St Kilda schoolgirl, Gotye, Brynne Edelsten — where are the newsmakers of 2010 now?
Some enjoyed the greatest years of their career, while others were less fortunate. Here are today’s brilliant and bizarre careers of the stars and newsmakers of 2010 — and some will surprise you.
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These are the Aussies who made an impact in 2010.
Whether they starred in our favourite TV shows or movies, performed the hit song of the decade or simply made headlines for the right, and wrong, reasons — we’ve revisited the careers of those who were the talk of Melbourne and Australia at the dawn of the decade, and found out their plans for 2020.
SAM WORTHINGTON
On Boxing Day 2009, the hyped James Cameron film Avatar debuted in Australian cinemas, with Aussie Sam Worthington in a lead role, which propelled the Perth boy onto a global stage.
That year, he appeared in Terminator Salvation with Christian Bale and in 2010, Clash of the Titans.
Since Avatar, Worthington hasn’t landed any big roles. In that time, he married fellow Aussie Lara Bingle in 2014 and became a father to two children, and, and this year it was reported they are expecting a third child.
Worthington will be busy these next few years with Avatar sequels, released in 2022 and 2023.
Avatar 4 and Avatar 5 are also in pre-production and tipped for release in 2025 and 2027 respectively.
GOTYE
Wouter “Wally” De Backer, widely known as Gotye, made his breakthrough in 2010 with Eyes Wide Open, a single that reached No.25 on Triple J’s Hottest 100. It was recorded in a studio he built that year in a barn at his parents’ farm on the Mornington Peninsula.
At the very end of the year, he started work on the follow-up, which brought him global fame. Somebody that I Used to Know was from his third studio album, Making Mirrors, released in 2011.
The track with Kiwi singer Kimbra eventually hit No.1 on the US Billboard charts, making him the first Australian-based artist to do so since Savage Garden in 2000.
Gotye and Kimbra did the US talk show rounds performing on Saturday Night Live and Jimmy Kimmel Live, and cleaned up at the 2011 and 2012 ARIA awards, winning Single of the Year and Best Album.
Has Gotye become someone that we used to know?
Gotye only returned to the limelight in 2018 for Gotye Presents a Tribute to Jean-Jacques Perrey at the Sydney Festival and Tasmania’s MONA FOMA.
THE CHASER
The ABC satirical troupe was widely known for its controversies. Prior to 2010, one of their biggest stunts drew global attenti on.
The 2007 APEC summit saw police wave The Chaser’s fake motorcade through multiple checkpoints in Sydney’s CBD.
The stunt ended when comedian Chas Licciardello, dressed as Osama bin Laden, emerged from a limo and made himself known to shocked authorities.
The Chaser team got to within one block from the hotel where then-US president George W. Bush was staying.
Charges were laid, and later dropped, against 11 people associated with The Chaser.
The Chaser’s War on Everything was suspended in 2009 and 2011 for distasteful sketches.
Since 2011, some of the group’s members made appearances on other ABC shows like The Checkout, and more recently on Radio Chaser, a Triple M Sydney drive show.
Chaser member Julian Morrow now focuses on his production business Giant Dwarf, according to The Australian.
BRYNNE EDELSTEN
In 2009 US fitness instructor Brynne Gordon, 26, married Australian medical entrepreneur and one-time owner of the Sydney Swans Geoffrey Edelsten, 66, at a $3.3 million wedding at Melbourne’s Crown Casino.
Seinfeld actor Jason Alexander was paid well to give an address at the wedding, and The Nanny’s Fran Drescher made an appearance.
The newlyweds spent 2010 as A-listers on the Melbourne social scene.
In 2011, the new bride made her TV debut on Dancing with the Stars and in mid-2012 she’d landed her own reality TV show — Brynne: My Bedazzled Life.
In 2014, Brynne and Geoffrey split, with Brynne telling Stellar onlylast month that she’s still fighting for a settlement. Brynne has since tried to find love again, becoming engaged and later separating from Brett Hunter. She also dated a woman named Coby Boatman.
She’s recently hinted she’d love to appear on The Bachelorette: “I could do that … line them up!” she told Stellar.
ST KILDA SCHOOLGIRL
Headline-grabbing Kim Duthie, otherwise known as “The St Kilda Schoolgirl”, was at the centre of a nude photo scandal involving two St Kilda footballers in 2009.
Then along came player agent Ricky Nixon and more scandal ensued.
First, photos and later, a video of a near-naked Nixon in his underwear on a bed in a hotel room emerged.
He said the pair did not have sex, while Duthie claimed they had a sexual relationship and took a lie-detector test on 60 Minutes.
The polygraph concluded she had told the truth.
Nixon wrote a memoir aptly named My Side and Duthie sought an injunction to prevent the book’s release.
She lost the battle, which led Nixon to release his memoir in 2016.
