Sam Frost has detailed the difficult period in her life that led to her quitting Home and Away.
The actress and former Bachelor star exited the soap shortly after facing mass backlash over a controversial Instagram video in which she described her hesitancy to get the Covid-19 vaccine in late 2021.
The 35-year-old told the Life Uncut podcast this week that she struggled with her mental health during that period and that she ultimately decided to walk away from the show in the wake of that battle.
‘That was an awful year. I had a lot of stuff happening in my family life, and a lot of things happening in my private life. It was a really yucky time. I don’t think anyone was okay during COVID,’ Sam said.
‘When I did the video about that, if you actually watch the video, it was all about mental health and it was about me saying “no one is okay right now” and whatever you think about these vaccines, everyone is struggling and you need to be compassionate and have empathy towards people who may think differently towards you,’ she went on.
‘And the whole thing got twisted and taken out of context, and got far messier and uglier than what it was meant to be.’
Things came to a breaking point for the star, who ultimately decided she needed time with her family to recover.
‘I just ended up going ‘oh man, I need to go home and be with my family’ and that’s when I made the decision to leave Home and Away,’ she said.
Sam quit Home and Away in December that year and has previously reflected on being ‘torn to f***ing pieces’ when she compared restrictions on the unvaccinated to ‘segregation’ in her tearful Instagram video.
‘The bullying of unvaccinated people was disgusting. Friends I’d had for years stopped talking to me,’ Sam told Stellar Magazine.
‘I never said I didn’t want to get it. I’m not an anti-vaxxer – are you kidding me? But I feel it’s quite unreasonable to assume that everyone’s going to think exactly the same way and that people are going to come to the exact same conclusion in the same time frame.’
The former Bachelorette also revealed she’s only had ‘good intentions’.
‘I got torn to f***ing pieces. That was someone in a very vulnerable position talking about their struggles with mental health,’ she said.
Sam, who joined Home and Away as Jasmine Delaney in 2017, quit the Channel Seven soap two months after revealing she hadn’t had the vaccine.