New Zealand-born model and actress Rachel Hunter has confirmed she is taking part in I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here 2026.
“YES … I said YES. So here we go on this ride!” she wrote on Instagram, before admitting that she is “dreading the encounters with the animals.”
But there’s a poignant reason she agreed to take on the challenge of entering the jungle.
After losing her mum Jeneen Phillips to cancer in 2017, Rachel started to reevaluate her life.
“She [my Mum] said, ‘I regret not being fully who I am, always worrying what will people think, what will people say.’ My grief became a real journey of inspiration for me. It made me face up to those big questions, like, ‘Who am I and what do I want to do? And what do I regret about myself?’” she told New Zealand Women’s Weekly. “I’m not living for my mother. However, I’m constantly inspired by her and asking myself, ‘Am I being who I am and need to be?’”
With that in mind, she decided that she would start to worry less about what other people thought of her, and take on challenges that pushed and inspired her.
“I need to be me and I need to break the cycle of worrying about what others think,” she said in the same interview. “I need to keep evolving. To be in that restful, stable state of not creating anxiety about who I am or where I’m going. It’s about being grounded, being strong and saying what I want.”
She has described this journey as a “spiritual evolution,” adding that she now makes decisions based on “intuition.”
“It’s about creating that space where you can make grounded, fundamental decisions using your so-called intuition, that natural thing we all basically have, and making decisions from that point on a day-to-day basis,” she said. “But when you’re doing this, the state of flow starts happening in your life because you’re like a river. You just keep going and it’s a beautiful thing. But the reality is, our conditioning and experiences sometimes interrupt the flow. I’m in a total flux, I’m constantly working on that. I am not in that present state of being all the time.”
The 56-year-old, who was married to Rod Stewart between 1990 and 2006. The pair share children, Renee, 33, and Liam, 31. Now they are grown up, she admitted that she’s had to reconsider what “home” means to her.
“I’ve really moved away from that conventional sense of home being just one place,” she said. “I realise that I feel like I’m home in lots of different places. America is my home because I’ve spent my entire adult life here. But so is New Zealand because it’s my birthplace. But I also feel at home when I’m cooking my kids’ dinner at their places, and I feel at home in my little house with all my philosophy and yoga books, my clothes in the wardrobe and the pictures of the kids on the walls. And then, of course, there’s India, where I am deeply connected to as well.”
Will the jungle become another home for Rachel? Time will tell!
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