National treasure
Lying awake in the middle of the night, Kiwi TV legend Angela Bloomfield picked over her return to our screens with no small amount of anxiety.
She should’ve been celebrating her first major TV gig since leaving Shortland Street in 2016, but instead, she was trying to make peace with what she’d just watched.
Despite spending 24 years as a household name playing Shorty’s Rachel McKenna, her debut on Celebrity Treasure Island just weeks ago was a whole new ball game, and one she vastly underestimated.
“I was naive,” she says, reflecting on how the experience continues to impact her mental health. “I didn’t give enough consideration to others’ opinions of me… I didn’t consider how that would feel to watch.”
The TVNZ celebrity survival show was something that appealed to Angela when it first cropped up in the early 2000s, but being tied to Shortland Street at the time, she wasn’t able to take part. When the opportunity returned with the reboot, she was excited to get on board.
“I was like, I want to see who I am in this situation, I want to see if I can do those challenges. But the cameras were the thing… they expose
