Rebel Wilson, actor

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 30 June 2024

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Australian actor Rebel Wilson became an international star with a breakthrough part in the 2011 Hollywood comedy Bridesmaids, opposite Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy. She followed this up playing Fat Amy in the highly successful Pitch Perfect trilogy, which documents the fortunes of a female college acapella group.

Rebel was born in Balmain, a suburb of Sydney. Her parents bred and showed dogs, in particular beagles, and her first brush with showbusiness came when she visited television studios to watch the dogs perform in popular shows. The dogs were so successful they even had their own agents.

She studied for a combined arts and law degree and then joined the Australian Theatre for Young People. At the age of 29 she sold everything she had and left Sydney to try her luck in Hollywood where she slept on a friend’s sofa for the first few months. She gave herself a year to make it and Bridesmaids came at just the right time – she never looked back.

Rebel recently made her debut as a director with the Deb, a musical set in Australia.

DISC ONE: Just the Way You Are - Bruno Mars DISC TWO: Greatest Love of All - Whitney Houston DISC THREE: Always Look on the Bright Side of Life - Monty Python DISC FOUR: I Missed the Bus - Kris Kross DISC FIVE: We Belong - Pat Benatar DISC SIX: Let Me Entertain You - Robbie Williams DISC SEVEN: Can You Feel the Love Tonight? - Elton John DISC EIGHT: Here Comes The Sun - The Beatles

BOOK CHOICE: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl LUXURY ITEM: A bath tub and bath salts CASTAWAY'S FAVOURITE: Always Look on the Bright Side of Life - Monty Python

Presenter Lauren Laverne Producer Paula McGinley

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:04.6	Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Disks podcast.
0:08.6	Every week I ask my guest to choose the 8 tracks, book and luxury they'd want to take with them if they
0:14.3	were cast away to a desert island. And for rights reasons the music is shorter
0:19.5	than the original broadcast. I hope you enjoy listening. My cast away this week is the actor and writer Rebel Wilson.
0:48.0	She burst onto the Hollywood scene 13 years ago, stealing the show with her breakout performance in bridesmaids before
0:54.7	taking centre stage in the internationally successful pitch perfect trilogy. Her
0:59.6	comedy persona was outrageous, her confidence infectious, and her body positive attitude hailed as a
1:05.2	refreshing change on screen. She was a rebel by name, but perhaps not by nature. She grew up in the
1:11.2	suburbs of Sydney and was deputy head girl at school where her first love was mathematics.
1:16.0	She was so painfully shy, her mother dragged her to drama class in an attempt to bring her out of her shell.
1:22.0	Luckily, it worked. She says if you've got the
1:25.2	ability to make people laugh you have an inherent sense of power. Sometimes men feel
1:30.0	uncomfortable with women having that power but of course women have
1:33.7	always been funny and talented maybe that's scary. Rebel Wilson welcome to
1:38.4	Desert Island discs. Hi it's great to be here. It's great to have. So let's start with that sense of power then.
1:44.9	Can you remember the first time you realized
1:47.4	making people laugh, gave that to you?
1:51.0	The first time people laughed, I was unexpected because I didn't set out trying to be an
1:56.8	actress like the next Dame Judy Dench. And then I was in this play that was put on at the
2:01.9	Sydney Theatre Company and I thought I was playing a serious role and I came on and my first line to the other character who was called Amy was like Amy Amy
2:10.2	People just started laughing and then I tried to be even more serious and then it made people just
	...

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