COVER STORY
“Even the support you got, you felt like: ‘Oh my God, I can’t
let these people down’. But looking back on it now, and what
I’ve learned from it, it’s just mind-blowing. I made brilliant
contacts, such as Andrew Lloyd Webber and [casting agent]
David Grindrod, and had two solid months of intense acting
tuition. I gained so much out of it, even though at the time it
was a bit of a nightmare!”
Talent tour
Aoife confesses that she was a tad cynical about these types of
reality talent shows before trying out for Maria, having
auditioned for – and been rejected by – Popstars and You’re A
Star here in Ireland. However, her opinion of the process and
the entire reality show format changed once she was thrown in
at the deep end herself.
“So much work goes into it,” she explains. “We were up at 7
or 8am; we were training all day until 6pm and then we’d come
home and go over stuff we’d learned that day, which would
include three or four group numbers as well.
“Then we had ‘Maria Missions’. They were terrible! For one of
them, we were brought to the London Palladium, where
Andrew was sitting in the audience, and we had to run out and
sing The Hills are Alive to him. They were just really pushing us
to our limits to see if we could handle it nerves-wise. After all,
that’s what you’re going to have to do in front of an audience
of 2,500 people every night.”
Aoife made it through to the show’s semi-finals, where there
were two rounds of voting on the night. In the first, she
survived the sing-off against her best friend Abi Finley, only to
be sent packing by Lloyd Webber in the second round.
“I was gutted,” Aoife admits. “It was such a sense of dejection
because, up to that point, everyone had wanted a piece of you.
You’re doing interviews; everyone’s telling you what to do and
giving you stuff to wear; you’re driven around and treated
really well; and then the next morning you pack your bags and
are off in a taxi and that’s it. The phone stops ringing and it’s
like your dreams have gone down the tube.
“I think I allowed myself one day of self-pity to wallow and
then I told myself: ‘You’ve got a great opportunity here, make
the most of it’. So I started ringing agents, setting up loads of
meetings and began auditioning for other things – that’s when
I got Chicago. Actually, the producers rang me a few days after
the programme. I thought it was someone pulling my leg! I
went in and did a two-hour, gruelling audition. Three weeks
PAGE EIGHT UCD CONNECTIONS
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