‘I’m an emotional person’: Why Candice Warner signed up for SAS Australia
From the ball-tampering scandal to hitting “rock bottom”, it’s been a harrowing time for Candice Warner. Here’s why she signed up for a physical and mental challenge like no other.
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With three daughters under six, Australian cricketer husband Dave away in Dubai since September playing in Indian Premier League, Candice Warner has to run a pretty tight ship.
It’s filled with plenty of activities and strict dinner, bath and bedtime routines.
“It’s a challenge — there’s days where you’re exhausted and they’re bickering and you just want to pull your hair out,” she confesses.
But she laughs when we ask if she’s barking orders like on Channel 7’s new reality show SAS Australia under former Special Forces soldiers chief instructor Ant Middleton and his DS (directing staff). “It’s not quite as tight, no — I don’t quite have that military style.”
Warner joins 16 other celebrities including comedian Merrick Watts, former Bachelorette Ali Oetjen, Miss Universe Australia Erin McNaught, actor Firass Dirani, rugby player and former Bachelor Nick “Honey Badger” Cummins, as they take on one of the toughest challenges of their lives, conquering a series of physical and psychological tests from the real SAS selection process. They are cut off from the outside world at a secret base — initially planned for New Zealand, but swapped to the Snowy Mountains in NSW after COVID hit.
There’s no names, the recruits, as the celebs are known, are handed numbers on the first day and that’s what’s yelled at them throughout. It’s freezing and wet. All the time. They didn’t have access to hot water. Or showers. There are no flushing toilets. There’s no privacy. And filming doesn’t stop.
She jokes she signed up for the brutal physical and mental challenge so her three girls (Ivy, 6, Indi, 4 and Isla, 1) would kiss the TV like they do when they see their daddy. But also to set an example for them.
“I know I’m physically tough and can put up with a lot. I’m not always the best, but I don’t give up. I know I can handle a physical challenge but I wanted to know how far mentally I could push myself. And also to show my kids that you don’t just give up easy.”
Warner wasn’t in peak physical condition when producers first came calling. Baby Isla was only two months’ old. She could run, but didn’t have a lot of strength, telling us she could only do one pull up and about 10 push-ups.
But as with all challenges she’s faced over the years, she met this head on. Working with a trainer four times a week, she regained her fitness and an extra six kilos — because she wanted that extra bit of cushioning to protect her against the cold, but also laughs that COVID wasn’t so kind to her either. Warner has weathered many ups and downs in the past two years after David’s involvement in the ball tampering controversy. The 35-year-old recently opened up to former PR supremo Tory Archbold in Powerful Stories about how an emotional “breakdown” helped her reassess life. Warner tells the podcast: “To have people question us as people, question us as parents, question us as husband and wife — it’s really difficult and it’s how you deal with it when you hit rock bottom. At first it’s devastating (but) it isn’t so bad — you get to assess your whole life because things can’t get any worse. From that, we’re much better people to be around because we now value different things.”
There was also plenty of introspection in the barracks. Warner shares she didn’t sleep much, worried that they’d be startled awake to do a challenge.
“I really discovered I can survive on the bare minimum,” she says. “You don’t need all the materialistic things. I learnt how resilient as humans we can be — that you can pick yourself up and continue no matter the circumstance. It was such a nice thing to learn. I really hope it comes across like that on the show.”
She jumped out of helicopters, walked for kilometres with a 20kg Bergen (a rucksack jam-packed with the items needed to survive), physically fought with friends, but Warner says the toughest challenge was being away from her girls. She’s barely been apart from them since they were born.
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“That was very challenging and, for me, I found that the hardest thing to not let that affect my performance,” she says, explaining she just had to keep super busy, almost mothering fellow recruits, to move through it.
“I was always doing something — whether it was helping other people dry their clothes. Whatever little jobs, I tried to do them. Otherwise if I had down time that’s when I’d start thinking about them. I’m an emotional person — I would have got really emotional. I just kept busy so I didn’t have to think about home.”
Home’s been a sanctuary in COVID. Before David headed back to cricket duties the family enjoyed some rare time all together.
“It wasn’t too bad for us,” Warner shares. “We live a pretty simple life. If anything I had a hell of a lot more washing because David was home and so I ended up having four kids instead of just three. He was like another kid.
“We survived, went a bit crazy on TikTok for a while. But really we just made the most of being together as a family because David is generally away for 300 days of the year. We just enjoyed spending a precious time together.”
Now the dust has settled on the SAS experience, would Warner put her hand up again?
“Yes and no. If it was in a different location, if it wasn’t so cold, I would consider it. It was a phenomenal experience, it really was but it’s the hardest thing, apart from childbirth, I have ever done. So if you asked me straight after the show it would have been 110 per cent now. I’m a sucker for punishment, so yeah I probably would do it again.”
SAS, Monday-Tuesday, 7.30PM, Seven