Emma Wiggle: ‘Yes, I’m in love again’
Looking almost unrecognisable in a stunning new photo shoot, Emma “Yellow Wiggle” Watkins exclusively reveals she has a new boyfriend – who is also part of The Wiggles team.
Stellar
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It’s not often that a woman picks her former husband’s new girlfriend, but Emma Watkins has spent nearly every day of the past 10 years with her fellow Wiggle Lachlan Gillespie. So it’s no surprise her instincts were spot on.
A group of dancers from The Australian Ballet had started to record a DVD with The Wiggles, the beloved kids’ group that Gillespie joined in 2009, and which Watkins signed with a year later.
And last year there was one in particular, senior artist Dana Stephensen, who Watkins sensed could be right for the man she had married, separated from and now called her best friend.
“Dana and Lachy have a similar energy, and I said to a friend that they would be perfect together,” Watkins tells Stellar with a laugh. “But she was in a relationship, so I didn’t say anything to him.”
Months later, Gillespie told her the pair had in fact begun a romance. In response, Watkins yelped with delight. “I knew it! I picked it!” she told him. Gillespie, she recalls, couldn’t help but laugh. “Of course, you of all people would pick it,” he told his ex-wife.
And the duo – who married in April 2016 and officially announced their split in August last year – share more than matching skivvies (her yellow, him purple) and a very modern and intuitive approach to love. Because as Watkins reveals exclusively to Stellar for the first time, Gillespie isn’t the only person to have once again found love within the wider Wiggles circle. So has she.
“Yes, I’m in love and I feel very excited to tell you,” says the 30-year-old children’s entertainer, who seems to be bubbling over with happiness after a difficult few years that have involved both relationship and health challenges.
Now, and with remarkable synchronicity, Watkins has fallen for musician Oliver Brian, who is a part of The Wiggles “family”. And she confirms she’s both contented and grateful.
“I haven’t actually told anybody because it’s new, but I feel happy,” she says, revealing that she and her new beau had worked together and were friends of four years before he asked her to dinner.
“He’s very opposite to me,” she says. “He’s a very calm and thoughtful person and I’ve always been interested in his mind and his take on life, and his morals. He loves talking about the environment and food production. It’s not very ‘Wiggly’, but it’s been nice for me to talk about things not just concerning ourselves, but people everywhere around the world.”
A self-avowed perfectionist, Watkins – who is also studying for a PhD and has multiple passion projects on top of her Wiggles commitments – says new love has made her calmer and more patient.
“I’m a bit particular. I used to worry about being late or not getting my pirouette right, but he’s taught me not to worry and not to focus on myself, but to help other people. The last couple of months have been really eye-opening. I’ve relaxed a lot more.”
Watkins’s candour in sharing her news is all the more poignant given the public’s investment in her former romance. While her young fans adore her for her smile, her songs and her trademark yellow bows, their parents bought into the love story between her and Gillespie. Naturally, they were disappointed when the marriage floundered.
“Some people don’t understand it, they want us to be together – particularly the parents,” says Watkins. “The children don’t care. The parents wanted to fall in love with that fairytale and that’s what we’re rebuilding now.”
It can’t have been easy for either Watkins or Gillespie. Like a lot of couples, they met at work, fell in love and got married.
When they were interviewed by Stellar in 2017, founding member Blue Wiggle Anthony Field predicted that “[their baby] will be a part of the Wiggle family”.
So when the couple jointly announced their separation the following year, a seeming business and marketing disaster loomed for The Wiggles empire. After controversies surrounding former members, they had been pivotal in the band’s renewed success. And as the first female Wiggle, Watkins in particular was garnering a new generation of young fans.
But it’s testament to both their friendship and professionalism that the pair still happily work together and have embraced each other’s new partners. They even have dinner together. “Yeah, yeah,” says Watkins. “We’re on tour together so we go to breakfast or have lunch. It’s all very nice – there’s a lovely friendship between us.”
Seeing a former partner with a new love can still sting plenty, but when asked if she felt any heartache once she saw what was transpiring between Gillespie and Stephensen, Watkins replies sincerely.
“This is what was meant to happen,” she tells Stellar. “The way they are together and the way they look at each other... well, there’s something very special there. She’s absolutely wonderful, and she’s wonderful for him and he’s wonderful for her.”
