YOUNG Athy woman Gillian Deegan got to live the dream of thousands of people last week when she got on stage with rocker Juliette Lewis to present an award at the 2009 MTV Europe Music Awards.
Lucky Gillian was picked from 100 other contestants who had taken part in the MTV Fanwalk competition and who walked for 10 days from Hamburg to Berlin to get to the ceremony.
The 100 young people were chosen from thousands of entries and along the way they shared their experience online with other MTV fans from around the world. At the end of their walk, Gillian was picked to give three judges her reasons why she should be chosen to present the award - and the bubbly student was selected outright.
“It went really well,” said a delighted Gillian. “I didn’t expect that I would get picked - I was shocked when they called out my name!”
She received the star treatment after being chosen, spending the next day in press conferences, being brought to a designer store to pick out a special outfit and on the night itself getting to hang out in the VIP area with all the celebrities. Perhaps one of the reasons why she was chosen was that Gillian wasn’t just interested in meeting the celebs - although she did chat with some of them - but instead in seeing how everything ran backstage. “It’s like a military operation - it goes by the millisecond, everything is done a T,” she said, in awe of the huge numbers of people working on the televised awards.
When it came to getting onstage with Juliette Lewis, Gillian wasn’t fazed. “I was strangely calm,” she said, adding that Juliette, who was “so down to earth”, kept her calm.
It has been a whirlwind few weeks for Gillian, who entered the Fanwalk competition on a whim a few months ago. It has been a dream come true for the 21-year-old design student, who told the judges that she had been sending in applications to do an internship with MTV for a number of years. Thanks to winning this competition, she has finally had a taste of stardom herself, and has even higher hopes that she will one day work for the global music channel.