The Masked Singer EXCLUSIVE: Rob Mills just admitted he “wasn’t very good” on Australian Idol

When Rob “Millsy” Mills was unveiled as the Wolf on The Masked Singer on Monday night, very few were surprised.

For the whole five week run, speculation was rife that the star of stage and screen was behind the howling disguise, with one fan even outing him on Twitter after posing with him.

And for the Australian Idol alum (2003), who burst into the spotlight at the tender age of 21, it was clear that The Masked Singer would be a “fun” way for him to show the country that he was not just “surprisingly good”, but an incredibly talented entertainer.

Throughout the run of the show, the Wolf spoke about “dropping his bad boy image” and “being misjudged or underestimated”, a reputation that came from his days on Idol when a young “Millsy” went on a partying rampage, which included a very public tryst with Paris Hilton.

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Speaking with Now to Love after the Grand Finale of The Masked Singer, Rob spoke candidly about that time, admitting that it was a very different time back then.

“You would have seen maybe eight minutes of me singing [on Australian Idol],” he admitted.

“And I wasn’t very good at 21. I was OK but I was a little-known pub singer. Since then I’ve had a lot of singing lessons and done a lot of work and have trained my voice to get into musical theatre.”

While he could still definitely carry a tune, it was his ‘sense of self’ that Rob, 37, felt he lacked more.

“I say this to a lot of parents who are thinking of getting their kids onto these shows,” he said.

“If they don’t have a sense of self, I wouldn’t recommend going on the show. Guy [Sebastian] was 22 and had a really great sense of who he was at the time and I was just a cover band singer. Cover band singer’s just try and be someone else.”

Following his time on Idol, Rob knew that he had acquired a “reputation of being a party boy”, however in hindsight he believed that it was more of a “representation of what everyone else thought” of him.

“In my own head, I was a really hard worker. I worked five days a week and then four nights a week in the band, so I never really went out partying.

“It was only on Idol that I went out partying. It was the first time I’d been on a plane. It was the first time I’d been let off the leash.”

After a few years, Rob decided that to be taken seriously as an entertainer, he would need to buckle down and do the work.

“I wanted to gain respect and I knew the only way to gain respect is through hard work. You can’t buy respect, there’s no way to fake that. It was through musical theatre that I realised I wanted to gain the respect of that industry. They work so hard. Their work ethic is second to none and they are the triple threats of this world.”

Millsy has worked tirelessly perfecting his craft as an Australian musical theatre star, with his first role as Johnny Casino in Grease – The Arena Spectacular. From there, he toured with Hair (also starring Masked Singer alum Nikki Webster) before originating the role of Prince Fiyero in the Australian production of Wicked in 2008.

Currently, the seasoned performer has a re-occurring role on Neighbours as bad-boy Finn Kelly and his personal life is hitting new heights with girlfriend Georgie Tunny, a producer at the ABC.

So, will be hearing wedding bells anytime soon for this (as Lindsay Lohan called him) “stud-muffin”?

“No, I don’t think so,” he admitted. “We’re just cruising along very nicely. We went to a friends birthday over the weekend and saw all of our mates with babies, and we’re like ‘nope, not yet’. We saw all these two-year-olds and three-year-olds walking around, and we’re like ‘nah, there are things we’ve got to do still.”

”It’s not a huge priority, marriage, for Georgie and I. We just love and respect each other and enjoy each other’s company. We both joke that we’re ‘batting above our average’. I think she’s well out of my league.”