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‘The Amazing Race’ Host Phil Keoghan Works With His Wife! Meet Producer Louise Rodrigues Keoghan
The Amazing Race host Phil Keoghan has been traveling the world and leading the alluring CBS reality competition since 2001. The New Zealand-born television star is always hard at work planning his next big television project. His loving wife, Louise Rodrigues Keoghan, is also a television producer who often works alongside him.
Phil and Louise met when they were both working on the show That’s Fairly Interesting in New Zealand. Unfortunately, the show was canceled, but that did not stop the couple from finding love offscreen. The Emmy winner had begun his takeover of reality television as a teen, but a near-death diving experience led to one major career revelation.
“At age 19, while hosting a TV show on a shipwreck, I was 120 feet down, separated from my diving buddy and having a panic attack. I thought I was going to die,” Phil told the Los Angeles Times in November 2014. “It was my wake-up call to hurry up and live my life with purpose. So within a year, my wife and I sold our first New Zealand network show: Keoghan’s Heroes, a show about thrill-seekers, people who lived on the edge — like an 80-year-old ex-fighter pilot still instructing. Eventually, the show got picked up in the U.S., and we packed up and left for New York. I was 23.”
The pair were married in the early ‘90s and welcomed their daughter, Elle, in 1995. The Keoghans moved to California where the couple started their own production company called Keoghan Film Company. Phil landed the hosting role on The Amazing Race around the same time, which became an instant success on CBS. The first three seasons of the high-pressure travel show saw nearly 10 million viewers tune in for each of their individual premieres. It was only just the beginning of Phil’s popularity on reality television in the U.S.
He worked with his wife as executive producers on No Opportunity Wasted in 2004. The former Fox correspondent hosted the Discovery Channel series which led to spinoffs in New Zealand and Canada. The power couple also found major success with their 2016 documentary, Le Ride, after discovering their shared love for cycling.
“My wife and I, my producing partner and I, found this book about the first English-speaking team to ride in the Tour de France. As cycling fans, we couldn’t quite believe that this story hadn’t really been told apart from this limited edition book, and it seemed sad to us that more people didn’t know the story,” the producer shared in a July 2018 interview. “So, we started talking about maybe how this would be a good subject for a film, but we really did not anticipate that it would end up being as big a challenge as it ended up being.”
In 2020, Phil landed another competition series on CBS called Tough As Nails. He hosts the series and shares executive producer responsibilities with Louise. Season 3 aired in December 2021, just ahead of the highly anticipated premiere of season 33 of The Amazing Race.