Today Duthie lives in Queensland and is married with a young child. She owns her own beauty business and occasionally works as a model.
She declined to comment about her life up north.
JESSICA WATSON
At 16, Watson became the youngest person to sail solo non-stop around the world. She spent 210 days alone at sea and still remembers the surrealness of arriving back in Sydney Harbour in May 2010.
“The day of getting home itself was too much, it’s really hard to explain how overwhelming it was,” she said last week.
“It feels like it was yesterday, but in other ways so much has happened since then, I’ve grown and changed so much. Some of the adrenaline is still with me. It hasn’t gone away.”
In 2011, Watson was named the Young Australian of the Year and went on to skipper the youngest crew to compete in the Sydney to Hobart yacht race.
Watson spent the following years doing press tours, penning her first book, travelling across the globe in her role for the United Nations’ World Food Program and “finishing school in between all of that”.
In 2017, she completed a Bachelor of Arts at Deakin University, followed by an MBA at the Australian Institute of Management.
Watson released her first young-adult fiction novel Indigo Blue last year.
Today she lives in Melbourne and works full-time as a management consultant at one of the big four accounting firms. She also works at marine start-up Deckee (described as TripAdvisor for boating), which she co-founded.
As for what Watson’s future holds: “One day I’d like to sail around the world again, maybe stopping along the way this time, but maybe not in the next 10 years.”
JULES LUND
A FOX FM competition helped launched Jules Lund’s career when he won “15 Days of Fame” and scored his own weekly radio show in 2002.
Lund went on to host the Logies red carpet and became a Getaway presenter.
In 2010, Lund and Fifi Box took over Hamish and Andy’s Fox FM drive spot.
He soon realised radio alone couldn’t harness his creativity visually, so he began creating content for the Fifi and Jules Facebook page.
“It ended up becoming one of the most engaged Facebook brands,” he said. “That’s when I realised (social media) was a powerful medium, compared to radio and TV, and I was excited.”
In 2014, Lund launched the Tribe app — an influencer social media and marketing platform that connects brands and content creators.
Tribe operates in five cities: Melbourne, Sydney, London, Manila and New York.
“I still love radio and TV and even if (Tribe) is a juggernaut, I still want to come back,” Lund said.
When asked whether he thought he’d be the CEO of the global tech company at the decade’s end, Lund said: “It’s incredible to think back. I thought the greatest success was hosting a Logie Award-winning TV show and having a No.1 radio show.
“That’s as far as I could imagine. We still have a long way to go to achieve our mission with Tribe, but I really love being a husband and father and I don’t want to be working this hard for the rest of my life. I think the next move will be back into radio.”
FIRASS DIRANI
The Underbelly TV series’ first two seasons were a huge hit in Melbourne in 2008 and 2009.
But in 2010, Underbelly: The Golden Mile would tell the story of Sydney’s John Ibrahim in Kings Cross.
Until then, Dirani had only appeared in Aussie films or small TV parts.
The same year Underbelly appeared on our TV screens, Dirani was named Cleo Bachelor of the Year, while at the following year’s TV Week Logie Awards he won the Graham Kennedy Award for Most Outstanding Newcomer and Popular New Male Talent for his work on Underbelly.
Dirani went on to land small parts in US action thriller Killer Elite (2011), starring Robert De Niro, and Hacksaw Ridge (2016).
Today Dirani is known for his role on Aussie TV drama House Husbands between 2012 and 2017 and this year he appeared on Channel 7’s The Real Dirty Dancing.
JESSICA MARAIS
Marais was Rachel Rafter on Packed to the Rafters, a lead role on television’s most popular show of 2010.
The show won Most Popular Drama at the Logies that year, and Marais was nominated for Most Popular Actress but lost out to co-star Rebecca Gibney.
She left the drama series in 2013, moving to Los Angeles to try her luck in Hollywood.
Marais was cast in the US Drama Magic City for two seasons.
She’s since returned to Australia and starred in a handful of TV dramas, including Love Child and The Wrong Girl.
In June 2018, Marais took an extended hiatus from acting to focus on her mental health. She also pulled out of attending the Logie awards, despite being nominated for the Gold.
Marais will return to our TV screens in Packed to the Rafters when the show returns next year, with the original cast.
ANGUS AND JULIA STONE
Sibling folk duo Angus and Julia Stone were propelled to fame after their song Big Jet Plane landed at the top of the Aussie charts in 2010.
It was also the top song in Triple J’s Hottest 100 countdown that year.
They cleaned up at the 2010 ARIAs, taking home awards including Album of the Year, Best Adult Alternate Album and Single of the Year.
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Big Jet Plane was the second single off their second album, Down the Way.
Their career appears to have been in hiatus of late, with the last we heard of the duo being in 2017 when they released their fourth studio album Snow.
No tours were listed for 2018/19 on their website for New Zealand and Australia.