Funny, down-to-earth and talented – Emily Atack has always seemed like a girl you could easily while away a Sunday afternoon with over a few drinks in the pub. 

Atack is perhaps best known for playing Charlotte in the hit Channel 4 series The Inbetweeners and, of course, for winning I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! in 2017. And most recently, the actor and comedian has returned to our screens as a team captain on Celebrity Juice and presenting her own ITV 2 series The Emily Atack Show. 

But Atack has just talked about exactly what she has had to overcome in her career to get to this point – and a lot of women will no-doubt relate to her words. 

Speaking to Alison Hammond on the My Life in TV podcast, Atack discussed where she was in her life just before going into the I’m A Celeb jungle: “I’d been typecast as a blonde girl next door type. I was getting a bit older, things were getting a bit lower down. Those roles stopped coming in. I couldn’t play the ‘sexy school girls’ anymore, the femme fatal sexy girl with the stockings on who seduces the male lead. It all dried up for me.”

She added: “I took it personally. In this industry, it’s easy to take things personally. I had no money and I was all heartbroken from a relationship. I was a bit lost in life. I felt I wasn’t getting the jobs I should have been getting, all the jobs I would have got three or four years earlier. I really just hit a wall with everything. I thought, ‘I need some excitement in my life again, I need to pick it up.’”

Atack explained how she overcame this rejection, continuing: “That particular time, just before the jungle, I found really difficult. I felt a lot of rejection but I think the jungle helped me overcome it, definitely.

“That show changed my life in so many ways. It changed my career, it changed the way I looked at myself. It didn’t really change me, it reaffirmed the person I thought I’d lost. I’d lost so much confidence in myself, I’d lost so much hope for my career and for myself as a person.”

She concluded: “I was in a really bad place and reminded me of who I was. Rather than change me, it helped me dig deep to find the person I thought had gone. I can’t explain how grateful I am to the jungle for helping me rediscover myself I guess.”

Although it’s only natural to experience self-doubt, Atack’s approach of remembering who you really are is a refreshing and helpful way of dealing with periods of rejection in the future.

Images: Getty