The 30-year-old competed against 17 other New Zealand celebrities on location in the Coromandel, North Island, to claim the $100,000 prize for his chosen charity, Childfund, in Wednesday’s final.
He lined up agains actor James Rolleston and former All Black Christian Cullen as the final three “castaways”. They had to compete in a difficult series of puzzles and exhausting physical challenges to find and dig up the treasure.
JP told The Spinoff that the contest taught him that, “when I put my mind to something, that I can achieve it, and how powerful our culture can be. To call on the values that we have as Tongans, as Pasifika people, when times get really tough in the game. For Pasifika people, it’s never really about us. If we’re at the centre of something, it’s at the centre of our village and everyone that surrounds it. Whatever opportunity that I have, especially as an artist, there’s a lot of friends and family that help out. Those values help in so many different scenarios. In a game like Celebrity Treasure Island, those were the things that really got me through.”
The charity that will get the prize money https://childfund.org.nz/ helps to provide clean water for children in the Pacific.
Foliaki debuted his acting career in the lead role Maka in the comedy film Red, White & Brass.
JP moved to Papatoetoe with his family from Remuera as an eight-year-old almost two decades ago. His grandparents on both his parents’ sides of the family moved from Tonga to Auckland in the 1970s. His father is a lawyer and his mother has a PhD in education. Foliaki has spent most of his life following in those same academic footsteps too, studying physics and accounting in high school, and graduating from law school at the University of Auckland. He worked in banking before discovering his acting talent.
