logo
Holly Madison: The Girls Next Door was a little cult bubble

Holly Madison: The Girls Next Door was a little cult bubble

Perth Now06-05-2025

Holly Madison thinks 'The Girls Next Door' was a "little cult bubble".
The 45-year-old TV personality starred on the reality series between 2005 and 2009, and Holly believes 'The Girls Next Door' was a snapshot in time.
She told E! News: "I always say it's the one show you can't reboot, because it was like catching this little cult bubble in real time. And you can watch it two different ways. You can watch it for all the eye candy like the first time it came out and say, 'Oh my God, look how fun.' Or you can watch it knowing about all the stuff going on behind the scenes, and that adds a whole other layer."
The TV show focused on the lives of Holly, Bridget Marquardt and Kendra Wilkinson, who were the three main girlfriends of the late Playboy founder Hugh Hefner.
And Holly has relished the experience of reuniting with Bridget for 'Girls Next Level', their rewatch podcast.
She said: "We're going into season four now and there's just so much to talk about. It kind of takes on a whole life of its own for sure."
Meanwhile, Holly recently described season one of the show as a "character assassination".
The reality TV star believes she was initially portrayed in an unfairly negative way.
Speaking to Us Weekly, Holly explained: "The first couple of episodes, we felt like we were characterised in a way that really wasn't flattering.
"I was watching it, like, this is character assassination. I don't like it.
"But as the seasons go on, we're allowed to show more of our personality, and I think viewers got to know who we really are more - so that feels good."
Holly also admitted that herself and her 'Girls Next Level' co-host have contrasting memories of the show.
She said: "I think [Bridget] had just tied everything up in such a positive bow and had kind of forgotten any of the negatives.
"So when we go back and rewatch and comment on it, she's like, 'Oh my god, I forgot about this.' I remember after watching the first episode, she's like, 'I don't think I can do this podcast.' I'm like, 'No, it gets better. I promise.' I had already rewatched a lot of it from YouTube and that's what gave me the idea to do the podcast. And I'm like, 'Trust me, it gets better. The hardest part is season one and then it gets better."

Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Original Birkin Bag Crafted For Jane Birkin Heads to Auction
Original Birkin Bag Crafted For Jane Birkin Heads to Auction

