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Rebel Wilson is one of Hollywood’s most successful comedy actors, as well as a writer and producer. Known for her outrageous on-screen persona and scene-stealing performances, she first found fame in the blockbuster film Bridesmaids, and went on to take a lead role in the Pitch Perfect trilogy.

Yet, growing up in suburban Sydney, Rebel struggled because she was so incredibly shy. After a concerted campaign to build her confidence and a life-changing bout of malaria, she went into acting against everyone’s expectations – and the risk paid off.

Following some lonely times early in her career, Rebel is now happily engaged with a young daughter, something she thought might never happen.

Here are 10 things we learned from Rebel’s Desert Island Discs…

“When I was born, I was named by my mum ‘Rebel’, because a little girl called Rebel had sung at my parents' wedding,” Rebel explains. “My parents had a big fight about it because my father wanted me to go to Christian school and didn't think that… they'd even accept me with a name like Rebel.”

So instead, she was called Melanie Elizabeth. “Melanie actually after a singer in the seventies, and then Elizabeth after the Queen… But my mum was always like, ‘well yeah, but Rebel’s your name.’”

As an adult, she changed her legal name to Rebel. “If my mum had more power in the relationship, that would've been my name. So, it didn't feel like changing my name, more like just making official what my name was always supposed to be.”

2. A malaria-induced hallucination made her an actor

As a teenager, Rebel had plans to become a lawyer, until she caught malaria on a trip to Africa and became seriously ill: “I lost my hearing for the two weeks while I was in hospital,” she recalls. “And then I just started hallucinating, and it was like a full blown hallucination that I was an actress, and that I win an Academy Award and I do an acceptance rap.” The experience altered the course of her life.

“It was so, so real that I come out of hospital and say, ‘Oh, I think I'm gonna become an actress now.’ Even though nobody looked at me and would've thought ‘actress’... I'd gotten into the top law school in Sydney, I was going to go – and so I did go, but I also did acting at night.”

3. Growing up she often felt upstaged by the family’s dogs

Rebel’s family bred and kept prize-winning beagles. “They had agents and they did commercials,” she says. “The first time I ever was on a TV set, or saw a musical, was because of the dogs.”

For a long time, Rebel didn’t realise she was actually allergic to them. “I was just very uncomfortable as a child… I'd feel itchy… I didn't love hugging the dogs and I never quite knew why. I thought maybe [it was] because the dogs would get a lot of attention.”

“At times I felt like the dogs got treated better than me, which is probably not true. But I just felt like they were definitely the stars in our family.”

“I really wanted friends, but I was just so shy and so reserved,” Rebel says. She decided to make herself invisible, spending lunchtimes in the library by herself. One lunchtime she remembers reading a study that claimed your personality at 15 is set for life. “I was about 14 and I was like, ‘I don't have that much time. I’d better change!’”

Listening to a motivational tape she found in her dad’s car helped. “I went: ‘Huh, wait, I can take active steps to improve my situation and my life.’ And I started forcing myself to do things outside of my comfort zone.” This included getting into public speaking at school, “which was awful at first”.

Her mum also pushed her to go to drama classes. “I put on an American accent… that was the only way I could cope with the stress of having to communicate with these strangers I didn't know. And then eventually, what happens with acting is you play these different characters, and some are confident, and then a bit of the confidence rubs off on you.”

5. Her dad’s volatile temper made home life tough

“His father got murdered when he was 18 and just about to finish high school,” Rebel says of her dad. Her grandfather worked for Customs and called home to say he had just cracked a big case, but “he was found dead on the side of the road in his car.” She says this devastating event derailed her dad’s life.

“Even though he tried to do his best and he clearly did love us, he would get very angry at the drop of a hat.” She describes how frightening this was, as her dad would “just explode and do something crazy… sometimes whack us or grab something and throw it… And my father would say stuff like, ‘Your mom doesn't love you, she only loves the dogs.’”

