Aussie TV star takes on Dancing with The Stars
'I did think: I'm 60. I can either continue down the path of more wine, more hot chips, less exercise or I can take this moment and use it as a chance to reset. Reset my body, reset my brain and bounce into my 60s with a bit of vim and vigour,' Gibney says with a laugh.
Despite her enthusiasm, Gibney, best known for her role as Julie Rafter on Packed To The Rafters, admits walking into the rehearsal studio on that first day — having recently recovered from a bout of COVID-19 and carrying a little extra weight following a UK holiday — was a little intimidating. She says before the show, her dancing experience was limited to 'a few jazz ballet classes as a kid'.
'My (dance) partner was the reigning champion so the first thing I said to him was 'lower your expectations. mate!',' she says. 'He just said to me 'we're going to go very slowly'.
'It was much more of a physical and mental challenge than I was expecting.
'I did sort of beat myself up a bit wishing that I'd gotten a bit fitter prior, because I was probably about 20-30 years older than most of the others,'
The others in Gibney's 2025 cohort of the popular competition show include Olympians Harry Garside and Susie O'Neill, Comedians Felicity Ward and Shaun Micallef, and a collection of familiar faces from across Australian news, sport and entertainment including Osher Gunsberg, Trent Cotchin, Michael Usher, Karina Carvalho, Brittany Hockley, Mia Fevola, and Kyle Shilling.
'Most of them I was meeting for the first time and that's the best thing that's come out of this whole experience, the relationships that I have formed,' Gibney says. Rebecca Gibney. Credit: Nicholas Wilson
'It becomes such a tight-knit family. and because you are going through something random and weird that no one else would quite understand, it really bonds you quite quickly.
'And we were all from such different walks of life. There was the beautiful Susie O'Neill, who has won a gajillion gold medals in the swimming pool, but as soon as she got on the dance floor she was like the rest of us, completely out of her comfort zone.
'And Michael Usher who has been a news reader for 27 years and completely in control, but the minute he got out on the dance floor, he turned to jelly. So it was amazing to have the same experience and be able to share it with these people.'
Dancing With The Stars isn't the only new challenge Gibney has set herself this year. Next month she is starring in the Sydney Theatre Company production Circle Mirror Transformation, the first time she has done any theatre work in 23 years.
'My first thought is to go 'it's terrifying', but my son keeps going: 'Mum, nerves and fear and excitement are the same emotion, so flip it',' she says.
There seems to be a lot of advice being traded in the Gibney family. Her son, Zac Bell, made headlines last year when he gave a speech about his mum at the Logies when she was inducted into the Hall of Fame. Bell has recently finished up at drama school in New Zealand and is set to move to Sydney to follow in his mother's footsteps in the acting world.
'My biggest advice to him, because he has been auditioning a lot, and hasn't got as many roles as he obviously would like — he's had a couple of small ones, but he's had a few knock backs — and I've just said: 'Darling, you've always got to remember that what is for you will not pass by. That if it is meant for you, it will come',' Gibney says.
For Gibney, what was meant for her in 2025 was Dancing With The Stars, and no doubt many people will be cheering the unlikely contender on.
Dancing With The Stars is on Sunday, June 15, at 7pm on Channel 7 and 7Plus.
