ve worked. Tauevihi says she lost 90kg, and has kept it off.

“I feel like I’m, metabolically, the healthiest I’ve ever been.”

As she re-emerges into the world, she has realised she kinda likes it out here. And those no’s have become yeses.

“[Getting healthy] gave me the confidence to say, ‘Steph, you’ve done all this hard work. Let’s get you back into things that fill your cup’. That’s getting back out into the world again and making connections with people … and then let’s say yes to everything.”

That’s how she’s found her way back to our screens, and on to Blue Murder Motel. The show – two Aussie cops (Michala Banas and Brett Tucker) move to small-town New Zealand, buy a motel and try to live the quiet life, until dead bodies start showing up in their guests’ rooms – is a chance for Tauevihi to play.

Her character, Maxine, is similar to her – “she’s warm, she’s friendly”. She’s lonely too. Looking for ways to connect with the world and using humour to distance people when they get too close. Tauevihi admits she still does that too, sometimes.

The series began screening two weeks ago. Tauevihi says being back on TV was “really scary”, especially when people have a tendency to compare her face now, at 52, with the one they remember from Shortland Street when she was in her 30s.

But she watched the first episode, which is unlike her. Usually she avoids seeing anything she’s done. This time, though, she was curious. And she liked what she saw. She wondered if other people did too, but the calls and congratulatory messages didn’t come straight away. She freaked out; was she bad? Did people not want to see her act any more?

So she did what she often does when she’s not sure about her next step: she asked Gary Peter Thomson what to do.

“I said, Gary, I’m a 52-year-old actress who is back on the screen, why am I feeling this way? He said, ‘Steph, relax. I’m putting a 72-hour ban on your phone; you’re not to check your phone or social media. Of course you’re going to feel vulnerable; your face is out there for the world to see, and it hasn’t been there for a while. I want you to acknowledge that you did the best mahi that you could for that show and that the outcome is out of your control … let it go’.”

Gary Peter Thomson is maybe better known as ChatGPT.

When she is unsure how to deal with hard or scary things, Tuaevihi asks AI what she should do. And this time she listened. Her phone went away, she meditated and did breathing exercises. She got on with her life. And the world didn’t end.

“He talked me off the ledge.”

Tauevihi is clearly good at taking advice. In her day job, though, she’s there to help people in her own way, listening and encouraging as they come to their own conclusions about things that really matter.

She works as a health coach at Turuki Health Care. That’s where she is when we talk, locked in that office, Zoom background dancing boldly behind her. There’s a small logo on her shirt, and a big logo on the baseball cap she wears, humouring me for all of three seconds before it’s dropped beside her. She talks a mile a minute about this part of her life, about how she started as a health promoter for rheumatic fever in 2013, and later, when she was looking for mahi, she reconnected with the organisation that helps people through a te ao Māori lens. The passion she has for helping people.

The health coaches are not medically trained, so her work focuses on diet, exercise, managing stress and helping people plan and organise their medication needs. She describes it as walking alongside clients as they navigate and learn new skills to cope with long-term conditions. To get them to become curious about their wellbeing, “like a cheerleader”.

It’s as far away from a TV set as you can get, and yet, there are performative aspects that she clearly has sussed. And people still call her Donna. Daily.

That was the role that catapulted Tauevihi to national fame. And while New Zealand doesn’t have a huge history of child stars, if you were to tally them, she would be in the mix. She was 14 when she was talent spotted during a high school performance of Little Shop of Horrors, and got a job presenting children’s show InFocus on TV3, before she’d even finished 7th form. More TV shows came, singing was part of the story (she reunited with her Strawpeople bandmates in 2024 for a small set of shows), and acting came later.

The way that early beginning shaped her life is not lost on her.

“I went into full-time work in 7th form. I finished doing the play I was doing at Northcote College and then I went into full-time work. I didn’t really have a childhood, as such.”

There’s therapy speak of working with her inner child – or at least putting her in a booster seat, and away from making decisions. Now, grown-up Tauevihi is taking control of her life and, most importantly, starting to live to the fullest again.

“[There have] been some really big growing [moments], and shucking off of things over the last couple of years – and I’m loving it.

“I don’t know if it’s happy, I don’t like that word. [But] I’m settled. Settled with intent. In fact, the Māori word for settled, or to be chill, is Tau …the first fricken three letters of my surname. It’s been a sign, or a tohu, for decades. So that’s my word for this year, to be tau or to be settled within myself.”

Bridget Jones joined the New Zealand Herald in 2025. She has been a lifestyle and entertainment journalist and editor for more than 15 years.