‘Everyone thought I’d end up in jail’
What motivates fitness guru Joe Wicks to live at a pace that would drive most of us over the edge of exhaustion? He tells Boudicca Fox-Leonard how his chaotic upbringing made him the man he is today
“What’s this interview for again?” comes the unstarry voice of the nation’s favourite PE teacher. “The TV show? OK,” says Joe Wicks, obliged for the reminder.
We’re in a discreet riverside hotel in Richmond for a photo shoot and interview. It’s three months before the documentary he’s filmed for BBC One airs, and he’s deep in promotion for his latest recipe book, Feel Good Food. Also competing for his attention are the hundreds of fans who message him on social media daily; he spends hours every day responding to their messages. Yesterday, he filmed six workouts, plus a live session for Instagram. I’m not surprised Wicks needs a little help getting into gear for our conversation, but true to HIIT form he shifts very quickly.
“You’re one of the first people to see it – what did you think?”
There’s a pause. He seems genuinely interested in what I thought about Joe Wicks: Facing my Childhood. Being a good listener, I am to learn, is both his superpower and his kryptonite, which often leaves him teetering on the edge of burnout.
Today is a light work day for Wicks, though he was still up at 6am for a 30-minute Peloton session. He’s had a nice long lunch, arriving at our shoot 15 minutes late and apologetic. However, he’s a tad softer around the edges than the tiggerish “Body Coach” who sprang to fame in 2014, extolling the virtues of “midget trees” in his Lean in 15 videos.
While still in better shape than your average Joe, there’s clearly been a shift in focus in what he considers his health priorities; less about gym-honed sculpting and more feeling happy in himself.
The trademark chestnut ringlets are unchanged – perhaps in need of a little product – but after trying and failing to smooth it down for the shoot, Wicks declares: “Big hair, don’t care”.
By a total coincidence, the hotel is where he and wife Rosie, a former model, had their first date after meeting at a rave. “We were walking along the river when I asked her to be my girlfriend,” Wicks declares in his natural open-hearted way.
They’re now married and settled in a modern house in the exclusive Virginia Water area of Surrey. Rosie is expecting their third child. And Wicks’s world clearly revolves around their first two: Indie, three, and Marley, two.
It’s very different to the home he grew up in, on a council estate in Epsom 20 miles away. Bigger, for one thing.
“We really were a family living under each other’s feet.”
What both households have in common, though, is being full of love. I find myself surprised to hear him talk about his childhood like that, given that we’re here to discuss the remarkable challenges he faced at home. By his own admission, his childhood, which he explores in the documentary, was “mad and chaotic”, but he insists he and his brothers always felt loved: “Our mother taught us to be kind.”
The madness and chaos refers to his parents’ mental health. His father, Gary, a roofer, was a heroin addict who went through periods of being clean and long stints using. Wicks could tell he had taken something if he returned home “spaced out” on the sofa. His mother Raquela, meanwhile, suffered from OCD and disordered eating.
That he is willing to share so much about his difficult childhood was motivated out of desire to connect with young people who might be going through something similar. “Especially after the effect the pandemic has had on a lot of adults’ mental health.”
This interview is the first time he’s talked about the process of putting his experience on camera. Which is why
‘It was emotional. I’d come home in the evening so drained because I was crying every day’
he’s so keen to know what I thought.
“Did you find it uplifting?” he asks. His brown brows furrow.
I did, sort of. But more than anything I was simply amazed that he has grown into such an apparently well-balanced adult. There has been no therapy. And yet he has the aura of someone who has very much “done the work”. He bears no resentment towards his parents. In fact, he’s close enough to both of them that they agreed to take part in the documentary, talking about subjects the family had never discussed openly before.
The fact that they were brave enough to make the documentary, he says, was down to the trust he had in the producer, Louis Theroux. Still, filming was an intense experience, he admits. “I’m proud of it as a piece of content, but I don’t think I need to go back there. It’s a one-shot. That story has been told now,” he says, clearly hoping the film will draw a line under the exploration of his childhood.
It had been his plan originally to investigate the mental health of families across the UK. “I could talk about exercise and sleep and food and shine a light on that,” he says. But as filming progressed, unresolved conversations from his own past came to the fore. Suppressed memories, such as sitting on the stairs digging a hole with a screwdriver in frustration, bubbled up.
