″I can really feel myself blushing!” says Magda Szubanski. “I used to be considering, ‘Do I actually need to speak about my private life on this interview?’ However I don’t must maintain it a secret: I’ve been single for ages. I’d love to fulfill somebody and fall in love however for the second, I’m very fortunately a spinster.”
At first look, this change appears unremarkable: as considered one of Australia’s most beloved comedian performers, with a profession spanning 35 years, Magda has grown accustomed to journalists asking about her romantic life. Nevertheless it wasn’t at all times so. In 1992, a reporter from a girls’s journal pushed her to handle “the rumours that you’re gay”.
After dismissing the query, Magda lower the interview brief and went house. Then the panic set in. As she remembers in her excellent 2015 memoir, Reckoning, she turned “overwhelmed with an emotional ache so excessive,
I felt as if I used to be dying … I slid down the wall of my hallway gasping and weeping; I banged my head in opposition to the wall and I pounded my cranium with my clenched fist.”
The concept that at some point, she might speak brazenly about her sexuality – changing into a job mannequin for LGBTQI+ individuals and a pivotal determine within the combat for marriage equality – by no means crossed her thoughts.
“Again then, it was inconceivable that the general public may embrace you for who you have been,” Magda says, sitting within the boardroom of 9’s Melbourne headquarters.
“After we dreamed about equality, it was virtually when it comes to a science-fiction fantasy.
“We assumed that we’d nonetheless get bashed and persecuted. The very best we might hope for was that we wouldn’t be despatched to jail; that we might discover a pocket of like-minded individuals and stay brazenly in our small little world.”
On April 12, Magda turned 60. For her, this milestone is an opportunity to take inventory and replicate on all that’s good about her life. In some ways, she’s happier now than she’s ever been.
“There’s a sure consolation that comes with age,” she says. “It’s not as if you’ve gotten life all discovered, as a result of there’s nonetheless rather a lot to study. After you have some life expertise underneath your belt, although, you’re feeling such as you perceive issues a bit higher. You don’t have these raging insecurities you had once you have been youthful.”
To wit: when paparazzi snapped her swimming at Bondi Seaside in 2011, her self-consciousness rapidly gave method to a steely defiance.
“I needed to cry,” she instructed Andrew Denton in a 2018 tv interview.
“Then I believed, ‘F… them!’ I’m going to go down there with all of the fashions and simply be fats on Bondi Seaside and so they can get f…ed.′ It truly turned actually liberating.”
The downsides of ageing, she acknowledges, are the niggling aches and pains that announce themselves with rising frequency. These pale compared, nevertheless, to her gratitude for all of the issues her physique does effectively.
“I’m extra sporty than individuals realise,” she says. “I’m an excellent dancer – I like a little bit of a boogie – and I’m a terrific hugger. That was exhausting for me throughout COVID as a result of I like giving hugs and I do know I’m actually good at it.”
Having obtained one such hug on the finish of our interview, I can verify that is true. Magda’s heat, honesty and vulnerability – three traits she shares together with her most well-known comedian character, Sharon Strzelecki – have endeared her to generations of Australians from all backgrounds.
In 2003 and 2004, Magda obtained the best Q-score (a measure of celebrities’ familiarity and attraction) of any native tv presenter. Firms together with Jetstar and Jenny Craig have paid her handsomely to star of their ads, whereas marriage-equality advocates verify that her campaigning efforts have been essential in convincing a majority of Australians to vote “sure” throughout the 2017 postal survey.
All of which prompted some followers to query whether or not Magda is just too good to drag off her newest position – internet hosting a revived model of sport present The Weakest Hyperlink on 9.
The collection debuted in Australia in 2001, with the late Cornelia Frances
as its theatrically villainous ringmaster. In every episode, eight contestants enter the studio as strangers, working collectively to financial institution the utmost quantity of prize cash by answering common data questions. The intention is to construct a “chain” of appropriate solutions; on the finish of every spherical, contestants vote to get rid of the individual they contemplate the best legal responsibility.
It’s Magda’s job to farewell evictees with the well-known phrase: “You’re the weakest hyperlink. Goodbye!”
“I appreciated The Weakest Hyperlink and like most individuals, I like Magda Szubanski,” one individual posted on Twitter, “however I’m unsure how our nationwide treasure goes to slot in the position of nasty host.”
