When I tell people it’s our family motto, they often joke, “That’s healthy.” But it isn’t about being the best. It’s about refusing to stop being. I’ve loved Apollo 13 since I was a child.
To me, Ron Howard’s 1995 adaptation of one of humanity’s greatest rescue missions is the perfect film to watch when you feel you might implode – because they got home. It is a film about a successful failure. When the Nasa director warns: “This could be the worst disaster Nasa’s ever experienced,” Kranz replies: “I believe this is going to be our finest hour.” Every time I watch that scene, I start crying.
Since I was little, if I couldn’t understand an emotion, I used scientific examples and historical events as analogies and metaphors to explain my emotional state. For this reason, it was never the trapped floating astronauts led by Tom Hanks’s Jim Lovell who fascinated me. It was the white-shirted, spectacled, chain-smoking engineers and scientists in Mission Control.
It was sexy, crew-cut Ed Harris saying: “Let’s work the problem, people. Let’s not make things worse by guessing.” It was Gary Sinise as Ken Mattingly refusing to take a break (“If they don’t get one, I don’t get one!”) as he tried to get his friends home. Mission Control embodied everything I loved about humanity and learning: teamwork, creativity, rationality, calmness and respect for the data and the facts.
This was why, in 2025, when my own systems module exploded, Apollo 13 became my breakup movie. On a balmy night in Australia in April 2025, my relationship with my fiance ended in a concrete hotel room under a flightpath in Sydney, 15 minutes before I was due to perform to 2,000 people. Instantly, my brain shut down and went into survival mode.
I moved into my own dreamlike Lunar Module (the lifeboat that saved the astronauts). I worked flat out but on reduced power. In 2025, that meant touring Australia and the UK with a show in which I pretended to be a horse, while also relearning three shows for the Edinburgh fringe.
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