Wild on Brooke

Along With elevating Wild On to E Entertainment's second-highest-rated show (behind Howard Stern), host Brooke Burke has unlocked a spirit of adventure in herself that gave the 29-year-old raven-haired beauty ample reason to pose here.

In Wild On, Burke tours the globe in search of adventure and the world's best parties. The high-exposure gig has even sparked the model's acting ambitions: She's in contention for the female lead of a big-budget action-adventure film and meeting with a top TV producer for a possible network series, all as E develops another series around her. Surprisingly, she had little acting ambition before doing the show.

"I have always followed my heart, starting with when I won an acting scholarship and moved to Los Angeles on my 19th birthday, with just my dog and a suitcase," she says. She also brought along a killer body and a face that bears an exotic mix of Irish, French and Portuguese. Burke quickly found herself in high demand as a model. "I loved acting, but coming from such a small place in Arizona, the whole Hollywood thing was too much for me. I started modeling and for eight years I was too busy to do anything else."

That's until a friend in advertising coaxed her into meeting the Wild On producers who were conducting a nationwide search for a new host, no broadcast experience necessary. Burke walked out of the two-hour interview with the job. "I'd traveled a lot for modeling jobs and talked about that," she recalls. "They were looking for a real person, not a newscaster. We agreed to go to Spain and give it a shot."

Burke quickly learned that she wouldn't be sipping fruity drinks poolside. Her first assignment was to report on Spain's La Tomatina festival. "It's basically the biggest food fight in the world," she says. "All the bars are open, the alcohol is free and tons of tomato puree is dumped into the streets for this huge brawl. People are there with all this padding and these goggles, and in I come with flip-flops and a cutoff T-shirt, quickly thinking I'm going to die." Especially during the postbrawl ritual in which Spanish men try to tear the tomato-stained T-shirts off fetching combatants as they hose down. "I was left thinking, What have I gotten myself into?"

Despite that messy start, Burke quickly grew to love the job. "It's a spontaneous reality show," she says.

"I've skydived and have been on a shark dive where I grabbed hold of a fin and got taken for a ride," Brooke says. "I went to interview a crocodile hunter and wound up fending off a 14-foot crocodile using a stick with a pair of pants on the end. The only thing I refused to do was bungee jump in New Zealand." She also admits that a bug phobia led her to nix a lobster dive ("they're cockroaches of the sea," she says), and left her on the sidelines when a mezcal-drinking segment in Cabo San Lucas culminated in the inevitable worm-eating challenge. "When bugs are not involved, I do my own stunts."

Burke's passion for action was honed growing up a tomboy who watched football games with her father. She quit the cheerleading squad, preferring to compete with boys on the field rather than root for them from the sidelines.

Burke's physicality, honed by a disciplined routine of Pilates, yoga and walking, led her to star in five commercials for the Bally's Total Fitness health club chain. "I'm the woman coming out of the pool in the blue bathing suit. You still see me all the time," she says. Aside from motivating women to exercise, Burke's body once sparked controversy among feminists. A photograph of Burke getting out of a car, showing her from the neck down to her toes, graced a European Chivas Regal print ad that proclaimed "Yes: God is a man." Burke was surprised to find feminists outraged by the distiller's notion that a woman didn't need a head to be attractive. "The shot was about mystery, about beauty," she says, "and I was never offended by it."

Only recently, Burke had said in another magazine she'd never pose nude, not for any amount of money. "This wasn't about money, but rather freedom and taking chances," says Burke. "We shot it in Bali, dropped into this estate. It was an absolutely peaceful setting. The whole thing was exciting, very erode and sensual."

Burke has turned her love for travel into a business, including a calendar with photos of herself in exotic locales, and turning her Wild On adventures into an upcoming book she calls "a hip guide written in the form of a traveler's memoir."

Wild On has emboldened Burke for other itineraries, with a trek to the Middle East and a tour of the Seven Wonders of the World high on her list. Despite all that, part of her craves some downtime.

"I am really a homebody. I love sleeping in my own bed," she says. My ideal vacation is hardly action packed. Just some fresh air, beautiful warm water and a good book."

Get wild with Brooke at Playboy.com/current.