“The way of coping, which I learned from my mother, was to eat sweets. That numbed any kind of feelings of pain or emotions surrounding it. So we didn't talk about it openly, but we definitely – the women of the family – bonded by eating sweets and comforting ourselves in that way.”

6. At the age of 29 she headed to Hollywood with just a suitcase and a duvet

Although Rebel found work in the theatre, TV and film in Australia during her twenties, she was determined to make it in America: “I felt if I could get in one Hollywood movie… then maybe my mum would finally be like, ‘oh yeah, she is an actress’, and not just keep hoping I'd go back into law.”

She sold everything she had to fund a trip to Los Angeles, where at first she slept on a friend’s sofa, living on a weekly budget of $60.

“I eventually got my own apartment… and I had a bed and a TV and I found an ironing board out in the rubbish bins and I put the TV on the ironing board and then I bought one $10 chair from Home Depot and that was my chair. It had a cup holder – so that’s pretty good!”

After the film Bridesmaids was released, Rebel’s Hollywood career took off. “It was like it caught fire,” she says of the movie. “I booked six movies in the two weeks after Bridesmaids came out.”

This sudden stardom was a lot to handle. “Even though I became famous later in life compared to a lot of people in my business, it still kind of hits you. And it can affect you and can throw off your perception of reality... so you've got to stay grounded and it can be difficult sometimes.”

Luckily, she was living with her Bridesmaids co-star Matt Lucas at the time. “He was like an older brother. He'd been through it all in the UK and he just would give me advice about how to handle stuff. So, he was a great help.”

8. One of her discs takes her back to the moment when she proposed

Soon after meeting her partner Ramona, in 2021, Rebel was forced to make their relationship public when the Sydney Morning Herald said it was planning to publish an article on them (which it has since apologised for).

“I just decided to put it on Instagram and announce it myself, because I wasn't going to let some journalist do it,” she says. “I also thought, at this point, why are people outing people? I thought we had moved past that as a society”. In the post, she wrote: “I thought I was searching for a Disney Prince… but maybe what I really needed all this time was a Disney Princess.”

When it came to asking Ramona to marry her, Rebel did it on a trip to Disneyland. “She was so surprised… she just started crying as soon as she worked out this was a proposal. And I got down on one knee, and then she eventually just got down on her knees,” she remembers.

Rebel had arranged for a violinist to play Elton John’s Can You Feel the Love Tonight?, from The Lion King, in the background, and she’s chosen this song as her seventh desert island disc.

9. She risked her career to have a family

Rebel says her early Hollywood success was built on her image as a plus size actress. “In a world obsessed with a thin beauty standard… I came and I was so different that I guess that's why I got signed [by her agency].”

But as her career progressed, she faced some internal struggles. “On the one hand... I'm such a body positive person, in that I see beauty in any shape and size. And yet at the same time, I was feeling like I know deep down I'm engaging in very unhealthy behaviours, and I was ashamed of my emotional eating.”

When Rebel lost weight following advice from a fertility specialist, not everyone was supportive. “Obviously, my team thought I've created this amazing pigeonhole for myself playing the fat funny girl, and I was earning millions of dollars per movie, so why would you want to change?… So, I made the choice thinking, ‘well, it could ruin my career’. But I made that choice anyway to try to have a family and not develop any serious diseases.”

10. Her daughter inspired her final desert island disc

Rebel’s daughter, Royce, was born via a surrogate in 2022. Her final track is the one that was playing when her embryo was being transferred. “My doctor likes to play a song that's giving positivity to the embryo, and so the song she played is The Beatles classic called Here Comes the Sun.”

The surrogacy process was already underway when Rebel met her fiancée, who she says embraced the idea. “I went from somebody thinking, ‘Oh, maybe I'll never get married and have a family’... And now here I am, in a very untraditional way, but suddenly it's like: bang, and we're an instant family.”