Man of Many

time5 hours ago

  • Man of Many

Original Birkin Bag Crafted For Jane Birkin Heads to Auction

By Ben McKimm - News Published: 6 June 2025 Share Copy Link Readtime: 4 min Every product is carefully selected by our editors and experts. If you buy from a link, we may earn a commission. Learn more. For more information on how we test products, click here. Jane Birkin's original 1985 Birkin is going to auction July 10. Expected to break the Birkin price record of over USD$450,000. Custom prototype: unique size, hardware, and non-removable shoulder strap. Includes original charity auction certificate signed by Jane Birkin. Exhibited at MoMA and V&A museums before entering private collection. Likely to become the most expensive Birkin bag ever sold, Sotheby's is auctioning off the Original Birkin Crafted For Jane Birkin in 1985 at an auction on July 10th, 2025. While auction estimates are withheld, the bag will likely eclipse the USD$450,000 plus sales price of the Diamond Himalaya Birkin 30, which sold at Sotheby's in 2022. It's not often that handbags carry provenance, but this Birkin is different. The story goes that the actress was sitting alongside Jean-Louis Dumas, the French billionaire businessman who was the chairman of the Hermès group from 1978 to 2006, on an Air France flight. She complained that she couldn't find a bag big enough for daily life, so the brand designed one and asked if they could name it after her. The rest is history, as they say. Now, her original bag is headed to auction, and it carries serious provenance not just from Jane Birkin, but from those who have held onto the bag since she donated it at Millon, Paris, Les enchéres de I'espoir, Association Solidarité Sida on Wednesday, October 5, 1994, Théâtre de l'Empire. It was sold in Poulain Le Fur, Paris, on Friday, May 12 2000 (lot 70) and has sat in a private collection (and museums) ever since. The Original Birkin Crafted For Jane Birkin, 1985 | Image: Sotheby's What's interesting about this Birkin is that it's a prototype. There are key differences between this and the bag that would eventually hit the production run in 1985, including: It has the width and height of a Birkin 35, but the depth of a Birkin 40 Size : 36 x 27 x 21 cm: W It features closed pontet rings, whereas rings remained open at the bottom until the early 1990s There's gilded brass hardware, replaced by gold-plated hardware (with a check mark) at launch 'Eclair' branded inner zip, which was replaced by Riri Company in the 1990s Smaller bottom studs, or 'feet' It has a non-removable shoulder strap, the only one of its kind Not only is this bag made in a one-off custom size, but it comes in the same condition in which it was auctioned for charity by Jane Birkin. That means that you're getting a bag that was crafted for the namesake and lovingly used by the namesake until it was passed on, and it comes in the same condition as it hasn't been used since. Heck, it's even branded with her initials, J.B., and inside is the nail clipper that she kept hanging from the bag's strap. The Original Birkin Crafted For Jane Birkin, 1985 | Image: Sotheby's The Original Birkin Crafted For Jane Birkin, 1985 | Image: Sotheby's The Original Birkin Crafted For Jane Birkin, 1985 | Image: Sotheby's The Original Birkin Crafted For Jane Birkin, 1985 | Image: Sotheby's The lucky buyer will also recieve the original certificate of the charity auction 'Les Enchères de l'Espoir,' which was signed by Jane Birkin, 5 October 1994 alongside the original Hotel des Ventes du Palais auction catalogue, Poulain Le Fur, 12 Mai 2000, and exhibition catalog 'Bags Inside Out', V&A, 2020. Given the provenance of this bag, it was exhibited at the MoMA in New York for the ' Items: Is Fashion Modern?,' exhibition in 2018 before it was sent to London's Victoria and Albert Museum for the 'Bags Inside Out' exhibition in 2020. Now, it's hitting the auction block at Sotheby's on July 10th, 2025, where it will likely make history as the most expensive Birkin ever sold.

Charlie Vickers on ‘The Survivors', Building Character and Coming Home
Charlie Vickers on ‘The Survivors', Building Character and Coming Home

