The last time Brooke Jowett was on our screens, she was competing on Australian Survivor: All Stars in 2020, where she placed fourth. Two and a half years, one pandemic and what feels like a lifetime later, Jowett is about to return to television as she embarks on a whole new challenge, in The Challenge Australia.
Chatting to The Latch over the phone ahead of the show’s November 14 premiere, Jowett caught us up on everything she’s been doing since we last saw her on All Stars.
“It’s actually been such a busy few years for me, but all amazing things,” she gushed.
Following her last run on Australian Survivor, Jowett was able to quit her full-time role in advertising and pursue a new business opportunity.
“I started my own sustainable activewear line, which has been keeping me very busy!” Jowett said, adding: “It was obviously great post-show, because it helped a lot.”
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Her brand, JRSY, is based in Melbourne and creates activewear “using organic and/or recycled fabrics”, per the company’s website.
“We are dedicated to doing our part to eliminate plastic and textile pollution for future generations,” the site adds.
Jowett also began dating her partner, Chris Cavanagh, and as of October 9, the pair are engaged.
“It’s all very exciting, we’ve just bought a house,” Jowett said. “It’s all adult stuff, recently, which I mean, it’s not as fun as the old me but it’s all very exciting!”
She laughed. “I feel like I’m getting old now, but it’s all very exciting,” she said.
Although the couple “keep saying” that they’re planning to take things slow and enjoy their time as a betrothed couple, Jowett admitted that she’s “already booked all [her] appointments to go get dresses and all of that”.
“I’m too excited and impatient!” she exclaimed with a laugh.
With a reputation as a challenge beast from her time on Australian Survivor, her own activewear brand and a background in personal training, Jowett was “pretty confident with how [she’d] perform” in the challenges, but she still went the extra mile to prepare for the series.
“From watching the American series, I know how much running there is if you make it to the finale, so I was like ‘okay, I need to work on my cardio and my running’, so I upped that quite a bit,” she said. “But aside from that, I didn’t change too much, which I think is a good thing, because I kind of felt like myself going in.”
On the show, though, Jowett soon realised the difference between the challenges on Australian Survivor compared to The Challenge Australia.
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“I must say, the challenges are quite different from Survivor,” she said. “What I was good at on Survivor was those like, long endurance challenges where you have to stand on a pole for hours, or something like that, whereas this was like, you’re constantly moving, really intense challenges. So it was different!”
Asked whether her experience on Australian Survivor gave her a competitive edge over some of the other contestants, Jowett said that actually, she was worried that her reputation would put a target on her back from the jump.
“I went in being like ‘oh God, I am going to be targeted’,” she recalled, “because all of these forums and chats and things that were all over Google were like ‘bring on the challenge beast Brooke!’ and I was like ‘shut up, guys! Stop saying that!’”
She laughed. “I was like, people are gonna read this and they’re gonna come in swinging for me!”
Thankfully for Jowett, there were some professional athletes, like Olympian Emily Seebohm and professional boxers Billy Dib and Sugar Neekz Johnson, to take the heat off.
“It helped me that there were olympic champions in there and stuff like that, because not everyone was looking at me the whole time,” she said. “Everyone was complaining that they were in there but I was like ‘YES! This is great, distract them!’”
The Challenge Australia premieres at 7.30pm on Monday, November 14, only on 10 and 10 Play on Demand.
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