Rebecca Gibney “Life is short, make the most of it”
“Lots of women my age are taking up gardening and taking things a bit easy, but I’m actually busier now than I was 10 years ago”
a lot can change in the space of a few months. When Woman last spoke to Kiwi star Rebecca Gibney, she was relaxing in a Sydney hotel room, eating tempura prawns and treating herself to a glass of wine after a long day of media interviews. It was May, New Zealand and Australia were largely Covid-free and she was making use of the short-lived trans-Tasman bubble to pop over the ditch from her Dunedin home and join her beloved Back to the Rafters castmates on the publicity trail.
Today though, things are a little different. The much-anticipated TV show might be about to go to air, but the Kiwi-Aussie bubble has been closed for months and Aotearoa is now fighting its own battle with the Covid-19 Delta variant. Rebecca, 56, is holed up at home on her 12ha rural Otago property with husband Richard Bell, their 17-year-old son Zac and the family’s two dogs, Alby and Lolly.
Like the rest of New Zealand, they’ve spent the past two weeks in Level 4 lockdown and on the day we speak, the country (apart from Auckland, of course) has just moved down to level three. The actor was meant to be jetting to Sydney about now, but instead, the furthest she’ll get is to the McDonald’s drive-through in town with her takeaway-starved teenager.
“I’ve told him I don’t care how long the queue is, even if it takes an hour or two, I’ll get him McDonald’s,” she says with a