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Those fixations make Aster, a master of nightmare and farce, uniquely suited to capturing the current American moment. Eddington, which A24 is opening in selected Australian cinemas on August 21, may be the most prominent American movie yet to explicitly wrestle with social and political division in the United States. In a showdown between Joaquin Phoenix's bumbling right-wing sheriff and Pedro Pascal's elitist liberal mayor, arguments over mask mandates, Black Lives Matter protests and elections spiral into a demented Western fever dream. At a time when our movie screens are filled with escapism and nostalgia, Eddington dares to diagnose something frightfully contemporary. Aster, in a recent interview at an East Village coffee shop he frequents, said he couldn't imagine avoiding it. "To not be talking about it is insane," he said. "I'm desperate for work that's wrestling with this moment because I don't know where we are. I've never been here before," says Aster. "I have projects that I've been planning for a long time. They make less sense to me right now. I don't know why I would make those right now." Eddington, appropriately enough, has been divisive. Since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Aster's film has had one of the most polarising receptions of the year among critics. Even in Cannes, Aster seemed to grasp its mixed response. "I don't know what you think," he told the crowd. Some critics have suggested Aster's film is too satirical of the left. "Despite a pose of satirical neutrality, he mainly seems to want to score points off mask-wearers, young progressives, anti-racists and other targets beloved of reactionaries," The New Yorker's Justin Chang wrote. For The New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote: "Aster knows how to grab your attention, but if he thinks he's saying something about America, the joke is on him." Aster was expecting a divisive reaction. But he disputes some of the discourse around Eddington. "I heard one person say it was harder on the left than the right, and I think that's pretty disingenuous," he says. "In the film, one side is kind of annoying and frustrating and hypocritical, and the other side is killing people and destroying lives." For Aster, satirising the left doesn't mean he doesn't share their beliefs. "If there's no self-reflection," he says, "how are we ever going to get out of this?" Aster began writing Eddington in June 2020. He set it in New Mexico, where his family moved when he was 10. Aster wanted to try to capture the disconnect that didn't start with the pandemic but then reached a surreal crescendo. He styled Eddington as a Western with smartphones in place of guns - though there are definitely guns, too. "The dread I was living with suddenly intensified. And to be honest, I've been living with that level of dread ever since," Aster says. "I just wanted to see if I could capture what was in the air." Scripts that dive headlong into politics are far from regular in today's corporate Hollywood. Most studios would be unlikely to distribute a film like Eddington, though A24, the indie powerhouse, has stood behind Aster even after 2023's $35 million Beau Is Afraid struggled at the box office. A24 has shown a willingness to engage with political discord, backing last year's speculative war drama, Civil War. And Aster's screenplay resonated with Phoenix, who had starred in Beau Is Afraid, and with Pascal. In Cannes, Pascal noted that "it's very scary to participate in a movie that speaks to issues like this". For Phoenix, Eddington offered clarity and empathy for the pandemic experience. "We were all terrified and we didn't fully understand it. And instead of reaching out to each other in those moments, we kind of became antagonistic toward each other and self-righteous and certain of our position," Phoenix said. "And in some ways it's so obvious: Well, that's not going to be helpful." Since Aster made Eddington - it was shot in 2024 - the second administration of President Donald Trump has ushered in a new political reality that Aster acknowledges would have reshaped his film. "I would have made the movie more obscene," he says. "And I would have made it angrier. I think the film is angry. But I think we're living in a time of total obscenity, beyond anything I've seen." Eddington is designed to be argued over. Even those who find its first half well-observed may recoil at the violent absurdism of its second half. The movie, Aster says, pivots midway and, itself, becomes paranoid and gripped by differing world views. You can almost feel Aster struggling to bring any coherence to his, and our, modern-day Western. But whatever you make of Eddington, you might grant it's vitally important that we have more films like it - movies that don't tiptoe around today in period-film metaphor or avoid it like the plague. Aster, at least, doesn't sound finished with what he started. "I'm feeling very heartbroken about where we are, and totally lost, so I'm looking for ways to go into those feelings but also to challenge them. What can be done?" Aster asks. "Because this is a movie about people who are unreachable to each other and completely siloed off ... a question that kept coming to me was: What would an olive branch look like? How do we find a way to re-engage with each other?" A post-it note sat near Ari Aster while he wrote Eddington: "Remember the phones." Eddington may be set during the pandemic but the onset of COVID-19 isn't its inciting incident. Outside the fictional New Mexico town, a data centre is being built. Inside Eddington, its residents - their brains increasingly addled by the internet, social media, smartphones and whatever is ominously emanating from that data centre - are growing increasingly detached from one another, and from each other's sense of reality. "We're living in such a weird time and we forget how weird it is," Aster says. "Things have been weird ever since we were able to carry the internet