By Dov Kornits
“I tea-bagged the web cam a few times and I got quite lucky,” says Nick Boshier straight-faced. “Now I actually appreciate good sketch more because I’ve learned the greats. I’ve started to consume brilliant, brilliant stuff like Monty Python and The League of Gentlemen, which I didn’t even really get a couple years ago.”
First getting noticed through their sketches on YouTube, Nick Boshier and Christiaan Van Vuuren are now working in the TV space, which means much more emphasis on narrative.
“You see shows like Key and Peele where you go, ‘ok, right. So sketch can be cinematic and can be genre adopting and it can be deep,’” comments Christiaan Van Vuuren. “One of the things about a sketch, generally, is that it feels like those characters are just there to tell the joke. You often don’t get a sense that those characters have a lifetime of interaction and backstory before they got to that point.”
When it came time to bring their own show to life with Soul Mates, which follows four separate stories in time, with Boshier and Van Vuuren interacting in each as different characters, the focus turned to crafting backstories. Says Van Vuuren: “One of the interesting things was playing to the idea that these guys have reincarnated through different lifetimes and without being too prescriptive to that as something which would restrict creativity in any given story; one of the best ways to do that is to have similar relationship balances between the characters across the different lifetimes. My character tends to be the more selfish one. His character tends to be the more loving one who’s more invested in the friendship.”
Adds Boshier: “We came into it going like, we want this show to marry the best of short format story content and the best of longer format narratives, so we want to create something that works in short pieces online, segments and pieces that have a beginning, middle and end as scenes, but that also draw you into the narrative and the story and keep you watching after it. For us we have always looked at the show as a half hour comedy story, with the story a kind of spine and backbone, and that the content that surrounds that can peripheral and world-building and can reach to far corners of the internet potentially as the story goes.”
Before we leave Christiaan Van Vuuren and Nick Boshier to resume their Bondi lives, we have to ask – has their comedy ever offended?
“We’ve had a few threats,” admits Van Vuuren. “They’ve come through Facebook messages through the page but every time I’ve ended up writing a response and engaging the person. And then they’re like, ‘we have a beer and talk about it’. It’s maybe the space of four or five minutes that people get angry about something they don’t completely understand, you contextualise it and message back to them and they kind of seem fine again.
“On the Kiwi thing, it was funny,” he continues after we ask about one of the stories in Soul Mates which follows two New Zealand assassins. “I was talking to Rachael House who plays mom and at our wrap party she was saying a couple of her Kiwi friends were like, ‘why do you do this show? It’s making fun of Kiwis,’ and she’s like, ‘to be honest, in New Zealand I don’t get that many opportunities to play strong, wholesome Maori women and this character these guys have written is a strong, Maori, female character who’s in charge, who’s dominant, who’s funny, who’s fun. The story is positive and one of friendly jabbery, not one of taking the piss out of our culture.’”
And will there be any potential touchy points in Season 2? “We dabble in transgender stuff,” answers Van Vuuren.
Prepare yourselves… “We spend a lot of time on crafting and making the line right and being on the right side,” adds Van Vuuren. We’re not trying to take the piss out of trans people by any stretch of the imagination, but we don’t think that things should be comedically off limits.”
Christiaan goes on to say that their collaboration with his brother Connor is key to this. “If you have a fart or a shit joke, Connor just wants to make sure there’s an intelligent insight beneath that, and he will work tirelessley to make sure that that insight is there on the page. Nick and I will continually low brow things, but then he’ll find ways to make the low bow things high brow.”
“I’m ironically relatively high brow, which is ironic,” Boshier chimes in. “Oh yeah, I know what’s up.”
“You have to spend a lot of time making sure the lines are right and that your message is right. If your message is right, you can dabble with anything,” says Van Vuuren.
“This is the thing about offensiveness that I find off,” Van Vuuren continues. “You can spend months, years pouring brainpower and energy into making something insightful and finding the right line with which to explore it and what you want to say. Somebody can watch it and decide they’re offended in thirty seconds. A lot of people just can’t read subtext.”
Nick: Fuck, man. I think we should be absolutely furious that none of us know really why we’re on the Earth. Again, this doesn’t keep me up at night…
Christiaan: Yeah it does!
Nick: …but I find that kind of funny… Does that not concern us at all that we, all of us, are flailing to an extent? I mean, I’m an optimistic guy. I actually am not a melancholy kind of dust-kicking dude; definitely not. I enjoy life, I enjoy all the fruits, I enjoy my earthly delights, but I find it insane how the majority of the population flails.
Christiaan: I don’t actually have a problem with not knowing why we’re here because I think that sets a nice life challenge of, just don’t be a cunt, and then when you die something good will probably happen.
Nick: Yeah, but that simplifies…
Christiaan: …But I also like not knowing. I like the idea that death is a complete fucking mystery and it makes me not afraid of death.
Nick: Man, you wouldn’t be afraid at all. You’d just be reset. You’d just be like a Buddhist about it. You’d be like, ‘fuck this, I’m just going to hit reset.’ I believe in reincarnation maybe. I don’t know yet whether or not I believe it because I want to believe it or because I do truly believe it. There’s a part of me that would gravitate to a Buddhist’s way of thinking than any other way of thinking just in terms of something makes sense about applying their spirituality or their religiousness. They don’t just have to believe it and be forced. That’s what I like about it. Long story short, that’s arguably the genesis of the Soul Mates device.
Christiaan: I’ll buy it. I buy that we’re reincarnated…. We want to be able to play with it where it makes sense. Like, in this season it allows us to touch on spiritual things, and spirituality is kind of a thematic thing that runs through the show…
Nick: And by spirituality – of the spirit, not any kid of particular spiritual thrust other than body, spirit distinction.
Soul Mates: Season 2 will premiere on ABC1 at 9:40pm on August 3, and in September, Seasons One and Two will become available in the US on NBC’s comedy portal, See So.
Click here to check out Part 1 of our chat with Christiaan and Nick. Click here to check out Part 2. Click here to check out Part 3.