Man of Many

time5 hours ago

  • Man of Many

Charlie Vickers on ‘The Survivors', Building Character and Coming Home

By Dean Blake - News Published: 6 June 2025 |Last Updated: 4 June 2025 Share Copy Link Readtime: 10 min Every product is carefully selected by our editors and experts. If you buy from a link, we may earn a commission. Learn more. For more information on how we test products, click here. Charlie Vickers is on the rise. After an impressively devilish rendition of Middle-Earth's Sauron in Rings of Power, the Aussie actor is returning home to star in Netflix's The Survivors: an adaptation of Jane Harper's novel of the same name that focuses on the small, coastal town of Evelyn Bay and a series of deaths that echo through the years. In some ways, The Survivors was a particularly personal project for Vickers, who saw his own echoes in the show—a big-town man returning to his small-town roots—and who connected with the inherent Australianness of it all. Since studying acting at the College of Speech and Drama in London, Vickers has been largely living overseas, and the opportunity to return home, especially for a script he felt excited by, was too good to pass up. We caught up with Vickers ahead of The Survivors launch on Netflix on 6 June to talk though what drew him to the project, how he got started in acting, and what it was like coming back to Australia. Charlie Vickers in 'The Survivors' | Image: Netflix To start with, I wanted to get an idea of what it was about The Survivors that got you excited. What sold you on being a part of it? I love shows that adapt novels, really. The Survivors is a novel that I hadn't read, but I'd read a few other books by Jane Harper and this just sounded like a really fun adventure to be able to go on. So when I had the opportunity to potentially do it, I thought, 'It's in Tasmania, I grew up in Melbourne, but I'd somehow never been to Tasmania,' and being able to work with a whole bunch of new, amazing people and having Tony in charge of the whole project got me really excited. Also, just being able to be part of an Australian story. It's quintessentially Australian. I live in the UK now so I want to do as many Australian projects as possible, and this was such an enticing opportunity, really. The character of the town, although it's fictional, its kind of its own character in this story, and being able to film so much of it on location got me really excited. I also thought the story was interesting, and the way the script adapted the novel made me quite interested. It's quite cool seeing small-town Australia highlighted—I wanted to ask about that. Was that part of the charm for you? Is that something that reminds you of your childhood in Australia? In a way, it is . There are a huge amount of similarities between Tasmania and Victoria, and I grew up in a small coastal town exactly like . It's funny, the character of Kieran is still quite far away from who I am but he's also returning from a big city, in his case Sydney, to his childhood town, and there was a bit of familiarity there for me. I live overseas in a big city and often find myself coming back to my small, coastal town, and I think my son was about 6 months old when I was filming this, and he has a 4 month old, so there was a lot of 'world's colliding'. Having the opportunity to tell a story set in a coastal town, and you have all the dynamics . I was watching the show with my brother the other day, and he said 'god, some of these characters feel like they could be from our home town', it's crazy. Charlie Vickers in 'The Survivors' | Image: Netflix I wanted to get an idea of what you look for in a role? There's no shared characteristics of any roles , I often look for something that when I read it I get inspired, or I get excited by the idea of doing it. These roles can be completely different, but the thing they share is that I think I can bring something to the project: it has to ignite my imagination, reading it. Those kinds of jobs are few and far between, that make you excited, and this was one of those jobs. I've played quite a lot of villains in my career so far, but that's just coincidental and because of the material I've been given. How do you find your characters? When you're given a script or a treatment, how do you go about turning those words into action? For me, I try to keep it as simple as possible. I don't properly believe in the idea of 'character'. It's useful to use it in terms of referring to the character of Kieran, for example, but his 'character' is just the sum of a whole bunch of little moments. So I try not to look at things through a wide-angle lens, you know? And sometimes I watch the final product of things and find that 'oh wow, he's an entirely different person to how I had imagined him', because I tend to approach it from a moment to moment basis, and react to the circumstances he's in, and try to play to each moment truthfully, and then that paints a bigger picture of this character's life during the time period on screen. The only thing you have to be mindful of, I guess, is to think of the journey of the character throughout the show, but the specificity of each moment we see creates the 'character', I think. Charlie Vickers in 'The Survivors' | Image: Netflix Beyond being able to come back to Australia, what was the highlight of the filming process for The Survivors? There were so many. I loved being able to be in a really special place, Tasmania, that I'd never been to, with a whole bunch of amazing actors and creatives. To be able to work with these people made it an amazing experience: Actors that I've watched since I was a kid on screen. People like Damien or Robyn or Catherine and then there's this whole other amazing generation of actors like Yerin , Jess , Thom and George , and I think that's what I really love about projects. I've been really fortunate in my career in that you can just kind of go somewhere for six months and work on something and be fully immersed in the world of whatever you're doing, and then you get to move on and some of the relationships endure. That's the lasting memory of working in Tasmania : the combination of the location and the people. It was probably really good to have that filming location be somewhere you'd never been but also being very familiar in a way. Exactly, I don't know why I'd never been to Tasmania, but it really does feel different. There's an atmospheric quality to that place that is inherent, just when you're walking around. The energy there can be heavy, and I'm sure that's what Jane was trying to tap into when she wrote the novel. You mentioned earlier that you've enjoyed doing adaptations of novels, and you've done quite a few of them at this point: is there any book adaptations that you'd love to work on? I love Tim Winton's novels, and I read The Shepherds Hut recently, and also The Riders, and Eyrie, which is about a retired climate worker that lives in Freemantle, and I just think his stories are so evocatively written and I'd love to be a part of an adaptation of one of those novels on screen. I think they're pretty rarely adapted, though, and the adaptation process to take a novel to screen is often a really complex one. Those novels, when I read them, I really connected to a few of the characters and thought it'd be really cool to be a part of. I love imagining the world, that's part of the amazing thing about reading books. Charlie Vickers in 'The Survivors' | Image: Netflix You've worked in a few genres so far – is there anything you'd want to do that you haven't been given the chance to yet? It's quite a boring answer, but I'm lucky that I've been given the chance to work on bigger productions and smaller productions and things that are in pretty wildly contrasting genres that I don't really have that itch to do anything in particular. I just kind of want to work on stories that are exciting, the genre could be anything, really. If it's something that creatively inspires me, I'd be keen to do it, but there's no particular world I want to jump into anymore: which is nice, it's a nice place to be. How did you get started in acting? I did a lot of plays at school. I remember being in year 12, and I was playing Richard the 3rd in our school production of it, and it was the same year it was being done by the Melbourne Theatre Company, and Ewen Leslie was playing Richard the 3rd, and I remember going to see it and just thinking 'wow, that's so much better than what I'm doing', and thinking 'I'd love to be able to do that one day'. I remember that moment of 'wouldn't it be cool to be an actor', but then I never found it to be an accessible path. I think I was afraid. I knew you could go and audition for drama school, it just didn't seem to be a thing that was in my world, it didn't feel possible to me: getting in to a drama school and then going on to be an actor, so I didn't do it for a few years after school finished. In those intervening years I was studying a music/business degree, and while I loved uni and being around my mates and that whole period of my life, but I was really just treading water. I had no idea what I was doing, and throughout Uni I was doing amateur theatre productions. Melbourne Uni has this amazing theatre called the Union Theatre, so I did a lot of work there. Eventually, I drummed up the courage to do it, and that changed my life. I thought, maybe I should just have a go at trying for a drama school because I really didn't know what I was doing. The school I went to, the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, they come and do audition weekends in Sydney, and I decided I was going to go to it. I flew up and didn't tell anyone because I was afraid of telling people I auditioned and I didn't get in, so I did the audition over a weekend and then found out six weeks later that I'd got in, and then had to decide whether I wanted to uproot my life or did I want to wait until the end of the year and maybe try some of the Australian schools. But when you get into a drama school, it's so unlikely in the first place that I just thought I have to take this opportunity – it might not happen again. So yeah, I moved to London, and that was really the moment the direction of my life changed. The Survivors launches exclusively on Netflix on 6 June.

