Julia Morris:
She had everything – a stellar career, happy marriage and two healthy kids, so why was Julia Morris so angry? Despite her high-octane life, the comedian had lost her sense of humour. Samantha Trenoweth reports.
the comedian, actor and mum regains her mojo
Menopause was driving comedian and TV presenter Julia
Morris nuts: “Nuts, I tell you!” She can laugh about it now, but 18 months ago, she felt absolutely overwhelmed.
“I was thinking, I’m in an amazing job, I have a happy marriage, I’ve got healthy, happy children, I feel like I’m heading towards my career apex, so why am I furious all the time? Furious!” she says.
Julia was furious with her husband, with her kids, with friends and colleagues, with other drivers on the
road – especially with other drivers on the road. “If I let someone into traffic and they didn’t wave, I just wanted to follow them home and bash them to death. Make no mistake, that’s how I felt.
“If I’m honest, the problem wasn’t simply menopause,” admits the 48-year-old mother of two. “It was overload … and a little bit too much of the high-octane life. It was partly an adrenaline thing and partly a fear of losing control. I’ve never really thought of myself as a controlling person, but I must have become one while I wasn’t looking.
As you have more success, there’s more to lose and unconsciously, I think, you become more controlling.
The “high-octane life” took hold when Julia first tried juggling two major TV projects simultaneously, playing Gemma
Crabb in the drama series House Husbands and hosting Australia’s Got Talent, back in 2013.
Two years later, she added I’m A Celebrity ... Get Me Out Of Here to the mix. With its long stints filming in South Africa, the emotional and professional pressures then ramped up spectacularly. “I was trying to be best mumma, best comedian, best colleague, best everything,” says Julia.
Today, however, sitting in the shade of a Moreton Bay fig, looking out across Sydney Harbour, Julia couldn’t appear more relaxed. She has spent the morning trudging through jungle for a photo shoot. Nothing was too much trouble. Clambering over rocks in heels? No problem. Wading into that sea of venomous spiders’ webs? Sure. So, what’s changed? Where did this new happygo-lucky Julia Morris come from?
“A friend suggested I try cognitive behavioural therapy [CBT],” she explains, cheerily. CBT is a resultsdriven school of psychotherapy that helps change habitual thought patterns and behaviour. “It saved me,” she says. “Having felt out of control, I’ve now relinquished control and I feel so much better. Who knew? It was a very quick turnaround from fury to being so much happier. I’m evangelical about it. It’s like my new religion.”
Julia’s husband, TV producer and comedian Dan Thomas, and their daughters, Ruby, 10, and Sophie, eight, have been happy about the turnaround, too.
“I’m much more patient,” she confesses, “and better at spending not just time together in the same room, but actively doing something that the girls will enjoy. A friend suggested that I ask the girls what they’d most like to do, then take each of them out of school for a day and do it. Ruby wanted us to hang at home and give each other crazy makeovers. Then she wanted to fill the bathtub with soft toys – no water – and sit in there.
“Sophie wanted to go ice-skating, which I’d never tried. I hired a big seal-shaped Zimmer frame. Can we just say it wasn’t Ice Castles.”
The most rewarding aspect of those days for Julia was seeing that “the girls didn’t want big, flashy things. They just wanted to look in my eyes and do something. It’s been amazing to reconnect properly with the family this year, rather than feeling lost and
overwhelmed by my own fury.” The scandal
The therapy also clocked in just in time to help Julia keep her cool in the face of allegations that her flirtation with I’m A Celebrity co-host, Dr Chris Brown, was sexual harassment. The allegations were made not by Dr Chris, but by a variety of tabloid, social media and FM radio commentators on a slow news day. Even so, it took a dose of CBT-infused calm for Julia to refute them without blowing a fuse.
“There were comparisons made with the young woman [sports reporter Mel McLaughlin], who was hassled by the pervy cricketer [Chris Gayle],” Julia says, aghast. “How can you draw a comparison? Dr Chris doesn’t feel put upon, he’s not scared, I don’t touch him inappropriately and I’m not in his space. He is a big, strong, smart man and I feel like I treat him with nothing but respect.
“Also, those jokes are written collaboratively. They’re written by two incredible scriptwriters [Matt Lovkis and Michael Ward] and Chris and me. Every day, it’s a party of four. If Chris found any of it offensive, he would have no trouble telling us. He’s a scientist – he’s not an idiot.”
