Actor Tammin Sursok talks about Me Too movement on Mental As Anyone podcast

Former Home and Away actor Tammin Sursok has talked openly about the Me Too movement, marriage and motherhood on the Mental As Anyone podcast.

Former Home and Away actor Tammin Sursok considers herself lucky she hasn’t faced the extreme sexual abuse half her friends have.

A quarter of a century into working in the entertainment industry, the 41-year-old has detailed some of what she calls micro abuses she’s experienced on the job.

Sursok was 15 when she first landed the role of Dani Sutherland on the hit TV soap and has gone on to enjoy a successful career in Hollywood.

“When the Me Too movement came out, I was like, ‘I am so lucky, sexual abuse never happened to me’,” Sursok said in the latest episode of the Mental As Anyone podcast.

“But then when I look at these microdoses of sexual abuse, I’m like, ‘oh my goodness, there were so many things that were said or like, I was overly sexualised.”

Actor Tammin Sursok was interviewed on the Mental As Anyone podcast. Picture: Christian Gilles,

The mother of two recalled an experience with a “much older” man from her time on Home and Away: “ … he was saying some extremely inappropriate things to me and I was 15/16-years-old”.

Sursok has lived in the United States for much of the past two decades.

Her big roles there have included TV shows like The Young and the Restless, Hannah Montana and Pretty Little Liars, as well as films Aquamarine, Crossing Over and Flicka 2.

Tammin Sursok with Daniel Collopy on the Home and Away set in 2002.

Tammin Sursok at the 2004 Logie Awards.

The Daily Telegraph nor Sursok suggest any of these incidents took place on any of these projects.

She is currently writing her memoir, in which some of these experiences will be detailed.

“In one of the shows I was on, I was getting my hair done, and the guy opened up his laptop, and there was a picture of him naked, like, fully naked, and then he would do my hair while I was just seeing the screen saver,” Sursok recalled.

“There was just these little underground hidden things that were, like small abuse, I guess but I didn’t really know it at the time, because it was kind of normalised, like, ‘Oh, that’s okay’. Someone’s allowed to, if you walk in and you have a meeting and you have a really short skirt on, someone’s allowed to comment on it. Someone’s allowed to talk about your body – they’re allowed to, and they did. I actually look at it and think I’m actually really lucky I got out so unscathed, but there was still stuff.”

Tammin Sursok renewed her vows to Sean McEwan on Surfers Paradise beach. Picture: Instagram

Tammin Sursok with her kids Phoenix and Lennon.

Sursok estimates that “out of all my friends” 50 per cent of them have been sexually assaulted.

“Isn’t that wild?” she said.

Sursok is married to actor, producer and director Sean McEwan and the couple are parents to daughters Phoenix, 10, and Lennon, five.

They live in Nashville, although travel regularly back to Australia, and their daughters are not allowed to sleep over at friends’ homes.

“People think that I’m too overprotective for this, but I have two girls, and sleepovers can happen at our house, but my girls are not going to sleepovers,” she explained.

“Ninety-five per cent of sexual assault victims are females, and they’re between the ages of eight and 16, and I have a 10-year-old, and she can have people over, like totally. But it’s not worth it, because it’s not the family that you know, ... it is someone ancillary from the family, it is the uncle or the brother ... that you don’t really know, the guests that are coming in and out, you just don’t know. I think you have to be super careful these days.”

Sursok is meanwhile a successful podcaster, hosting The Shit Show with Tammin Sursok, and social media content creator with millions of followers online.

In the wide-ranging Mental As Anyone interview, she spoke about everything from her relationship with her husband to suffering from bulimia as a teenager.

“Back then, I didn’t really know I had mental health issues,” she said.

“I was kind of addicted to my eating disorder back then, like it made me feel really good.

It’s weird, something so bad can make you feel so good. I didn’t really look at it like that, but it’s like to feel thin made me feel really good and I think that was kind of my safety blanket, because, remember, I was a more of an overweight kid, and I was bullied a lot. So when I did lose the weight in a healthy way, and then I got cast on a TV show, I thought that the only way I was gonna be able to stay relevant and stay sort of, quote, unquote, important … was to stay small, was to stay thin and I didn’t know that I didn’t have to do that.”

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