Married At First Sight star Melissa Lucarelli suffered every bride’s worst nightmare this week when she slept in late ahead of her wedding. She also misplaced her wedding dress and ended up alone and panicked on the side of a highway – leading some viewers to brand the whole fiasco as fake.
But Melissa, 38, wants viewers to know her meltdown was very much real.
“If it was staged, I wouldn’t have been wearing that tent of a dress!” she tells TV WEEK with a laugh.
“I hadn’t slept for pretty much the whole week leading up to it. The night before the wedding I was packing my bags and just fell asleep because I was that exhausted. I didn’t set an alarm. Then I woke up to producers calling me, asking where I was.
“Within two seconds I grabbed my stuff and chucked it in my bag, hence why I couldn’t remember if I’d brought my wedding dress. I ran out to get a taxi and then saw a producer running after me with a hand-held camera. It was all real!”
This isn’t the first time Melissa has sparked rumours she’s an actress.
Eagle-eyed fans noticed she’d uploaded an image of herself in a police uniform to Instagram with the caption ‘Constable A Nadar’.
One follower commented, “acting gig?”
Confirming that she has dabbled in acting, Melissa says she once starred as an extra on Home & Away, and has also worked as a TV presenter on Nine’s travel show, Postcards WA in 2009. But her day-to-day job is looking after actors and extras as a talent agent.
Melissa arrived at her wedding feeling flustered (Image: Nine Network).
As for her initial reaction to her husband Dino, Mel says she was just “very confused”.
“The fact he trotted in on a horse dressed as Aladdin was an impression it itself,” she explains.
“And then I couldn’t understand what he was saying. He speaks ‘spiritual’, which is actually a language. But I knew the experts had matched us for a reason.
“The fact he wasn’t my type physically wasn’t a deterrent. It’s about us getting to know each other and to see if we can meet in the middle.”
Dino made a grand entrance in to the ceremony (Image: Nine Network).
Married At First Sight airs Sunday to Thursday, 7:30pm, on Nine.
