Jake Quickenden has said the deaths of his father and brother have made him want to “put everything” into his endeavours and “keep going”.
Quickenden’s brother Oliver was 19 when he lost his life to bone cancer in 2012, the same disease that killed his father four years earlier.
The 32-year-old actor and singer told Good Morning Britain: “I think everybody goes through bad times in their life, everybody does, and you never really know what’s going on in someone’s life and I kind of try… now to look at the positives, even in the worst things.
'I actually felt sorry for them.'@JakeQuickenden tells @SeanFletcherTV and @CharlotteHawkns about the horrific trolling his son has received.
He explains how he 'tries to brush it off and move forward'. pic.twitter.com/JRa24w7uoU
— Good Morning Britain (@GMB) August 31, 2021
“So, for me, losing my dad and brother, if I can think of one positive, it just makes me live my life and also it makes me put everything into stuff and I just want to kind of keep going.
“I have got my own little family now that I want to impress and I want him to be able to look up to me and say: ‘My dad’s doing well,’ do you know what I mean?”
Quickenden, who welcomed the birth of a baby boy with his girlfriend Sophie Church earlier this year, said trolls had targeted the child online.
“I can’t get my head around it myself,” he said.
Quickenden added: “Just the way I look at things I say: ‘They must be going through a hard time’, so rather than feel sorry for myself, I actually felt quite sorry for them and hope that they are alright, because who would do that?”
He also discussed his appearance on Channel 4’s Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins, saying he was “running out” of shows to take part in following his appearance in I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! and Dancing On Ice.
He said he decided to take part in the programme, which also features TV stars Ulrika Jonsson, Kerry Katona and Ore Oduba in its current series, to “test” himself and show “a different side to me”.
“I wanted to show who I was, rather than just the jokey, messing around all the time and doing a few shows,” he said.
“I wanted to show that I had a bit of a serious side as well.”
He added: “It’s just such an amazing thing to say you’ve done.
“I take the mick and say how many reality shows I have done, but I have kind of just been lucky and I’m really grateful that I got to do these shows, because I can look back on them in years to come and go, ‘I did SAS Who Dares Wins and it was a great experience.”