Perhaps it was naive of him not to realise he would become the ultimate focus. As Wicks interviews his parents, you can sense it dawning on him that he is the one in the spotlight. Watching the documentary, you can see how nervous he is. There’s none of the bravado fans of his workouts will be used to.
Filming only took place for up to four hours a day: “But every day it was emotional. I’d come home in the evening so drained because I was crying every day.” Realising just how much he had blocked out, including the time his mother went into rehab for five months (“It felt like two weeks”), hit him hard. Maybe he had underestimated the amount of trauma he had experienced.
The BBC did offer him a psychiatrist, but he never went. Instead, he says, whenever he’s felt the need to talk, he’s spoken to his family: wife Rosie, and his older brother Nikki, who’s been by his side in life and business and is CEO of the Body Coach empire.
With another production company, he might have felt he was being exploited, fodder for yet more tabloid headlines, but he had total confidence in Theroux and his team. After all, the Weird Weekends star was not only a childhood hero of Wicks’s, but the feeling of respect was mutual.
“Louis did every one of my ‘PE with Joe’ workouts during lockdown,” says Wicks. “He didn’t miss a single one.”
After Theroux posted about it on social media, they started chatting. It was when Theroux revealed how surprised he was by Wicks’s Desert Island Discs episode that the wheels were put in motion.
“He said he hadn’t realised there was more to me than this guy who’s a trainer and has this nice house and great life,” says Wicks. Theroux was surprised that the relentlessly upbeat Wicks had had such a tough start. And yet it precisely that which has shaped him and, arguably, driven him to be the success he is today: in 2021, he reportedly made more than £9million in just one week after thousands of subscribers signed up to his new app.
Without all the trauma of his childhood, would the Body Coach have existed? “Definitely not.”
Not that it wasn’t a close-run thing. He was by his own admission disruptive at school. “I was cocky and lairy.” There was no exploration of what his home life was like; no attempt was made to understand why he was acting out. “Back then you were just seen as a naughty kid and put in detention, and that was it.”
Exercise proved his salvation. He would run to and from school, burning up excess energy and boosting his mood.
There’s a scene in the documentary where he has a pint in the pub with an old friend, who had a similar background and ended up taking drugs. It’s a moment where viewers can see how easily the success of the Body Coach might never have happened. However, neither Wicks nor Nikki have ever touched drugs.
His other brother George, who is 10 years younger, was just a baby around the time the documentary explores and has had his battles with addiction. “He’s struggled, but Nikki and I just stayed clear of it. We were so frightened of it.”
Nikki, who Wicks sees every day, is notably absent from the documentary (while he supported filming, he prefers to stay out of the limelight), save for one scene where Wicks, sitting outside the tiny house they grew up in, calls him to verify the repressed memory of Wicks’s destructive behaviour around the house.
Nikki is as much a part of Wicks’s business life as his emotional life. He looked out for him as a boy, and he was the person who helped the young personal trainer with a few Facebook posts. Today he works behind the scenes; the lynchpin driving the Body Coach’s growth, and the person Wicks will take to Windsor Castle when he collects his MBE, two weeks after we meet.
That stark contrast – a future that leads towards a palace rather than, say, a prison – is why, Wicks says, he gets emotional talking about their childhood. “Because we had no one cheering us on. Everyone really thought we were ‘wrong’, that we were going to be in and out of prison, that we weren’t going to make anything of our lives. When I think about what we achieved, that’s why we are so proud of each other.”
Right now, Wicks likens the growth of the Body Coach brand to being attached to a rocket. “We’re both hanging on and just trying to keep it going.”
He was planning to drop in on the Richmond HQ after our shoot, but it turns out Nikki is busy with meetings. The news is greeted with brotherly concern. “I’ve told him to take time off,” he frowns. “I really care about his health and his relationship with his kids. I don’t want him to end up saying, ‘Wow, there are millions of people doing our workouts, but I’ve missed the kids growing up.’”
Burnout is a real concern for both of them. “Days like yesterday,” when he did seven workouts, “I feel like instant burnout. But then I get days like today.” I can’t imagine talking to me is very relaxing, and I note that between photographs he’s on his phone, clearly responding to messages from his followers. Not all simple fan mail; they’re often dark cries of despair. And at the beginning of the documentary, scenes shot last year clearly show what a toll that takes. “Sometimes I don’t want to be the Body Coach,” he tells the camera, holding back tears of exhaustion.
