‘I’m one of the normal ones’
This Morning presenter Rylan Clark-Neal, 31, on fronting a new fashion makeover series – and making folk cry…
Tell us about your new series?
It’s emotional. People come on because they don’t know what clothes to wear. We had a longrunning joke that I just make people cry. I felt terrible by the end of it, but obviously, they’re crying in a good way…
Do you enjoy working with real people?
OMG, yeah. Give me real people any day of the week. I’m one of the normal ones – I don’t get affected by any of [the fame], so when I’m with the people we’ve got on the show, I love it. I don’t feel like I’m at work, and you don’t realise how much an outfit can change someone.
You’re very ‘real’ too?
On all the jobs I do, I’m just Rylan. When the cameras stop rolling, I don’t. It’s not like, ‘Cut!’ then
I’m gone. People get on with me because they know I’m not an ar*ehole.
Did this make you think about your own fashion disasters? Weirdly enough, my old X Factor stylist Nana Acheampong is on the show’s ‘Style Squad’. One of my main fashion regrets is Nana’s fault – from The X Factor live shows, when Chanel sent me a gold chain mail vest to wear. It was ridiculously heavy, and after I’d performed, I was thinking, ‘God, I feel wet!’. It turned out to be actual blood, as it had sliced off both of my nipples. Now, it’s got to be extremely cold to get a little bit of nipple from me…
Have you forgiven Nana for that? Well, no. I did try and shave her head in her sleep, but…
What’s your ‘go to’ outfit?
I’m very samey with what I wear. A pair of black skinny fits is literally me. Every show I host, everywhere I go, it’s a black pair of skinny fits.
Everyone wants to work with you now – but when you first did The X Factor, you said you felt like the most hated man in Britain? When I first started out, it was either me on the front page of the tabloids or Jimmy Savile, and I don’t know who got the worst f***king headlines at one point. It was awful, but I played the game and I played it well. I knew exactly what I was doing on The X Factor and I knew I was going into Celebrity Big Brother [in January 2013]. I thought, ‘I’ll show everyone that I’m normal and not this Drag Queenwannabe’. Now, everyone’s like, ‘Oh God, you’ve really changed,’ but no – I’ve literally not
Caption changed, I’ve just grown up. in here
Is please Twitter still sometimes mean? On Twitter, you still get the odd ar*ehole. You’ll still get people going, ‘Oh, you’re talentless’.
I’m like, ‘True. But I’m rich!’ But I don’t believe in the block button. I like to live in the real world and see people call me talentless, or say my teeth are too big, or that I’m too orange. Again, all true, but I quite like that.
Does it help keep you grounded? It just reminds me that not everyone likes me. It’s quite easy in this industry to feel like a star. I could walk out of doing this interview, put on a pair of sunglasses and think I’m Madonna. But it’s not real.