TOWIE star Dani Imbert never saw herself on TV, but now hopes to have her own reality show one day, she tells Rebecca Pitcairn
Reality TV star Dani Imbert may well seem pretty confident on screen, but the 25-year-old hasn’t always been that way. “I was really quiet growing up, a really shy girl in primary school. If anyone had said you’d be on TV back then I wouldn’t have believed them,” the Warley resident tells Absolutely.
We’re chatting as the 31st series of The Only Way is Essex (or TOWIE as it has become known) has just started and Dani is excited but secretive about what viewers are about to see unfold. “I can never say too much because I can’t ruin what’s about to come out on TV, but it’s a really good series and I’ve had a lot of fun filming it,” she smiles.
While it might never have crossed Dani’s teenage mind that she might one day be on the reality show that has spawned household names such as Gemma Collins, Lucy Mecklenburgh and Mark Wright, it didn’t stop her from being a huge fan when it first aired back in 2010.
“I remember being in Year 7 when TOWIE first came out and being super buzzing about it. I was obsessed, my mum used to come with me and we’d go and line up outside the shops some of the cast members owned to try and get a picture with them,” says Dani, who attended Brentwood County High, where many of the ITVBe show’s cast members past and present were educated. “It’s funny because I was a real super fan of Harry [Derbidge from the original cast] and now I’ve ended up being on the show and becoming friends with him.”
Brentwood born and raised – and still in the same house she has lived her whole life, name-checking Sheesh in Chigwell, Aura in Loughton and Figo in Brentwood as her favourite go-tos – it was perhaps inevitable that Dani would one day end up on the show, which follows the lives of a group of young men and women living in and around Brentwood.
Prior to joining the show, which was the first of its kind to feature real people in modified situations, saying unscripted lines but in a structured way, Dani worked at a local financial advisory firm to ‘pay the bills’ while also attending castings for fashion and beauty modelling jobs on the side.
“While being on TV wasn’t necessarily a dream of mine, once I gained my confidence after leaving secondary school, I wanted to see my face plastered on a billboard,” admits Dani, who models for ASOS Marketplace.
It was around this time that she started to get approached through her social media account to do reality shows, but it wasn’t until the producers of TOWIE got in contact in 2020 that she took the idea seriously.
“I was getting messaged about shows like Love Island and True Love or True Lies and I just wasn’t interested. I even got approached to go on Naked Attraction and I thought ‘absolutely not’. But then I got the message from TOWIE and it was the only one I considered, purely because I already knew people on the show and had grown up in the area.”
Dani joined the 27th series of the BAFTA award-winning programme, which aired in 2021,
and was quickly entered into a romance with Gatsby, aka Liam Blackwell. The pair dated for a time but split last year and viewers of the latest series will have seen a romantic storyline play out between Dani and her best friend Roman Hackett – although Dani remains tight-lipped on the ‘will they won’t they’ situation.
While the show is predominantly centred on Essex and is primarily filmed in Brentwood, Buckhurst Hill, Loughton, Chigwell and Chelmsford, the cast regularly jet abroad to destinations such as Marbella, Dubai, the Dominican Republic and most recently, Thailand, where the cast are put up in lavish accommodation.
But it’s not all about living it up. One of the things that makes TOWIE so successful is the drama that often plays out on screen, which often involves explosive arguments. “What I’ve struggled with the most is falling out with a friend on the show,” Dani admits. “As soon as that happens, the producers stay with you to make sure you don’t cross paths. It’s intense. You might want to meet up with them the next day and sort it out but you can’t, you have to wait until the cameras are rolling as they want everything to be as real and as raw as possible. We call it ‘sifting’, which means ‘save it for the scene’.”
Questions are often raised over how authentic TOWIE is, but Dani insists the show is not scripted. “Honestly I wish it was scripted, it would be so much easier,” she laughs. “It’s real life. Obviously, they do set up the ‘bump ins’, but we are all from the same area so the likelihood is I would bump into these people anyway.”
For Dani, the show is all about having as much fun as possible with her friends and opening doors to opportunities she might not otherwise have had to further her career as a model.
But, as she begins filming for the 32nd series, she admits that she does hope one day to follow in the footsteps of TOWIE alumni such as The Simms sisters, Tommy Mallet and Georgia Kousoulou, and Sam and Billie Faiers and have her own show one day.
“There are so many programmes I would now love to do and my dream is to have my own show one day, when I’m older and have my own family and kids,” she adds. “Considering I wasn’t interested in being in the world of TV when I was young I’ve gone completely full circle and I have the TOWIE experience to thank for that. It’s the ‘OG’ of reality shows, it blew up so quickly, but I can see it going on forever. It’s amazing to see how much it has put Essex on the map.”
All the latest episodes of TOWIE are available to stream on ITVX and you can follow Dani on Instagram @daniimbert
