By Eddah Waithaka
She vanished from screens at the peak of her fame. Now Celestine Gachuhi is back, not just as an actress, but as a woman transformed.The Kalasha nominee, who spent years as one of Kenya’s most beloved TV heroines in Selina, makes her long-awaited Showmax debut this month.
In Adam to Eve, she plays Amanda, a character she describes as “calm but strong. Bubbly but grounded.”But the woman behind the role is no longer the same actress who left.“I became a wife. I became a mother. And everything changed,” Gachuhi tells us in an exclusive interview.
For years, she stepped away from the limelight deliberately. No cameras. No sets. Instead, she built.Through Film Connect Africa, she now mentors young creatives navigating an industry that once left her unprepared.
“I was green. No one told me what a set is really like,” she says. “I bring them the unspoken rules, the life skills, the mindset.”
The initiative has reached high schools, primary schools, and colleges. Her message to budding storytellers echoes her own journey, “Talent will take you up there, but discipline will keep you there.”
Off screen, she also channels her energy into the Simama Initiative, fighting gender-based violence. That advocacy shaped how she approached Amanda.“I love being a woman. I love empowering women,” she says. “I handled Amanda with softness, strength, vulnerability, and grace, because that’s how real women live.”
Gachuhi builds her characters from the inside out. “I don’t just play her. I live her. I build her life in my head, even the parts the script doesn’t say,” she explains. What set Amanda apart, she says, was joy. “She knows how to have fun without guilt, even while carrying responsibility.”
But fame, she learned, carries a cost.In 2019, a fan tracked her to her home in Ruaka. At 7 a.m., the woman arrived at her door, bag in hand. Neighbourhood children had pointed out the house — everyone knew where Selina lived.“She told me, ‘I have been looking for you because I want us to sing together,’” Gachuhi recalls.
When she declined, the woman refused to leave. She repeated the demand, growing angrier. Gachuhi drew a hard line: leave, or she calls the police.“That incident changed how I think about fame, privacy, and safety forever,” she says.
She moved out the same day.Now back on screen, Gachuhi carries those lessons quietly. She returns not chasing the spotlight, but walking alongside it, on her own terms.
“Evolution doesn’t mean leaving the spotlight,” she says. “It means shining in it differently.”
