When funny man Nath Valvo was evicted from I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!, viewers saw the smiles, the hugs and the usual post-jungle chaos – but they didn’t see the emotional moment that hit him hardest.
“Robert Irwin said, ‘Nate, Cody [my husband] landed a few hours ago,’” Nath, 42, tells TV WEEK. “I burst into tears.”
After weeks of rice, rations and revolting eating trials, Nath had been counting down the minutes until he could see Cody again. But in true Nath fashion, the heartfelt reunion quickly turned into pure comedy.
While his fellow campmates were greeted by families waiting eagerly in a restaurant, Nath’s husband had a slightly different approach.
“He was jet lagged so he went to bed and I had to go to the room and wake him up,” the comedian reveals. “Everyone else’s families were waiting in the restaurant. My one, the Queenslander, who goes to bed at seven o’clock, was asleep!”
Once Cody was up, the reunion unfolded over wine, cheese and entire packets of TimTams, as Nath finally met the families he’d heard so much about in camp.
It was the perfect ending to what he describes as a mostly beautiful experience – aside from the eating trials and the shock eliminations.
“The eating trials are a form of torture,” he says. “They don’t air a lot of it because people are probably eating dinner, but we do vomit, we do dry reach heaps. It smells so bad, there’s flies on it, your body shuts down, your throat stops working.”
“And the eliminations threw a grenade in camp – and I don’t think we ever recovered,” Nath says.
“Because no one was really looking at each other in that way as threats, so for that to come up, it just changed the game.”
Despite the discomfort, Nath says the jungle forced him to confront something unexpected about himself.
“I’m a big fan of no,” he says with a laugh.
“I’m a big scaredy cat and I’m stuck in my ways a little bit. That makes me a good stand-up though, because I’m good at complaining. But I learned I need to say yes more. Saying yes to the show wasn’t easy, and then every single thing that happened on the show that made me really nervous ended up being an amazing moment.”
Related stories
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
