With her I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! co-host, Robert Irwin, having just won the US version of Dancing with the Stars, Julia Morris feels she might have made a terrible mistake. She’s let Robert get better at dancing than her.
“I haven’t brushed up my paso doble,” Julia tells TV WEEK.
“I haven’t whipped out a tango. I’m grossly behind now. I felt like I might have been the more experienced dancer, but now I’m just going to have to go and sit in the corner.”
The truth is, Julia couldn’t be prouder of Robert and what he’s achieved in the US.
“I’ll tell you what,” she says, “watching him through Dancing with the Stars, I was like, ‘Go blossom, babe.’ He’s just gone up another 50 levels in his life experience. He’s incredible.”
Julia, 57, and Robert, 22, are now in their third year of hosting I’m a Celebrity together, and they recognise that there’s a special chemistry between them.
“Honestly, I feel the dynamic that Julia and I have is so rare and so much fun,” Robert tells us. “I feel like every year that we’ve been hosting, it just gets better and better and it just feels easier. It just feels so perfect and so natural.”
Julia adds: “I think there’s a mutual adoration that is like a soul slam. It feels like someone’s high-fiving your soul. The connection… I think we’re both beyond surprised it’s as yummy as it is.”
Hosting I’m a Celebrity is a “brutal” job, according to Julia, because she has to be “putting out full personality” from five in the morning until five in the afternoon. She feels for Robert, who’s next to her for those 12 hours a day in the South African jungle.
“I have to manage myself a little bit because I am a lot,” she admits. “So, yes, I do think, ‘Poor Robert, he’s going to need a break.’”
But Robert finds it all “hilarious”.
“The in-between moments, when we’re setting up shots or we’ve just arrived or whatever it is, you could make an entire show just out of that,” he says.
It’s no secret that Robert and his family – including mum Terri and sister Bindi – are close. They were very much part of his Dancing with the Stars experience and they are with him in the jungle.
“We approach pretty much everything as a family unit and it is very, very special,” he says. “My family are absolutely everything to me.”
Julia says the Irwins have been a big part of her life for a long time, and it’s been “wonderful” getting to know them better through I’m a Celebrity. She says she finds herself getting “hugely defensive” if she hears people talking about any of them.
“I might hear, ‘Oh, Terri’s a mumager.’ Oh, my God, do I turn! I have to really control myself. I’m like, ‘Well, it sounds like you know her?’ And they’re: ‘No, no, I’ve never met her.’ ‘Right. So…’
“But also, I can’t get too defensive because I know they wouldn’t be that rude to people. So I’ve got to calm myself.”
This year, in I’m a Celebrity’s 12th season, Robert says they’re “doubling down” on the number of trials and the magnitude of them, making it even more intense.
“It’s just one thing to the next,” he explains.
“There’s this new element, this new part of the camp aspect that is really going to test them to a point they’ve never been tested before.”
As for the celebrities appearing this season, Julia says they’ve eased right off on casting “contentious people who are just in for a fight”.
“It becomes more about the human spirit and making a little micro-community where people can talk about subjects that are important to them,” she adds. “They’re so far out of anything that resembles a comfort zone that they seek comfort in each other. About a week in, they all start to really trust each other – and that’s when they trust Australian viewers and they open up about stories they probably would never talk about in an interview.”
Once the intense shooting weeks in the jungle are over, Julia and Robert will head off in their different directions.
Julia, mum to teenagers Ruby and Sophie with ex-husband Dan Thomas, has been careful over recent years not to take on too much work, saying, “I made up my mind when I went solo parenting that that’s how it is. I’m not going to get that time back.”
But she did pop up on some interesting shows last year, including The Assembly. Having been diagnosed with ADHD in 2024, she was keen to be interviewed by the show’s autistic journalism students.
“I begged to be on the show, like a stalker!” she laughs. “I found it so incredibly special. After I had my own awakening with a different brain last year, now it’s all I want to talk about!”
This year, Julia will be seen in new ABC comedy series Class Clowns, in which she plays the principal to a bunch of comedians who take on assignments based on school subjects.
Robert, meanwhile, wants to work on more projects that are “rooted in that sense of wildlife conservation and nature”. That might be a hosting role, or another movie like Zootopia 2, in which he voices koala Robert Furwin.
“I want to do more of that,” he says. “Let’s have a Robert Furwin spin-off!”
And, while Robert says he has “so much love” for his Dancing with the Stars experience, he has no plans to move to the US.
“I love the new community I have over there. It is a second home. But Australia is home for me forever – no question about it.”
