Julia Morris: ‘I don’t care about turning 50’
STARING down the barrel of her golden jubilee, the comedian reveals how “blinding self-belief” has powered her career as one of Australia’s most popular entertainers.
Stellar
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IF you need proof that Julia Morris is not your average middle-aged mum, just drive past her house on a weekday morning. There you will see her waving her kids off to school; right after, she’ll go clamouring onto a trampoline – in her pyjamas. And for the next half hour, she’ll jump up and down, headphones clamped to her ears, as she works out to the Black Eyed Peas and Miley Cyrus.
“I may be in my pyjamas,” Morris tells Stellar, “but I do put on a sports bra.” She quickly breaks into her trademark laugh, which sits somewhere between a seal’s bark and a snort. It is little surprise that Morris takes a free-spirited approach to staying fit as she approaches her 50th birthday — “my golden jubilee, darl” — next April. In the same way she eschews the activewear-clad jogs and gym sessions favoured by her contemporaries, she has also charted her own work path. As a comedian, actor, TV host, radio presenter and author, Morris has upended the conventional career ladder and swung along it monkey-style instead.
Now, Morris says she is busier, more successful, healthier and calmer than she has ever been. If the half century marks a moment of self-assessment and re-examination, then Morris – mother to daughters Ruby, 11, and Sophie, nine – got in early, ridding herself of bad habits and unhelpful thoughts well before the big day.
“It’s a cliché that the midlife crisis happens at 50,” she says emphatically. “Your 40s are the real confrontation time. That’s when you get the first signs of ageing and learn you’re on the reverse side of looking good. By 50, you’ve learnt to accept that’s going to happen. So it’s a tremendous rebirth. I don’t give a f--- about turning 50.”
She is so enthusiastic about the milestone that it is not hard to picture her sitting down to write a midlife manual for other women in the same position. But she gasps at the suggestion. “Oh gosh, no! That’d be too much bum on seat.”
Instead Morris will be celebrating with a dinner party. She told her husband, fellow comedian Dan Thomas, that she wanted to go to the Rainbow Room for her birthday. When he asked her where it was, she told him to look it up. He obliged. And on April 20, the couple, their daughters and some close friends will be celebrating at the landmark restaurant in New York City, 65 storeys above Rockefeller Center.
It’s a wonder Morris will be able to fit it in, given her schedule for 2018 would leave most others hyperventilating. In January, she heads to South Africa for two months to film the fourth season of Network Ten’s I’m A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here!, which she co-hosts with Dr Chris Brown. As soon as she returns, she’ll tour the country with her Lift And Separate Golden Jubilee Tour; later in the year she’ll be back with Network Ten to film a new version of Blind Date. On top of all this, the family is moving from Melbourne to Sydney.
Reminded that she once told an interviewer the first part of her life was “very intense” and insisted the second was “not going to be that intense”, she laughs uproariously. “So many big, exciting things keep coming up. I keep thinking, ‘This year is going to be my apex’, but then the next just gets better.”
Morris was raised in a hard-working family on NSW’s Central Coast and spent years trying to build a career and profile. So having stimulating, diverse and well-paid work is essentially a dream come true. “Yep, the girl from Gosford is still working,” she tells Stellar, crediting perseverance, “blinding self-belief”, motivation, and “being a pest” for her success. Viewers may think it’s been a seamless trajectory since she appeared on New Faces at age 17, but there has been plenty of job uncertainty. Morris shares a key piece of advice she has given her daughters: “It’s how you receive the ‘nos’ that defines you.”
She says that she’s excited about her hosting gig for Blind Date, which is being targeted as a family-friendly show that will aim to bring some subtlety and tenderness to TV’s matchmaking genre. But Morris knows it will eat into family time, and she is clear that she wants to be present for her daughters as they enter their teenage years.
“I really enjoy working and it’s a very big part of who I am,” she says, “but there’s no point being a strong woman if you’re raising two young women and you are not around.”
Strength is as pivotal to Morris’s brand as her humour. Behind the high jinks, the self-deprecation and the megawatt smile is a no-nonsense operator. Unlike many women who have been in the entertainment industry for more than three decades, Morris says she has not been on the receiving end of sexual harassment. “I’m not vulnerable and I’ve got too big a mouth,” she explains. “[Men] would be more scared off than turned on.”
She says those being snared in the aftermath of Harvey Weinstein’s unveiling “didn’t bother evolving” and suggests that “respectful men never did it”. In any event, she’s been personally calling out the creeps for years; she once told a colleague, who licked a woman’s face, that it wasn’t acceptable – then reported him to the boss.
“I love that this generation is changing it for the next. The women who no longer accept it are the daughters of women who had to.”
Morris says she has been fortunate with the men in her life, citing her father and brother as prime examples. On New Year’s Eve, she will also celebrate her 13th wedding anniversary with Thomas. A few years ago when she hit it big with House Husbands and Australia’s Got Talent, he sat her down to talk about what would happen next. “Dan said I’d constantly be told I was amazing and that my ideas were the best anyone had ever heard, but that I’d come home and I’d be expected to unpack the dishwasher. He said to me, ‘At home, we won’t find you as fascinating – but we love you.’”
If Thomas has been an anchor, then Morris herself has learnt to read the tides. Two years ago she felt overwhelmed and full of rage over seemingly innocuous issues, such as how people parked outside her house. Looking back, she compares it to the overload warning you get when a lift reaches load capacity.
She consulted a psychologist and learnt cognitive behavioural therapy to help change her thought patterns and behaviours; now, she says, life is happier and calmer. “The rage never goes away, but I can stop it before it starts to rise up to my oesophagus.”
She says she has also backed away from people pleasing. “I was so busy pleasing people outside my home that when I returned I had nothing left. I was saving the worst version of myself for the people I loved most.”
Morris and Thomas still seek professional help “to tweak things” – and she has also adopted smarter habits. Chief among them is treating her home like a resort. “If I was in a resort I wouldn’t come home and fold washing. Instead I would make an early evening drink and read a book or chat it out with Dan and the girls.”
She also instituted a 15-minute buffer between appointments. And she has streamlined her home, giving away dozens of gowns and clearing kitchen cupboards.
After her winning stint on The Celebrity Apprentice in 2011, Morris received a pep talk from the host Mark Bouris and put her financial ducks in order. Health-wise, her diet is cleaner and the trampoline will have her in good shape when she heads to the jungle. In fact, the only thing bugging her is her eyes — Morris suffers from terrible hay fever and has started pondering an eye lift. “I would never have a facelift because I’d be scared about how it would turn out,” she says. “But the skin over my eyes is like a balcony, and I hear the recovery period is quite favourable.”
She winks. “Look, it’s something to be considered – not promoted. But it would be a lovely complement to my Botox.”
I’m A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here! starts next month on Network Ten.