The 31-year-old could TASTE the final, but Nazeem Hussain just missed out on making the top three for I’m a Celeb.
Naz became the unofficial show’s hero, dipping into his comedic ways to make his camp mates, along with the country, laugh.
Making it up day 44 of the 45 day challenge, Now To Love caught up with the funnyman about his time in the jungle.
And he’s back in the real world!
Nazeem you were so close! How do you feel now that you’re out of the jungle?
Kinda gutted to be out, especially when people have been telling me it was less than 100 votes in the last one and a half minutes.
That stings a little but I also feel great. It shows it was a close race.
I genuinely thought I’d only be here for week one maybe week two? I’m a “celebrity.”. Really, I have a limited profile. In the jungle, I was surrounded by people who are well loved by Australians for all the right reasons.
Just being amongst them for that long was a real honour.
You were so loved by the nation, I think we can safely say the days of you being mistaken for Waleed Aly are over!
[Laughs] I’m just grateful for the time on the show and the audience! To have been on the show for 44 out of the 45 days just feels incredible.
You go through so many highs and lows.
Week two and I was thinking “What am I doing here?” I was missing everybody, the food’s horrible, you have to eat crappy things and I hate snakes… And they we’re making me touch them.
It felt like we were put through the worst things but then there were moments where I was like: “OMG! This is all set up for us.”
You don’t usually get this sort of opportunity in life. That was when I really embraced it and honestly for the most part I was really happy to be there.
The nation fell in love with the comedian.
Your top 4…
Will you and Shaheeda spend some time in South Africa or are you both headed straight home?
We’re here for a few more days but then we have to come back. I’ve got my comedy festival shows to write. I’m doing the whole country and I guess I need to start writing some jokes…
I just don’t want to scare my new audience,
Your stories about your mum were wildly funny and one of the best things from the show. Can we expect her to join you on your tour?
There will definitely be lots of jokes about my mum.
My mum will probably force herself onto the stage at some point. She has done that in the past. She tries to come to nearly all my shows.
When she’s there and I’m doing a joke about her, I’ll point and say “There’s my mum!” She’ll pretend to act shy, and then I tell her to get up and suddenly she’s doing a 360 degree bow to the whole audience.
She loves it. If I can make my mum happy that is all that matters.
We bet she’s so proud, have you spoken to her?
I have. She said, “I’m so sad you’re out. I bought seven sim cards to vote for you!”
Actually, I blame my mum. With 100 votes in the last couple of minutes making the difference, she could have had that covered in 20 minutes. Where was she?
Naz was so happy to see his wife when she surprised him in the jungle.
A diet of rice, beans and the casual elephant anus… It’s little wonder that Naz has lost over 9kgs.
Watching you on the show, you provided so many laughs but it was heartbreaking to watch you talk about your charity INTOUCH. Can you tell us a bit more about why raising awareness is so important to you?
INTOUCH is a tiny organisation but they do so much incredible work – the work that really, we should have been doing a long time ago as a society. They help communities that are culturally and linguistically diverse.
It’s close to my heart because my childhood was littered… I came from a broken home.
But we were able to bounce back because my mum is an incredibly resilient and strong person but not every family is resilient. Family violence scars everyone involved.
If I could take one thing from that experience – we need to do something to change the reality of family violence in Australia. It’s a silent killer. One woman dies every week from it.
I have sisters, I have my mum and a niece, I hope to have kids one day – and I don’t want my daughter to grow up in a world where that’s the reality. It’s a responsibility for us to make a change. It is within us.
His camp mates were touched when he shared the story behind his charity.
You mentioned hoping for a better future for your kids and on the show you did talk about fatherhood. Is that something you want soon?
My wife and I both love kids and we’d both love to be parents. If we don’t have kids, then no doubt we’ll adopt. If that doesn’t happen I guess we’ll have many dogs.
But in all seriousness, we both love kids and would love that for us! My wife was actually a lawyer and changed careers to become a primary school teacher.
I think we’re both very clucky!
Clucky you say…
What was the highlight and the lowlight from the whole experience?
A highlight… Definitely not eating maggots or elephant anus.
I think it was when we played Jungle Message. We had to pass one a message while wearing headphones that was blasting trance music.
While we were waiting for the message, we all were just dancing like idiots because we hadn’t heard music in so long.
So we’re all dancing except for Mr Price! We were in a line and Tegan was in front Steve, dancing her heart out and he was just so not into the dancing at all. We all just started dancing on him… I think he came around to it in the end.
Low moments were probably when arguments got personal. We live in such a small space and I don’t deal well with tension.
Tom [Arnold] arguing with Lisa [Curry] really bothered me. That was the lowest point for me.
We loved the bromance with Dane but it was your friendship with Steve Price that we all just adored. Did you expect that?
It was so surprising! Now that I think about it, I’ve grown up a little bit. I came in not wanting to like the guy. He’s the sort of person that, well, I’m not really supposed to like him.
Surprising BFFs: We will treasure this moment for life!
And I tried really hard… With all my heart, but he’s someone that has a really big heart and is actually a very nice and kind guy. I think he thought the same of me at the start but I think once we established that we both want the same sorts of things.
We aspire to have a good family, loving communities, and we love our country – that’s really when we started respecting each other and more importantly we started to listen and respect each other’s perspective.
When we did argue, we had that in mind and it wasn’t personal.
Our friendship developed despite any arguments – which really became more academic, despite how personal the topics were.
Can these two get their own spin off?
And we have to ask, with just hours before there’s an official king or queen – who would you like to see take it out?
Definitely Casey Donovan. She’s a worthy winner and an absolute darling.
She was the uieter person in the group, yet she made her way around to every single person in camp. She had such a positive influence on every individual.
I was louder than her but Casey is incredible.
People know she’s a great singer, but now it’s great that Australia can see what a great person she is.
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