Nia Sanchez and Daniel Booko welcome fourth child
Nia Sanchez and Daniel Booko welcome fourth child

Perth Now

time10 hours ago

  • Perth Now

Nia Sanchez and Daniel Booko welcome fourth child

Nia Sanchez and her husband Daniel Booko have become parents for the fourth time. The Valley stars have welcomed a daughter named Adelaide Nicole - who joins elder siblings Asher, three, and one-year-old twins Isabelle and Zariah - and the couple shared the first picture of their little girl in a post on social media in which they declared they are "absolutely in love" with the new arrival. In a message posted on Instagram. they wrote: "Sweet little memories from Adelaide's first moments of life. We are absolutely in love! Birth story coming soon." The pair told Us Weekly they gave their daughter the middle name Nicole to honour Nia's mother, who shares the same name, because she's been such a huge help raising their family. Nia also revealed Adelaide's birth was much more "intimate" than her previous experiences in the delivery room. She told the publication: "The first moments with baby no. four felt so sweet and intimate. "In our previous birth experiences, we've had a lot more people in the room. And we've always had a doula. This time, it was just us with our doctor and two nurses. This birth was extra special because Danny was able to deliver the baby." The family recently moved into a new home in Santa Clarita, California and they are were unpacking at the time Adelaide arrived. Nia said: "We moved in about two and a half weeks before baby no. four arrived. We still have boxes everywhere and are not quite settled. But it feels great to have so much more space and a beautiful backyard for our children to play in." Nia went on to reveal she now feels as if their family is complete and they probably won't be having any more children. She explained: "This pregnancy definitely felt like a full circle moment for us. We had always talked about either wanting two children or four. 'When we skipped the line to three kids [after having twins], we began discussing no. four shortly after. We both come from families of four, so having four little ones of our own feels very full circle ... "I am really looking forward to watching all of my children grow up and be so close. We love creating special memories with our children and are excited to now do that as a family of six."

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into the world of global news and events? Download our app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store