Mel Schilling feels elated when we sit down to chat. And why wouldn’t she be? She has a lot to celebrate.
Apart from just wrapping a stellar season of Married At First Sight UK and gearing up for another huge series in Australia, the star was recently told that her cancer is now in remission!
“It’s wonderful,” Mel, 53, ecstatically tells Woman’s Day. “It’s been a really tough year, but I’m pleased to be through the hardest part.”
The dating expert and coach says the fact that doctors gave her the all-clear right before the festive season made the news all the sweeter.
“Doctors diagnosed me right before Christmas in 2023 and that was meant to be our first cold Christmas after relocating to the UK – and I guess you could say it was really cold,” she reveals.

“So to be given the better news this time around, we made sure we went all-out at Christmas. We went to Salzburg in Austria, where we did the Sound Of Music tour and visited all the Christmas markets. We went absolutely Christmas-crazy. It was magical and brilliant.”
Despite Mel’s diagnosis, and the countless rounds of chemotherapy and operations that followed, she made it her mission to keep things as normal as possible, not only for her family, but for her own sanity too.
And it’s why, rather miraculously, she continued to shoot MAFS UK and MAFS Australia back to back.
“I needed to keep working,” she admits. “For my own peace of mind and just to feel like I still had that part of myself. I felt like I had lost so much of myself throughout the whole illness and treatment process.

“So for me, being able to turn up on set, get my hair and makeup done, put on a fabulous frock and step into professional mode, it was actually really important to me and I’m so glad I was able to do it.”
Mel adds that since battling cancer, it’s opened her eyes more to the antics MAFS participants sometimes display. She’s certainly not suffering any fools this time around.
“You’ll probably see me in my grumpy pants a little bit more than usual,” she laughs. “My tolerance is a little bit lower than it usually would be this season.”
Married At First Sight Australia premieres 7pm Monday 3 February on Three and ThreeNow.