Australian actress Nathalie Kelley reveals her family are stranded in Peru amid COVID-19

Australian actress Nathalie Kelley has revealed some of her family are stranded in Peru after borders were closed in March amid the outbreak of coronavirus. 

Speaking to Daily Mail Australia from her Los Angeles home, Nathalie said she was doing her best to stay strong and to avoid ‘surrendering to fear and anxiety’.

‘Like a lot of other Australians they’re stranded there [in Peru],’ the 34-year-old said. 

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Nathalie has held prominent roles in Dynasty, The Vampire Diaries, and Unreal, and played Neela in the 2006 action film The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.

‘My family actually is in Peru right now. They weren’t able to leave to come back to Australia, and like a lot of other Australians they’re stranded there,’ she said.

Nathalie was born in Peru, but left her birth country when she was two.

Her extended family has lived for generations in the mountain ranges within the Andes of Peru, in the state of Huanuco.

When asked what she’s doing to keep her mind busy and stay grounded while in self-isolation, she said she’d turned to Qigong.

‘Qigong is like Tai Chi, and it’s really good for calming the nervous system. It’s almost like a dance – it’s memorising movements. It’s been really keeping me grounded. I need those practices so that I can stay in a very strong place to be able to be there for my family,’ she said.

‘While I am personally not too negatively impacted by everything going on on a personal level, I need to be there, A) for my family and B) for everybody else that is really going through it.’ 

Nathalie went on to say: ‘I spend half my time really taking care of myself so that I’m strong and that I don’t surrender to the fear and anxiety and the grief that’s happening right now, but also I want to be able to be supportive for those people who are going through it and I spend the other half of my day on calls with friends and collaborators of thinking of what can we do to raise the vibrations and be of service right now.

‘The world, I don’t think, will be the same, and so this is a really good time to start thinking about what kind of world we want to create now when we get out of this.

Nathalie said she was lucky her new Stan show ‘Baker And The Beauty’, wrapped filming before any production shutdowns occured.

While she’s been proudly promoting the new romantic comedy series on her social media accounts, the actress claims she’s also using her self-isolation to focus her energies on stories she wants to help tell. 

‘I’m actually working right now on producing and writing content and I’m really conscious about creating content that will inspire people and think it’s coming and a good time right now,’ Nathalie said.  

The Baker and the Beauty premieres at April 15 at 5pm only on Stan, with new episodes weekly – same day as the US.