‘I nearly lost my life’: Alex Fevola on famous kids, second chances & Runway Room✨

Alex, welcome to Fascinated. Thank you for having me.

Entrepreneur, mum of four, author and married to radio star and former AFL player Brendan. I feel like we know all about you, but then we don't really know about you. Is that fair?

Yeah, I think so. I think probably people have heard of me, but perhaps don't know much about me.

Yeah. So tell me what it was like when you first sort of came into the public eye, because we're going back a while now. And I was looking up and I was thinking a wag today. And you've written in your book and you've said this before, like you hate the term. But it was very different back then, I think, to what it is today. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I don't necessarily hate it. Like, I understand it, but I think that it comes with a bit of a stereotype, which is not necessarily true. I think that's probably, it's more of an inaccurate, broadly used term to describe, you know, a broad spectrum of women. I think that it's unfair to sort of, you know, class everyone as the same type of person. But I understand. I get it. And I think what I find unfair about it is probably that there's no male term for that. So if you have a male married to a female sports star, there is no name for that. Yeah. We need to make one. Yeah, exactly. Yes, we

do.

But I think, yeah, going back to when I first met Brendan, he was sort of unknown when I met him. So it wasn't this instant understanding that we would have any kind of profile because I'd never heard of him but I wasn't really into football either. But he was pretty unknown when I met him and it was very quick that he became known once we were together. Yeah. Because the two of you were

kind

of clickbait before it even existed. Yes,

yeah. I was thinking about this. Yeah. There was a portion of people in this city that were obsessed with you both a while back now. In the media, yes. Yeah,

but you were clickable before we really clicked. Yeah, that's so true. Yeah, we did used to, for some reason, attract a lot of, I guess, attention or, yeah, click-throughs. And even when it sort of very first started being online online, Yeah, they would get a lot of comments and a lot of engagement. So people had a lot of opinions. And I think that's, yeah, it just comes, it's part of the course really. And it's the same for a lot of sporting, known sporting people. I think that happens. People just have interest in, yeah. Because what was your life like growing up? Um, very quiet and, um, conservative, probably a little bit boring, I guess. Um, grew up in Melbourne, had a really simple childhood, um, Pretty uneventful, really. We moved to England for a year, which was, you know, probably the most exciting thing that happened in my childhood. But really just the average Aussie upbringing I think I had and very, very quiet and, yeah, certainly nothing like the life my children have led. Oh.

I'm going to get back to that later because it's such a weird space for you to be in as a mum as your children grow up in the public eye as well. But to go back to when you were younger, you obviously had Mia quite young with your former partner

who died by suicide. That's right.

This would have been a terrible thing to go