The Wanted star and former Strictly Come Dancing champion Jay McGuiness finds new career success away from boyband fame

Daily Mail​

2 days ago

He shot to fame as a member of boyband The Wanted in 2009.
But since the group went on hiatus a decade ago, Jay McGuiness has found success in a whole new career industry, a world away from his pop star days.
The singer, 34, was part of the band alongside Max George, Siva Kaneswaran, Tom Parker, and Nathan Sykes, which produced number one hits like Glad You Came and All Time Low.
After they disbanded in 2014, he went on to appear on Strictly Come Dancing the following year and was crowned the champion with professional dance partner Aliona Vilani.
Jay's incredible dancing talent soon opened new doors, with the musician going on to forge a career in musical theatre.
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He made his West End debut in Big The Musical, based on the 1988 film Big, and played the lead character made famous by Tom Hanks.
He then treaded the boards in Rip It Up opposite fellow boyband and Strictly stars, McFly's Harry Judd and JLS' Aston Merrygold, as well as starring in musical stage versions of Sleepless in Seatle and White Christmas.
Jay also was one of the famous faces to take a turn at starring in 2:22 A Ghost Story, while he has been starring as William Shakespeare in the UK tour of & Juliet.
He has admitted that Strictly was a 'boomerang' for him to pursue his passion for musical theatre, crediting the show for allowing him the opportunity to get on producers' radar.
He previously gushed: 'I'm so thankful I did Strictly. It's the scary things that end up being rewarding.
'Whenever I feel pretty low after a long period of time it is because I have cocooned myself away from the things that are scaring me. Then you end up feeling stagnant. Every time I have pushed myself, I have felt happy I did.'
He added: 'I loved the nine hour rehearsals with Strictly and my partner was a legend. I was lucky as a lot of people were still in soaps or had kids to go home to. But I was free as a bird and could train for as long as I wanted.
'The adrenaline you get from going on live television on Saturday it really knackers you. And the day after your exhausted. You get Sunday off to decompress then go again.'
But Jay has also begun a whole new career far away from the world of music and stage, having become a published author.
He wrote his debut fantasy novel, Blood Flowers, in February 2024, with a sequel, Poison Tides, set to be released next month.
According to Waterstones, the young adult series is 'a story of love, witchcraft, betrayal and murder', which focuses on themes of poverty, class divide and addiction.
Opening up on he came to write the book, Jay appeared on Westlife star Nicky Byrne's podcast in February, where he explained he had always loved the fantasy genre.
He said: 'They asked if I would be interested in writing an autobiography and I was like, "heck no". But fantasy was something I knew - I'd been around it for so long, I knew what I wanted to write.
'And so I guess, it was a year of me on my laptop going for it. And then we shipped it to a few different places and Scholastic is my publisher. And that is the OG publishers. They liked my draft and away they went.'
Jay explained that he had wanted to write a 'fantasy book that I would've liked to have read when I was a kid' and admitted that the story was partly inspired by his own sudden rise to stardom in The Wanted.
He said: 'It's like some kid that's in a small town, where everyone's sort of on top of you and on top of each other and they you find out you've got this magical power.
'And away you go into a world where all that stuff that used to scare you isn't scary anymore and now you meet the real big bad wolves.
'And it is parallel to me being whisked off into a boyband and meeting those music execs. I felt like a fish out of water when I was back home and now that I've seen the rest of the world, I am a fish so strongly from the water that I'm from. But with magic!'
And with his huge success in theatre and publishing, it seems that Jay has also decided to draw a line under his time in The Wanted, following the tragic death of his bandmate Tom.
The father-of-two passed away from brain cancer at the age of 33 in March 2022, after he was diagnosed with stage 4 glioblastoma in October 2020,
The Wanted released a greatest hits album in 2021 and performed a one-off show that same year, before they went on tour in early 2022, which ended just two weeks before Tom's death.
And while members Max and Siva are touring together as The Wanted 2.0, Nathan has said that he and Jay would struggle to perform without Tom.
He previously told The Sun in March: 'I'm really happy for them. They get a lot of enjoyment in performing the music and they see it as a tribute to Tom.
'I think it's really difficult imagining The Wanted as a four-piece because The Wanted has been and will only ever be a five-piece, it's difficult imagining not performing with Tom.'