Masterchef’s Brent Draper on Separate Bathrooms podcast talking mental health and losing Jock

Cam and Ali Daddo, hosts of Nova Podcast’s Separate Bathrooms spoke in a new episode to Masterchef winner Brent Draper and his wife Shonleigh.

Draper featured on Masterchef twice. The first time, in 2021, he dropped out to look after his mental health saying in the episode that Shonleigh had told him to be truthful about why he needed to leave:

“It just got to a point where I had to get off, I had to go home, I had to go get help. There was a few ways that we could have done it, you know, I could have threw a cook or I could have just said personal reasons. But you know, Shon, she was sort of my pillar. And she said, just go out and just tell the truth and just say it’s for mental health. You know, it’s better off everyone knows what it’s about. And you’ll probably feel better.”

When Draper decided to leave judge Jock Zonfrillo handed him a set of his worry beads. Draper came back to the Masterchef kitchen in 2023 and won the series. But before an single episode had aired, Zonfrillo had died.

Draper told the Daddos how much the loss affected him:

“It just rocked me because I just I couldn’t grasp it. I think my mind couldn’t, you know, I’m still seeing him here. It was a very weird little moment of time when he was, you know, still on our screens every night. But we knew that, he wasn’t here anymore. And I just, you see how the type of person is when you see randoms in the street, and they talk about Jock and they start to visibly sort of have tears and get upset. And I’m like, you know, you don’t even meet the person and you feel like this.”

New episodes of Separate Bathrooms come out on Mondays. Brent and Shonleigh also have their own Podshape podcast called Behind the Drapes.