Sophie Monk: ‘I know this is the one’
She admits feeling like she let the nation down after failing to find true love on The Bachelorette. But as she approaches her 40th birthday, Sophie Monk reveals she has found her happily ever after.
Stellar
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Sophie Monk is in love. Deeply, properly — dare we say it — sensibly in love. What’s more, the object of her affections is not famous or a fake and, tellingly, he has little in common with the men she’s dated before. So, is he the one?
“Oh yeah,” she says, without hesitation. “I know this is the one. If he’s out, I give up, I really do.”
So, will we see a wedding?
“He’s just got to propose,” she says. “I keep asking him, I don’t think it’s too far off. He said to me I should ask him, but no. I want for the rest of my life to know he asked me.” She pauses briefly. “Well, even though I’m asking him to ask me.”
For those invested in the long and tumultuous saga that has been Monk’s love-life, this is heartening news.
Over the past few years — first on The Bachelorette in 2017 and then as the host of Love Island Australia — the 39-year-old has become a poster girl for the machinations and manoeuvring at the heart of modern love.
That she has finally met and fallen for someone far away from the cameras, and in the most ordinary of circumstances, will not only delight a nation invested in her happiness but encourage others jaded by contemporary dating.
As always, she’s happy to share. In fact, almost 20 years after she became a household name courtesy of the television show Popstars, she’s still refreshingly open about all aspects of her life.
There’s no artfully constructed persona, no positioning herself as a brand; rather it’s obvious that the woman who sits down to chat with Stellar is exactly the same as the one who has found love after suggesting a kiss with the man sitting next to her on a plane.
It’s been just over a year since the girl from the Gold Coast met Joshua Gross when flying home from a trip in the US after filming the first season of Love Island in Spain.
Just before she boarded the flight, she phoned her sister. “I told her I’d accepted I was going to be single, that I’d enjoy my travel and work and live through her kids,” Monk tells Stellar.
Minutes later she took her seat on the plane and, when the handsome man next to her ordered a glass of champagne, she did likewise. They started to chat.
Two hours later when they were still nattering, she asked if he was single. As Monk tells it: “He said ‘yes’ so I asked if I could kiss him. He agreed, but I said I’d have to brush my teeth so he helped me get my toothbrush out of my bag and I went to one bathroom and he went to another and when we sat back down we had a kiss.”
Was she nervous? “I just felt something,” she replies, smiling broadly. “I’d never normally do that, but he was charming and funny and cool and smart, and when he lent in, that feeling just came over me, like butterflies.”
Even at 10am on an otherwise nondescript Wednesday, when she meets to chat with Stellar, Monk sports a Marilyn Monroe aesthetic — all blonde halo and pillowy lips and breasts threatening to spill out of her tight strapless gingham dress.
But she’s far from the sum of her lad-mag cover shoots — although Gross, weeks after they met, would post one of her Maxim images on Instagram with the message: “Imagine. Somewhere in the world there’s a guy who’s allowed to kiss her.”
But as a born entertainer, Monk has always been so much more than her obvious physical attributes.
Her wit and self-deprecation, combined with candour and a soft heart, led the nation to fall in love with her when she featured on The Bachelorette two years ago.
A self-confessed “bogan” who loves her family, she lives next door to her parents and still uses the cheap beauty hacks she discovered as a teen.
Red food colouring, she points out, is excellent for staining lips though she warns spilling a drop can leave the bathroom looking like a murder scene.
As she tells it, however, the day she met Gross she was looking her worst. “I’d come from a shoot the previous day and I hadn’t washed my make-up off so I had eyelashes down my face, my hair extensions were showing and I was wearing ugg boots and trackies with a stain.”
What did the pair talk about during that long flight to Australia? “We talked about me,” she says deadpan. “My favourite topic.”
Gross, 35, was working in Denver as a neurosurgical robotics executive, but was on a trip home to Australia.
With the plane about to land, Monk asked for his phone number and texted him straight away. They’ve messaged or spoken every day since, and four months ago she announced he was leaving the US to move to the Gold Coast to live with her.
