Celebrity bodyguard who has looked after the world's biggest A-list stars reveals Michael Jackson was the most difficult to work for and why he quit after guarding Bella Hadid: 'I don't want to do this anymore'

Simon Newton was once the most recognisable bodyguard in Hollywood, having worked with the likes of Kendall Jenner, Rita Ora and Kate Moss. 

Once a soldier who served in Canada and Iraq for four years before becoming a guard to A-listers, the London security expert, 47, has since become an actor.

Newton now tells the Daily Mail why guarding Michael Jackson was the toughest job of his career and how he walked away from the industry after looking after Bella Hadid at London Fashion Week.

The bodyguard-turned-actor started out protecting Middle Eastern royalty and wealthy businessmen before he landed a gig protecting Michael Jackson in 2006.

He has since worked for numerous celebrities, but says guarding the late King of Pop was still his toughest Hollywood job.  

'With celebrities, obviously, a lot of the time you'd get fans. They weren't aggressive or anything, but they were quite excitable,' he says. 

'Whereas with Middle Eastern royalty, robbery and kidnap was the threat there,' he added.

But with Michael, he says the fan base was on another level.  

'As a person to work with, he was great, but the amount of fans was horrendous,' he says. 

'[It was] the biggest amount of fans I've ever had on the job. There were five of us on that job and we probably could have still done with one or two more, really.

'It was constant. We had people hiring taxis for the day so they could just jump in and follow us. 

'There were people constantly outside of every venue we went to, even the hotel we stayed in. It was a big deal.' 

Conversely, Simon says the easiest jobs saw him protecting businessmen and bank CEOs from activists, stalkers and kidnappers.  

'By and large, they're not known. They still run a fairly normal life, in and out of work, there's a lot of office hours involved and things like that,' he recalls. 

'Quite often they're family people outside of work, so they just do the normal family stuff. That's probably the easiest one to do,' he adds.

'It depends where they're from, because if you get CEOs of banks and oil companies and things like that, activists are probably the biggest threats to people like that. 

'All these people get stalkers. They're all relatively wealthy, so they're all open to kidnapping and robbery.'

After almost 20 years as a celebrity bodyguard, Simon gave it all up in 2018 following a job he worked for supermodel Bella Hadid. 

'I gave it all up nearly 10 years ago. It was Bella Hadid. I was on and off with Bella in London... I'd done a few fashion weeks with her over there,' he says.

'There are two fashion weeks a year in the UK. At one stage she used to do both of them... There were a few other trips between fashion weeks.'

Simon, who now also owns the fashion brand Simon Newton London, says that at the time he didn't consider it might be his last job. 

'It only ended up being my last job because I said I couldn't do it anymore. It's not like the job finished and then I decided I didn't want to do it,' he recalls. 

'I actually sort of gave that job up. I just got to a stage where I just thought I don't want to do this anymore. Not with her [Bella], but the job in general.'

Simon says he was in the job 'for 17 years' and had decided 'it's time for a change'.   

'I thought the only way I can make that change is to literally just change and not still dip in and dip out of bodyguard work,' he says. 

'Just say I'm done and that's it and get on with something else. That's kind of what happened.

'It was a job for me, so that's how I paid my mortgage, paid my bills... It was very much, I wasn't excited about looking after anyone anymore. 

'It didn't matter who they were, all I wanted was to do the job properly and be paid. 

'And you used to get to go to some quite good places and you'd go on red carpets and all this other stuff. 

'In the early part of your career, it's new, it's quite exciting, it's quite fun.' 

'If you want to be a bodyguard, they're the things you want to do and towards the end of the last few years I didn't care if I was doing any of that or not,' he continues.

Simon says that after spending so many years doing the job, he had lost the excitement he once had going to ritzy events to guard celebrities.  

'I didn't hate doing them, but I just wasn't getting the excitement out of it anymore, and I just thought, I was 39 or 40,' he says.

'I just thought I can't see myself doing this for another 20 odd years or longer.

'The other thing is you used to get called away all the time. It's difficult to have a normal life. I was away a lot of my early adult life.' 

Simon still owns the security business Askari Secure, though he has largely stepped away from the day-to-day operations of the company.

Nowadays, he has turned his energy toward acting full-time after he caught a taste for it in 2010 while working on a film with Matt Damon. 

'As a kid I never even thought about it. Acting was always something that someone else did. I didn't think I'd even be able to do it,' he says. 

'But I did a film in 2010 called Green Zone with Matt Damon. Paul Greengrass was the director,' he adds.

'I played a US Special forces soldier, but at the time I was still a bodyguard, so it wasn't something I could pursue properly.

'So we went out to Morocco and filmed that over about six weeks, and when I was out there I thought I actually quite enjoyed that. 

'Maybe it's something I could pick up later on in life.'

Simon adds that once he decided to quit security work, he naturally pivoted into acting and decided to study the craft.

He has since been involved in films like Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows and even doubled for Dave Bautista in the movie Final Score.