Despite the fact that she makes a living interacting with children on their level, over the past few years Watkins had to behave like a consummate grown-up when she was not on the job.
As she approached her birthday in September, she could’ve lamented her failed marriage or felt cheated by the stage-four endometriosis that has caused her so much pain and potentially compromised her fertility. She even had to announce her illness publicly after pulling out of a Wiggles tour, all to stave off speculation by fans that she could be pregnant.
But as she launches into a new decade there’s no self-pity, only gratitude. And no, she doesn’t regret getting married.
“It was almost like we were at high school. We became Wiggles and everything was such a spectacle, and it was exciting and we were riding on that excitement together, and that included getting married,” she says. “That was beautiful and we would never take that back because it was such a beautiful representation of our relationship and our friendship.”
In any case, she says, she and Gillespie still have each other’s backs. “I’m lucky to have him as my best friend and there’s no changing that. We are in an even better place than we were before. We’re just in tune with each other, like our circadian rhythms are connected. I even know exactly what he wants to eat when we’re both hungry.”
Watkins is as charming and open in person as she is on the stage, where she beams her high-watt smile to audiences several times a week, both here and abroad.
She shares the fact that her new boyfriend bought her a pair of goats for her birthday – her mother refers to them as Wallace and Gromit; she calls them Dolce and Gabbana – as easily as she touches on topics such as her health, and pressure to respond to those pesky pregnancy rumours.
She says she was premature in thinking she’d reached a full recovery after an operation to remove endometriosis last year. In fact, it’s only now, midway through The Wiggles Party Time Big Show Tour, that she’s feeling fully fit, although she still avoids movement that focuses on her abdominal region.
She applauds Stellar’s new policy of not asking women about their baby plans, but points out that she would like waiters to show similar respect. “I don’t drink, so I sometimes order tea,” she explains.
“But there’s an amazing amount of peer pressure to have a drink. It would make me upset because I knew if I said ‘no’, people would think I was pregnant. I don’t know if I can have children and I’m very relaxed knowing I might not be able to, which is why I’m so open to adoption,” she says matter-of-factly. “I’m not fussed if I can’t do it biologically. Whatever is going to happen, it will happen at the right time.”
Next year will mark Watkins’s 10th year with The Wiggles. She played multiple characters, including Dorothy the Dinosaur, before becoming the first woman in the quartet, a move that irked some fans but reinvented the brand.
“I didn’t think there would be such a phenomenon about being a girl Wiggle,” she says. “I had a lot of backlash from original fans and teenagers who didn’t want to let go of the fact The Wiggles were all boys, and I knew where they were coming from. But for the children coming through now, we are the original Wiggles. If someone mentions Murray or Jeff they have no idea what we are talking about.”
These days, those references and some of the old songs are more pointedly for parents and grandparents, not the kids. And Watkins admits she and her younger bandmates sometimes struggle with the lyrics.
As she says, “The amount of times Lachy has forgotten the words to ‘Hot Potato’ – and it’s a song that doesn’t have that many words – is too funny.”
While she wears one big bow on the stage, off stage Watkins wears multiple hats. As a film-school graduate, she’s heavily involved in editing and producing the group’s albums and DVDs and is responsible for introducing sign language into the shows.
On top of her exhausting schedule, independent dance projects and a radio show on smoothfm, she’s also studying for a PhD focused on creative ways of using sign language in dance and film.
Naturally, her fans are her guinea pigs. “Even the little ones will attempt to sign with me, but they think it’s part of the dance, which is just amazing,” she says. “I’m trying to bring more awareness to this beautiful language we have.”
Having grown up with dreams of being a ballet dancer, Watkins is not bothered that injuries long ago made that impossible. “I’m a lot more suited to being a Wiggle,” she says, laughing. “I’d have a really tough time doing the black swan!”
And while she doesn’t hold herself up as a role model, she knows she and her fellow Wiggles have a responsibility to deliver sound messages to their fans, and is committed to touring with the group as long as it will have her. “I’ve got a lot of Wiggling to do – and I’m very excited,” she says.
In fact, she and former Purple Wiggle Jeff Fatt have placed a bet around whether she can outlast his 21-year run.
Sounding keen as ever to tick another goal off her bulging to-do list, Watkins explains, “I’ve told him that I have to stay until I’m 60 because he was there until he was 60. That’s our pact.”