on our person. Ever since we began living in the internet, things have gotten weirder and weirder. "It's important to keep reminding ourselves: This is weird." Moviegoers have grown accustomed to expecting a lack of normalcy in Aster's movies. His first three films - Hereditary, Midsommar, Beau Is Afraid - have vividly charted strange new pathways of dread and deep-rooted anxiety. Those fixations make Aster, a master of nightmare and farce, uniquely suited to capturing the current American moment. Eddington, which A24 is opening in selected Australian cinemas on August 21, may be the most prominent American movie yet to explicitly wrestle with social and political division in the United States. In a showdown between Joaquin Phoenix's bumbling right-wing sheriff and Pedro Pascal's elitist liberal mayor, arguments over mask mandates, Black Lives Matter protests and elections spiral into a demented Western fever dream. At a time when our movie screens are filled with escapism and nostalgia, Eddington dares to diagnose something frightfully contemporary. Aster, in a recent interview at an East Village coffee shop he frequents, said he couldn't imagine avoiding it. "To not be talking about it is insane," he said. "I'm desperate for work that's wrestling with this moment because I don't know where we are. I've never been here before," says Aster. "I have projects that I've been planning for a long time. They make less sense to me right now. I don't know why I would make those right now." Eddington, appropriately enough, has been divisive. Since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Aster's film has had one of the most polarising receptions of the year among critics. Even in Cannes, Aster seemed to grasp its mixed response. "I don't know what you think," he told the crowd. Some critics have suggested Aster's film is too satirical of the left. "Despite a pose of satirical neutrality, he mainly seems to want to score points off mask-wearers, young progressives, anti-racists and other targets beloved of reactionaries," The New Yorker's Justin Chang wrote. For The New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote: "Aster knows how to grab your attention, but if he thinks he's saying something about America, the joke is on him." Aster was expecting a divisive reaction. But he disputes some of the discourse around Eddington. "I heard one person say it was harder on the left than the right, and I think that's pretty disingenuous," he says. "In the film, one side is kind of annoying and frustrating and hypocritical, and the other side is killing people and destroying lives." For Aster, satirising the left doesn't mean he doesn't share their beliefs. "If there's no self-reflection," he says, "how are we ever going to get out of this?" Aster began writing Eddington in June 2020. He set it in New Mexico, where his family moved when he was 10. Aster wanted to try to capture the disconnect that didn't start with the pandemic but then reached a surreal crescendo. He styled Eddington as a Western with smartphones in place of guns - though there are definitely guns, too. "The dread I was living with suddenly intensified. And to be honest, I've been living with that level of dread ever since," Aster says. "I just wanted to see if I could capture what was in the air." Scripts that dive headlong into politics are far from regular in today's corporate Hollywood. Most studios would be unlikely to distribute a film like Eddington, though A24, the indie powerhouse, has stood behind Aster even after 2023's $35 million Beau Is Afraid struggled at the box office. A24 has shown a willingness to engage with political discord, backing last year's speculative war drama, Civil War. And Aster's screenplay resonated with Phoenix, who had starred in Beau Is Afraid, and with Pascal. In Cannes, Pascal noted that "it's very scary to participate in a movie that speaks to issues like this". For Phoenix, Eddington offered clarity and empathy for the pandemic experience. "We were all terrified and we didn't fully understand it. And instead of reaching out to each other in those moments, we kind of became antagonistic toward each other and self-righteous and certain of our position," Phoenix said. "And in some ways it's so obvious: Well, that's not going to be helpful." Since Aster made Eddington - it was shot in 2024 - the second administration of President Donald Trump has ushered in a new political reality that Aster acknowledges would have reshaped his film. "I would have made the movie more obscene," he says. "And I would have made it angrier. I think the film is angry. But I think we're living in a time of total obscenity, beyond anything I've seen." Eddington is designed to be argued over. Even those who find its first half well-observed may recoil at the violent absurdism of its second half. The movie, Aster says, pivots midway and, itself, becomes paranoid and gripped by differing world views. You can almost feel Aster struggling to bring any coherence to his, and our, modern-day Western. But whatever you make of Eddington, you might grant it's vitally important that we have more films like it - movies that don't tiptoe around today in period-film metaphor or avoid it like the plague. Aster, at least, doesn't sound finished with what he started. "I'm feeling very heartbroken about where we are, and totally lost, so I'm looking for ways to go into those feelings but also to challenge them. What can be done?" Aster asks. "Because this is a movie about people who are unreachable to each other and completely siloed off ... a question that kept coming to me was: What would an olive branch look like? How do we find a way to re-engage with each other?" A post-it note sat near Ari Aster while he wrote Eddington: "Remember the phones." Eddington may be set during the pandemic but the onset of COVID-19 isn't its inciting incident. Outside the fictional New Mexico town, a data centre is being built. Inside Eddington, its residents - their brains increasingly addled by the