Magda jokingly addressed such considerations in 9’s press launch, telling viewers: “I’ve pretended to be good my complete profession; now I lastly get to play myself.” In fact, she has no need to imitate what she describes because the “brutal” tone of the unique UK collection.
“This model is sort of a conventional quiz present mixed with Survivor; the enjoyable is in watching individuals scheming and conniving. Will probably be stern and strict and aggressive and cheeky – nevertheless it received’t be merciless.”
“The world is in a special place in comparison with when the English model began,” she says. “I don’t suppose individuals are within the temper for one thing like that proper now. This model is sort of a conventional quiz present mixed with Survivor; the enjoyable is in watching individuals scheming and conniving. Will probably be stern and strict and aggressive and cheeky – nevertheless it received’t be merciless.”
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Final month, the ABC’s Australian Story documented Magda’s volunteer work with 19-year-old Will Connolly, dubbed “Egg Boy” by media after he cracked an egg over the pinnacle of far-right politician Fraser Anning in 2019. (Connolly was protesting a tweet, posted by the then-senator within the wake of terrorist assaults on two New Zealand mosques, which requested, “Does anybody nonetheless dispute the hyperlink between Muslim immigration and violence?“)
After assembly at a convention, Magda and Will turned buddies. As bushfires ravaged many elements of Australia in early 2020, the pair signed on as ambassadors for Regeneration, a program that helps disaster-affected communities heal by means of inventive arts workshops.
“We’ve met some individuals who’ve been by means of drought, then bushfires, then COVID and now the floods,” Magda says. “These traumas can manifest in so many alternative methods and it may well actually undermine individuals’s sense of identification.”
Her curiosity on this subject is way from educational – as Magda so eloquently explains in her memoir, her life has been formed by trauma. Her maternal grandfather, as an example, misplaced 10 of his 13 siblings, all of whom died in circumstances ensuing from excessive poverty, whereas her father, Zbigniew Szubanski, was an murderer for the Polish resistance in World Warfare II.
Although Zbigniew was on the best aspect of historical past, he was not spared what Magda calls the “ethical trauma” that such work entails.
“He by no means as soon as let me win,” she writes in Reckoning, recalling the tennis matches she performed together with her father as a lady. “He confirmed no mercy … he was making an attempt to treatment me of weak point. In an effort to assist me survive, he thought he wanted to expunge regular human frailty.”
By means of years of remedy, Magda realised that her father’s exacting requirements have been motivated by a need to guard his daughter: as a younger man combating the Nazis, Zbigniew had good motive to equate shows of vulnerability with the chance of dying.
Remedy additionally allowed Magda to view the “stunning mood” of her Scottish mom, Margaret, in a special gentle.
“It was truly an expression of her anxiousness,” she says. “The extra I got here to grasp my mom, the extra I liked her. I really consider that understanding somebody and loving them go hand in hand.”
Zbigniew died in 2006, whereas Margaret handed away in September 2017, barely per week earlier than Australians started voting within the Marriage Regulation Postal Survey. Regardless of her loss, Magda continued campaigning for a “sure” vote.
“The extra they [opponents of same-sex marriage] attacked us, the extra my combating spirit got here out and I simply knew I needed to see this factor by means of.
“I completely gave myself time to grieve,” she says. “However life doesn’t cease when one thing like this occurs. The extra they [opponents of same-sex marriage] attacked us, the extra my combating spirit got here out and I simply knew I needed to see this factor by means of.
“As I’ve gotten older, I’ve positively turn into extra brave.”
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The Weakest Hyperlink begins on Tuesday, Might 4, on 9.
Photographer: David Mandelberg. Trend editor: Penny McCarthy. Hair: Keiren Road utilizing Wella Professionals. Make-up: Nicole Thompson utilizing YSL. Trend assistant: Emmerson Conrad.
Magda wears, black background: “No Biggie” glasses by Le Specs; Louise Olsen “Hug Chain” bracelet from Dinosaur Designs. White background: clothes by Et Al; bangle by Dinosaur Designs.
This text seems in Sunday Life journal throughout the Solar-Herald and the Sunday Age on sale April 18. To learn extra from Sunday Life, go to The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.