Chris is also quick to defuse the controversy. The duo’s on-screen dynamic “is built around a deep respect for each other and an even deeper desire to surprise each other and make each other laugh,” he says.
“Julia provides this wall of energy that we ride like a wave during that 90-minute live show. You’re on your toes, throwing in turns and cut-backs, and having a ball. When we come off air, we’re not really sure how we got to where we did, but there’s been a lot of adrenaline and a lot of laughs.”
The adrenaline and laughter leaven what might otherwise be long and gruelling days in South Africa’s
Kruger National Park.
Filming involves months spent away from home and family, and “it’s not great on them”, Julia admits. “My girls understand it better now, but when they were younger, it didn’t make sense to them. We Skype every day. Sometimes, they’re more interested than others and I can’t allow myself to feel sad or hurt if they’re not missing me too much. They’re kids and they have other things going on, and I don’t want them to be unhappy. Luckily, Dan is willing to take on the home role while I’m away and keep a proper ballast.”
The hours Julia spendsnds on set don’t allow much timee for pining. She and Chris are up before 4am every morning,rning, working on scripts withth the show’s writers and their eir director, Peter Lawler, whom she describes as s “a great Svengali of hilarity”. She and Chris ris are on set by seven and then head out to the jungle to watch celebrities get up close e and personal with the wildlife. By the time Chris and Julia are delivered back to their r safari pad, the sun is setting tting behind umbrella thorn trees, wild animals have gathered at the waterholes for aperitivo hour and “we’re so empty neither of us even knows how to speak”.
“They’re brutal days and I’m not a young woman – I’m in the sheets by 7pm,” Julia quips. Yet she wouldn’t have it any other way. “The workingclass girl in me always wants to be working because I love it. I’m happy when I’m working.”
Talking politics
Julia Morris is a working-class girl from Gosford, NSW, with an impressive Irish working-class family tree. She learnt last year, while making an episode of SBS TV’s Who Do You Think You Are?, that her great-grandfather was a speechwriter for NSW Premier Jack Lang. “I always knew that I came from a big Labor family – and we’ve been outed now,” she says, laughing. More surprising was the revelation that her maternal grandfather was a member of a secret society of Irish nationalist rebels. Julia’s mother, who turned 80 last year, had never understood why the church was “heaving with people” at her fathe father’s funeral and why hi his coffin was draped in the Irish flag. ““He died young and M Mum knew very little about hi him,” says Julia. ““She thought, ‘All this for a tram conductor?’” Julia and her mother were “em “emotionally overw overwhelmed” by the r revelations.
If J Julia were to ca carry on the famil family tradition and h hatch her own revol revolution, she says, i it would be “a re revolution of k kindness”.
“People forget about kindness. They’re too busy,” she says. “Comedian Kate Langbroek once said, ‘I’m not sure what my children will turn out to be, but if I’ve raised them to be kind people, we’re on the right track.’ I’ve always remembered that.”
Julia would also like to institute a revolution of research. “Look at the state we’re in politically,” she says, sounding like a chip off the greatgrandfatherly block. “How did those people get elected? It makes me want to go into a corner and cry. We need to do research before we vote, and people who make statements at dinner parties could get a back-story, too. A revolution of kindness and research would ease our fury.”
Julia likes to keep her revolution and her comedy separate, however. “I don’t want to teach anybody anything,” she insists. “I don’t want to preach.”
She has been dabbling in some scriptwriting lately, with her close friend, Louise Siversen (Miss Looby in House Husbands and long-ago Lou Kelly in Prisoner), whom she describes as “a silky, brilliant actress” and a darned good writer. Julia isn’t ready to share too many details of the work in progress yet, but she confesses that it is well underway.
“It’s getting to a stage now where I can see it – I can see shots – so it’s exciting,” she says. “From the shape it’s taking at the moment, I think it could easily be a television series or it may even be a motion picture. The idea is strong. There are two girls at the helm and we’re two girls who have many different facets, so joining them together is lots of fun. Louise says, when she looks back at her notes, it’s like they’ve been taken by someone on acid ... It will be hilarious, but, right now, it still needs a bit more tickling.”