At that point he was spending nine hours a day on his phone responding to messages on his social media feeds. Now he has got it down to six hours. For him it’s a positive step, however inconceivable that might be to the rest of us.
At one point he was spending nine hours a day responding to social media messages
‘There are days when I don’t want to do it. I just want to be with my kids, like a normal dad’
It’s claimed back more time for Rosie and the kids. When he and Rosie watch TV together at night now, the mobile is left at the door. Before, he says, it was like having thousands of other people in the room.
Yes, there are times when he doesn’t want the responsibility: “I carry so much energy for so many people. I deliver workouts, but the emotional stuff, the DMs, the stories that I share I know have a big effect on behaviours and what people do in a day. And there are days when I don’t want to do it. I want to be a guy who doesn’t live on his phone and just be with my kids, like a normal dad.”
Does he think he’s a people-pleaser? “I am, but in a positive way. It fills my cup up, too.”
His highly-tuned powers of empathy stem from his childhood. While at times he would feel angry at his father’s “selfishness” he grew to understand that what his dad needed was unconditional love. “I am who I am because I’ve got empathy, because I’ve been through that.”
He hopes that the documentary also shows that “you can take trauma and stress at home and turn it into positive things”.
That Indie and Marley have a safe, wonderful home, where there’s no shouting and “no police knocking on the door,” feels odd, he confesses. “I imagine them being like me – I couldn’t put them through it,” he says. The Wicks family is “boring and ordinary” and that’s how he likes it.
He and Rosie are big fans of Succession, the TV show about a dysfunctional family vying to inherit the family business. Could other monsters lurk in the shadows of his success? Does he ever wonder how growing up rich, without the struggle he had, will be for his kids?
“My worst fear is kids who are just lazy, who are just thinking, ‘Daddy’s got a few quid’,” admits Wicks.
“I want my kids to be ambitious and to do something good with their lives. But also if Indie wants to work in a hairdressers or anything, I’ll be happy for her. I don’t have this thing that my kids have to be entrepreneurs and have their own business. I know they’re not necessarily going to have that real natural hunger and drive.”
It was never about money or fame, though, he is at pains to point out. Whether it was an early-morning PT session to a tiny group, or holding the Guinness World Record for the biggest ever mass workout, held in Hyde Park, it was always about the buzz he got from other people. That ability he has to connect with people is, he says, his “superpower”.
“People open up to me in a way that is so wonderful, but I do think, ‘Why are they messaging me about this, why are they not talking to their wife or kids?’ Maybe it’s easier when it’s a stranger listening. And I am a good listener.”
The mental health side of wellbeing is where he sees his future. There’s clearly some fatigue with being the physical embodiment of the brand. And Nikki is working behind the scenes to bring on other coaches who can take the pressure off Wicks having to lead all the workouts. In time, they hope it will become a platform for mental, as much as physical, health.
What exercise means to him has come full circle. In his late teens and early 20s it wavered as he pursued a strong and lean shape, but now how he looks isn’t a priority. A month after our interview he posts on Instagram showing off his “flabby belly” and opening up about emotional eating. It’s the kind of authenticity that feels vital if he’s to evolve beyond the slightly reductive before and after photos that kickstarted his career. And he acknowledges that the message telling people to exercise to lose weight isn’t very nice. “But telling someone to exercise to feel happy and less stressed, that’s a lovely message.”
He is bracing himself for the tsunami of messages he will receive when the documentary airs. “I’ll need to be on the moon,” he quips, adding, “I’m going to have to be ready and accept that I can’t help everyone.”
If it all ended tomorrow, though, he says he’d be all right.
“I’ve got my family and the kids. It’s a huge thing, my career, but it’s not the only thing that gives me happiness.”
Our interview ends. He’s due back home to make dinner and put the kids to bed. The perfect end to any day, heavy or light. Nothing would make him miss the kids’ bedtime story. “My own family was together, apart, together – but all you want as a kid is stability.”
Joe Wicks: Facing My Childhood will air on May 16, 9pm on BBC One and iPlayer. Feel Good Food (HQ HarperCollins) is available from books.telegraph.co.uk