Caroline Flack takes to the stage in Dublin next week for her first major acting role

Caroline Flack is better known to us all as one of the UK’s most popular TV presenters, hosting the likes of The X Factor, I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! NOW! and of course most recently, the summer reality TV hit Love Island. However, you can see a different side to the presenter in Dublin next week as she arrives in town with her new show Crazy For You in the Bord Gais Energy Theatre.
We had a chat with Caroline recently about this change in career direction and it turns out, it came about after her Strictly Come Dancing win in 2014, which she says made her want to get more involved in acting and theatre again as that is in fact where she started out.
“This is what my education was in, musical theatre, so it’s the first time I’m ACTUALLY using my qualification, I’ve never used it before, just blagged it all the other way,” she laughed.
The show is called Crazy For you, which features the music of the Gershwin brothers and stars fellow Strictly Come Dancing winner and Holby City actor Tom Chambers as Bobby, a wealthy New Yorker and long-term fiance to Flack’s character Irene. He heads off to Deadrock, Nevada on a mission to close a theatre down there, but finds himself falling for a young lady called Polly and deciding to save the theatre by putting on a show. All of which, naturally enough, Irene isn’t too happy about and quickly follows Bobby there to let him know, and she doesn’t hold back.

“I’m on Irene’s side the whole time. All her actions are justified because he [Bobby] treats her so badly!” Caroline said.
“She’s been engaged to him for five years, and he won’t commit, all she wants is some commitment, then he goes off and falls in love with the next girl he sees – and that happens all the time, when guys string you along for ages – so I’m not surprised Irene is a bit angry.”
“I’ve really started to defend her now”, she laughed. “The first time I read it, I thought she was really angry but now I’m like, yeah she should be angry!”
Caroline is enjoying the challenge, but also happy to not be taking on the lead in the production, “I’m a small part, not a big part, it was important for me to take the right part and not throw myself into it thinking ‘I can do this’ because I can’t, not yet anyway. I have to learn, like I did on telly, you start somewhere to end up where you want to be, like in any job really, you always have to work your way up, so it was important for me to find the right role.”
Acting is something Caroline is very much embracing too saying, “I really love it, you release all your inner demons through someone else, and I find the hardest part of the whole show is the bow, because that’s suddenly when you become you, and I suddenly go really self-conscious, whereas when I’m Irene, I’m fine.”
Of course we had to ask her about Love Island, and what it was like to work on one of 2017’s most watched TV shows: “It’s great, she said. “Because I’m on call for that job, it’s not like a normal job where you’ve got a certain amount of shows on certain dates – you do it for eight weeks but you’re on call the whole time. So if somebody is entering the villa, you find out that day, we don’t know what’s going to happen, like the Muggy Mike thing, it was last minute when we put him in and what an impact that made.”

Caroline, however, won’t have anything to do with Survival of the Fittest, the show that is being billed as the Winter Love Island, which according to Caroline, it is not. “I’ll be on tour when it’s on, it’s not Love Island – everyone keeps saying it’s a Winter Love Island but it’s the same production company – the same people who do the jungle as well [I’m a Celebrity].”
Entertainment.ie