“He’s everything I want in a person and more,” she says enthusiastically. “I don’t think you could invent a better person for me. I’ve gone for something completely opposite to what I’ve ever gone for.”
How is he different? Monk shifts uncomfortably, clearly not wishing to denigrate her previous beaus. “He’s a man; a grown up. He’s really sweet without being annoying, and he’s calm and makes me feel safe.” She pauses: “No-one’s ever moved in with me before, and I love it.”
Without being asked, she brings up the subject of children. “I want everything everyone else has. I’d love kids, though I’d probably need a nanny because I forget everything.”
Late last year she shared videos of the procedure she went through to freeze her eggs, even laughing from her hospital bed that she’d produced 13 eggs or, as she put it, “over a carton”.
For all her wisecracking, as she approaches her 40th birthday in December, Monk has clearly matured.
Perhaps it was her failure to find true love despite having multiple men to choose from on The Bachelorette, or maybe it’s seeing the shenanigans play out on Love Island, a show whose popularity sees it move from 9Go to the main Nine Network channel for its upcoming second season.
In any case, she’s learnt that loving yourself first is the key to making a relationship work. “You’ve really got to care about yourself to care about someone else, and I didn’t realise that. If you don’t care about yourself, you attract the wrong person, or you’ll search for the wrong thing to fill a void. I was always in relationships, but when I became comfortable on my own, that’s when it happened.”
After first tasting success with the girl band Bardot, Monk moved to Los Angeles in 2005 to kickstart an acting career. She appeared in a few comedies, notably alongside Amy Poehler and Simon Baker, but both work and relationships kept hitting a dead end.
She was engaged twice, first to Good Charlotte guitarist Benji Madden, then businessman Jesse Esberg, and enjoyed dates with actor Sam Worthington and TV host Ryan Seacrest.
When, back in Australia, she threw herself into finding love on The Bachelorette, fans were desperate for her to find “the one”.
But the credits had barely finished rolling when her relationship with then-separated father-of four Stu Laundy went sour. She felt she owed the nation an explanation and took to Instagram to apologise if she had disappointed anyone.
“I felt an obligation because everyone was so empathetic to me and wanted a happy ending,” she tells Stellar. “Even Rebel Wilson said to me, ‘Please tell me you’re in love.’ Yes, it was disappointing, but I don’t regret doing the show because my intentions were genuine, and if that hadn’t happened with Stu I’d have never met Josh.”
While she’s close to her three siblings and adores her parents — her dad Andrew is now a hero at the local surf club thanks to their joint comedy appearances on her Instagram — Monk doubts she’ll celebrate her 40th with a party.
“I don’t have heaps of friends, to be honest,” she says. “Because I travel all the time, I’ve only got a handful.” Despite her image as a blonde bombshell, she doesn’t fear getting older. “I wasn’t really mature enough to enjoy my 20s,” she says. “I didn’t utilise any part of what I have, so I think this coming decade will be my best one.”
Despite positioning herself as a ditz — she claims she only became school captain because her mum wanted the badge and someone else wrote the speech for her — Monk is, in fact, both street-smart and resilient.
Whereas reality show contestants now receive extensive psychological support — particularly in light of the two suicides linked to the UK version of Love Island — Monk says the attitude after she appeared in Popstars was “see ya and good luck”. “I left with everyone knowing my name, but not knowing what to do. I wish I’d had more support.”
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If living in Los Angeles knocked the sensitivity out of her, having work fall over and relationships fail publicly has made her tough and adaptable.
“I’ve seen people fall hard and they don’t know how to deal with it, whereas every job I do I don’t know if it will come off,” she says.
She would be thrilled if Love Island continued for multiple seasons because “it’s my favourite thing I’ve ever done”, but if it doesn’t she’s sanguine.
And, whatever happens, Monk has now got someone to go home to. Does she feel like she’s finally had the love fairy shine on her?
“Yes,” she laughs. “And it was about time! I thought my love fairy was dead.”
Love Island Australia premieres 8.40pm, Monday October 7, on the Nine Network.