Australia’s most brutal reality show, SAS: Australia, is about to drop a brand-new season with new recruits and a new location to match.
WATCH BELOW: SAS Australia 2022 sneak peek
In case you’re unfamiliar, SAS Australia rounds up 17 recruits, local celebrities who wish to challenge themselves by determining if they could pass SAS selection.
The show puts the celebrities through gruelling challenges, not unlike the real selection process, which is led by Directing Staff Ant Middleton, a real former SAS soldier.
Over the years we’ve seen celebrities fight each other, submit to being tear-gassed, climb from a rope up into helicopters, and complete super-difficult obstacles in order to be considered for finishing the course.
Recruits will very often leave voluntarily but can also be asked to leave if they’re not up to scratch.
The show is now entering its’ third Australian season, having first premiered in 2020.
That season was planned to be shot in Queenstown, New Zealand, but was moved to the Snowy Mountains due to COVID-19 border closures.
Last year’s season was shot in the Capertee Valley near NSW’s Blue Mountains.
Although not as freezing cold as the shoot in the Snowy Mountains, the temperature only ranged from 1-23°C in the isolated lot in the valley.
This time around, the recruits were placed on the NSW south coast.
Filming at a gloomy abandoned coal mine just outside of Dapto, the recruits were again subjected to single-digit temperatures overnight.
“This year’s location is more isolated. It’s so vast, so open, so mountainous, that recruits think to themselves ‘there’s nowhere to run, nowhere to hide’,” Ant Middleton said of the location.
Here, the recruits were subjected to very little sleep, low food rations, and banned from having any personal items as they carried out their two weeks of intense SAS-style training.
“The worst thing was the cold and calming my mind to keep going,” stressed former Bachelorette and SAS contestant Ali Oetjen, who appeared on the first season.
“No hot water, no showers, no flushing toilets. Sleep and food-deprived, riddled with adrenaline, fear, and exhaustion,” she said of the gruelling experience.
“The physical pain like cuts on my throat, hands all cut up, blistered feet, black & purple bruises which covered my legs and arms weren’t the worst thing,” Ali explained.
Among this year’s recruits are former Bachelor stars Locky Gilbert and Anna Heinrich, actors Orpheus Pledger and Melissa Tkautz, and athletes Barry Hall, Ellia Green and Darius Boyd, to name a few.
SAS: Australia premieres Monday, February 21 at 7.30pm on Channel Seven.
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