George Kapiniaris was putting on shows before he understood what a career even was. In this episode of Showtime, recorded ahead of his national tour of Nonna and Yiayia alongside long-time collaborator James Liotta, he traces a career spanning nearly four decades back to something simple: he was, in his own words, made for the stage.
That instinct showed up early, and it came from somewhere specific. George’s father, a printer by trade after migrating from Greece, was the unofficial life of every party, a natural joke-teller who loved cameras and film long before phones made everyone a documentarian. George suspects that if circumstances had been different, his father would have become an entertainer himself. Instead, that energy poured into supporting his son’s career, even after gently suggesting, at one point, that accounting might be the more sensible path.
George’s own plans pointed elsewhere entirely. He wanted to be an architect or a designer, and only picked up drama in year 12 because his teacher, Kate Donelan, had taken a particular interest in him. It wasn’t even a scored HSC subject at the time, which meant it contributed nothing to his final results, but it was enough to get him into a drama course at what’s now Deakin University, and set the entire rest of his life in motion. Years later, she watched him perform Brecht at the Melbourne Theatre Company, a moment George still describes as genuinely special.
What followed was a period that reshaped Australian television and theatre in ways George never set out to achieve. Alongside Simon Palomares, Nick Giannopoulos and Mary Coustas, he helped build what eventually became Wogs Out of Work, a stage show that grew out of open-mic gigs and a two-hour comedy set they’d written almost on a dare. When Crawford Productions came to see the show and couldn’t understand the jokes but noticed the audience roaring with laughter regardless, they green-lit a TV adaptation. What started life as “The Wog Bar” eventually became Acropolis Now, named, fittingly, after an episode of The Flying Doctors in which George’s own character fell for a Greek migrant.
George is candid about the fact that he didn’t set out to be a pioneer. He simply wanted to bring his own culture and experience into roles that hadn’t made space for it before, changing a character’s name on The Flying Doctors from Dominic Giustino to Demetrius Joannides just to keep the initials DJ while making the role authentically Greek. It worked, largely because there was nothing else like it on Australian screens at the time. Decades later, he still has young performers and comedians tell him that watching his work as kids was the reason they got into the industry in the first place, alongside teachers who showed Acropolis Now episodes in multicultural education classes.
Not everyone welcomed it. George recalls being confronted early on by people furious that he was “making fun” of their community, some going so far as to insist he wasn’t even really Greek. He’s philosophical about it now, likening it to the reflexive backlash that greets any retelling of a familiar story, whether it’s Shakespeare, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, or a modern adaptation of The Odyssey. His advice is simple: see the show before you judge it. He still bristles at reviewers who, he suspects, have occasionally done the opposite.
The character of Memo, arguably George’s most enduring creation, came together almost by accident, inspired by an infamously grumpy waiter at a beloved Melbourne cafe and stitched together from the exaggerated mannerisms of every eccentric relative George could think of. He never expected the character to outlive the show itself, let alone take on what he describes as an almost Elvis-like cult status decades later.
The conversation takes a more serious turn around George’s health. Roughly a year before this recording, he underwent emergency open-heart surgery after his aorta failed. Six weeks later, he was back on stage touring nationally, and within his first show back, he was already performing a ten-minute comedy routine about nearly dying. He credits that instinct, drawn from decades of stagecraft, that real comedy tends to grow out of real hardship rather than despite it. Audience members have since approached him after shows to say they’d been through something similar, some inspired to push through their own recovery simply because he’d gotten back on stage so quickly.
That near-death experience clarified things for George in a way little else could. Asked what became less important afterward, his answer is immediate: everything except his family. What weighed on him most in the lead-up to surgery wasn’t his own health, but the show he had booked five weeks later and the people depending on him to be there.
Much of the episode also touches on how live performance itself has changed. George is unapologetic about calling out audience members glued to their phones mid-show, describing it as a kind of necessary discipline in an era where screens have become a permanent security blanket. He sees the shrinking live theatre crowd as directly tied to a culture that no longer has to leave the house for entertainment, a sharp contrast to the era of Acropolis Now, when millions of Australians would sit down to watch the exact same broadcast at the exact same time.
Even now, decades in, George says the nerves never fully go away before a show, and he wouldn’t want them to. He describes it as a productive kind of anxiety, the sense of jumping into uncharted water each time he steps on stage, one that sharpens a performance rather than undermines it. As for the inevitable online criticism that comes with a public career, his approach is refreshingly uncomplicated: block, delete, and move on, on the reasoning that for every negative comment, there are a hundred thousand people who genuinely enjoy the work.
You can catch George Kapiniaris and James Liotta in Nonna and Yiayia at Williamstown Italian Social Club on 2 October, and in Wollongong on 16 October, with more dates to follow in 2026.
Nonna and Yiayia tickets and info: mailchi.mp/nonna-and-yiayia-live
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