Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins star Natalie Bassingthwaighte: ‘After coming out, I was terrified my world would collapse’

When Natalie Bassingthwaighte was asked to be a contestant on Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins a few years ago, she said she’d consider it, so long as she didn’t have to take part in the show’s fighting challenges. 

“They were like, ‘Well you have to. You can’t just not do that.’ So I said no, and then this time I was like, ‘Oh, surely it’s not as bad as it looks,’” Bassingthwaighte recalls. It’s surely down to some gleefully conniving producer then that in the very first episode of Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins season eight, which started on 4 January, the former Neighbours star is left wretching on the dusty ground, having just had the living daylights beaten out of her by Love Island star Gabby Allen.

Still, she’s alive. “I’m alive! I didn’t die,” she cheers over Zoom, calling from home in Australia, her dogs Biscuit and Harli barking around her. “I got a staph infection in my knees and I was bruised and battered, but the most thing that I’m proud of is that I came out with my head held high, and I was really proud of what I achieved in every scenario.”

Allen might have given her a whalloping, but the challenge did take place moments after Bassingthwaighte was plunged into a lake and instructed to hold her breath (which she did successfully). Give her a break.

When 50-year-old Bassingthwaighte, affectionately known by fans as Nat Bass, was first offered SAS a few years back, she “wasn’t in the best space mental health wise”, she says. The famously gruelling TV show, which sees celebrities forced to undertake ruthless challenges that actual military recruits in the UK’s Special Air Service have to do, isn’t for the fainthearted. Lucy Spraggan tore her labia. Matt Hancock broke a rib and got trench foot. In this season’s premiere, Bassingthwaighte’s Neighbours co-star Ryan Moloney is left weeping, and that’s only after a conversation with stone-faced chief instructor, Billy Billingham.

“In the last few years, there’s a lot that’s happened in my world,” she hoots, in a way which reads, “That’s an understatement”. It’s true: despite having surely one of the entertainment biz’s most topsy-turvy careers – she played Izzy Hoyland for more than 350 episodes of Neighbours, had three Australian Top 10 hits with her band Rogue Traders, hosted So You Think You Can Dance and judged The X Factor Australia – the last three years have likely been her most upending yet. 

“I’ve just done a lot of soul-searching and really finding out who I am on so many levels, and I filled my tool belt with so many tools to help me get through emotional situations, you know? When I was asked again I was like, ‘Oh God, could I do it now?’” she grins. In November 2023, the actress came out as queer, telling the Something To Talk About podcast that she was in a “beautiful relationship with a woman” – stage manager Pip Loth – following the end of her marriage to her Rogue Trades bandmate Cameron McGlinchey.

She and Loth, who uses they/them pronouns, got engaged in September. “We’ve been in a great place since we’ve met. We’re just so connected in an outerworldly way. I feel like I’ve known them in another lifetime,” she gushes.

Yet the road to Bassingthwaighte’s coming out was infuriatingly rough, far rougher than any celebrity reality show could be, even if it’s a quasi-military one that leaves you throwing up in the dirt. Her experience, one of realising that she is queer at a later stage in life and of veiled tabloid threats, broke her, and then built her back up tenfold.

“I grew up in a time when you weren’t allowed to be gay. I look back and it’s not like I felt gay and I hid it when I was a teenager. I didn’t have that story. For me it kind of felt like it came out of nowhere, but then when I’ve looked back, I’m like, ‘Oh. Oh! Oh. Ohhhhh, OK. It all makes sense,” she says, disarmingly candid. 

“Look, mental resilience is hard at the best of times, but something like that? When I was really terrified that my whole world would collapse, my children wouldn’t love me anymore [she has two, with McGlinchey], my family would disown me, my work would all just disappear? I genuinely had that fear of, ‘I can’t do this,’ but my body was like, ‘but this is the truth. You can’t not do it.’ So, it was a real fight in me, and scary. Really scary.”

Bassingthwaighte says she was “almost forced” to out herself, after being approached by a media outlet which said it knew she had split from McGlinchey, and that she was in a queer relationship. They wanted a quote about the end of her marriage. 

“I think I probably stopped breathing for a minute. Like, my entire nervous system went to s***. My entire body felt threatened in every single way,” she says. She had to choose between offering a quote, saying nothing, or taking back her truth, her way. “I spent 24 hours in the fetal position just rocking back and forth hysterical, just not knowing what the right thing to do was because my daughter was very well aware of the situation, but my son was younger and he [wasn’t]. That was terrifying, that he would find out that way.”

When she ultimately came out via the podcast interview, she felt an indescribable release. “I think I just left that interview and my whole body just burst into tears from relief, but also joy,” she beams. “Like, Oh my God. Yay. It’s done.”

During our chat, she is effulgent, and her house is bustling with family activity. Life seems real good. I ask about her sweet proposal to Loth, and she eagerly, meticulously tells all: how Loth convinced her that marriage is an “acknowledgement of love” rather than ownership; how she hid her proposal plan from her loved ones; how she flew a poet who writes spontaneous poems on a typewriter from New York to Niagara Falls, so they could write a poem for Loth before Bassingthwaighte dropped to one knee. 

“It got to the day and I was so terrible. I was so nervous that they were going to find out or that they already knew,” she says, smiling all the way. “I mean, I’ve never proposed to anyone so that was quite a wild ride. Next thing it all happened and it was just so mind-blowingly fabulous, like it was better than I imagined.”

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The day ended with a shoutout from Schitt’s Creek star Noah Reid at his concert, where he performed his character Patrick Brewer’s version of Tina Turner’s “The Best”. Bassingthwaighte had shared a meme of the scene with Loth at the start of their romance, and the actress had contacted Reid’s team asking for the dedication. “It was just so lovely. It was just the freaking best, you know?” she says. “It was gold, gold, gold.”

So yes, Natalie Bassingthwaighte is made of tough stuff. Somewhere on the internet, there’s a montage of her screaming during trials on I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! (which she was a finalist on in 2017). That came about in response to feeling “really lost and stuck” after the death of her manager, which left her wondering whether she’d approach the tasks differently. Being ambushed by a fake enemy on SAS: Who Dares Wins is similar: how can it compare to the anguish she’s felt in reality? “I feel like I’ve been through way more in my real life than that, in a strange way,” she says.

It’s also about her children, Harper, 15, and Hendrix, 11. “I wanted to show them that even in the hardest times when you feel like it’s too much, you can pick yourself up and keep going,” she affirms.

“But at the end of the day, if you’re in any scenario or work environment or whatever, if that’s not working out for you and you’ve given it your best shot, you’ve got to listen to your body.” Especially if that body is being whacked by Gabby Allen.

Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins continues on Channel 4 every Sunday and Monday and on Channel 4 streaming.

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