internet, social media, smartphones and whatever is ominously emanating from that data centre - are growing increasingly detached from one another, and from each other's sense of reality. "We're living in such a weird time and we forget how weird it is," Aster says. "Things have been weird ever since we were able to carry the internet on our person. Ever since we began living in the internet, things have gotten weirder and weirder. "It's important to keep reminding ourselves: This is weird." Moviegoers have grown accustomed to expecting a lack of normalcy in Aster's movies. His first three films - Hereditary, Midsommar, Beau Is Afraid - have vividly charted strange new pathways of dread and deep-rooted anxiety. Those fixations make Aster, a master of nightmare and farce, uniquely suited to capturing the current American moment. Eddington, which A24 is opening in selected Australian cinemas on August 21, may be the most prominent American movie yet to explicitly wrestle with social and political division in the United States. In a showdown between Joaquin Phoenix's bumbling right-wing sheriff and Pedro Pascal's elitist liberal mayor, arguments over mask mandates, Black Lives Matter protests and elections spiral into a demented Western fever dream. At a time when our movie screens are filled with escapism and nostalgia, Eddington dares to diagnose something frightfully contemporary. Aster, in a recent interview at an East Village coffee shop he frequents, said he couldn't imagine avoiding it. "To not be talking about it is insane," he said. "I'm desperate for work that's wrestling with this moment because I don't know where we are. I've never been here before," says Aster. "I have projects that I've been planning for a long time. They make less sense to me right now. I don't know why I would make those right now." Eddington, appropriately enough, has been divisive. Since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Aster's film has had one of the most polarising receptions of the year among critics. Even in Cannes, Aster seemed to grasp its mixed response. "I don't know what you think," he told the crowd. Some critics have suggested Aster's film is too satirical of the left. "Despite a pose of satirical neutrality, he mainly seems to want to score points off mask-wearers, young progressives, anti-racists and other targets beloved of reactionaries," The New Yorker's Justin Chang wrote. For The New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote: "Aster knows how to grab your attention, but if he thinks he's saying something about America, the joke is on him." Aster was expecting a divisive reaction. But he disputes some of the discourse around Eddington. "I heard one person say it was harder on the left than the right, and I think that's pretty disingenuous," he says. "In the film, one side is kind of annoying and frustrating and hypocritical, and the other side is killing people and destroying lives." For Aster, satirising the left doesn't mean he doesn't share their beliefs. "If there's no self-reflection," he says, "how are we ever going to get out of this?" Aster began writing Eddington in June 2020. He set it in New Mexico, where his family moved when he was 10. Aster wanted to try to capture the disconnect that didn't start with the pandemic but then reached a surreal crescendo. He styled Eddington as a Western with smartphones in place of guns - though there are definitely guns, too. "The dread I was living with suddenly intensified. And to be honest, I've been living with that level of dread ever since," Aster says. "I just wanted to see if I could capture what was in the air." Scripts that dive headlong into politics are far from regular in today's corporate Hollywood. Most studios would be unlikely to distribute a film like Eddington, though A24, the indie powerhouse, has stood behind Aster even after 2023's $35 million Beau Is Afraid struggled at the box office. A24 has shown a willingness to engage with political discord, backing last year's speculative war drama, Civil War. And Aster's screenplay resonated with Phoenix, who had starred in Beau Is Afraid, and with Pascal. In Cannes, Pascal noted that "it's very scary to participate in a movie that speaks to issues like this". For Phoenix, Eddington offered clarity and empathy for the pandemic experience. "We were all terrified and we didn't fully understand it. And instead of reaching out to each other in those moments, we kind of became antagonistic toward each other and self-righteous and certain of our position," Phoenix said. "And in some ways it's so obvious: Well, that's not going to be helpful." Since Aster made Eddington - it was shot in 2024 - the second administration of President Donald Trump has ushered in a new political reality that Aster acknowledges would have reshaped his film. "I would have made the movie more obscene," he says. "And I would have made it angrier. I think the film is angry. But I think we're living in a time of total obscenity, beyond anything I've seen." Eddington is designed to be argued over. Even those who find its first half well-observed may recoil at the violent absurdism of its second half. The movie, Aster says, pivots midway and, itself, becomes paranoid and gripped by differing world views. You can almost feel Aster struggling to bring any coherence to his, and our, modern-day Western. But whatever you make of Eddington, you might grant it's vitally important that we have more films like it - movies that don't tiptoe around today in period-film metaphor or avoid it like the plague. Aster, at least, doesn't sound finished with what he started. "I'm feeling very heartbroken about where we are, and totally lost, so I'm looking for ways to go into those feelings but also to challenge them. What can be done?" Aster asks. "Because this is a movie about people who are unreachable to each other and completely siloed off ... a question that kept coming to me was: What would an olive branch look like? How do we find a way to re-engage with each other?"
