I was filming on a tiny island where my cell phone had no reception.  Somehow there was a throughline and it was the Discovery Channel.  I’m not loopy–the island is magical.

It’s interesting because I’ve never taken a survival course in my life. The producers called me about a year before and asked if I wanted to be in one of the harshest locations on earth, naked with a man I’d never met. I thought, wow, thank you but no thank you.

I said no multiple times because I want to be an inspiration for kids and families. I don’t want to be the girl naked on TV. But once I started learning more about the concept, I agreed. They basically condensed thousands of years of societal progression into a couple of months. Cavemen took a thousand years just to figure out how to make tools. I finally thought, okay, this is not MTV, this is Discovery, let’s give it a whirl. It was pretty amazing.