By Dov Kornits
In the vein of their hilarious TV show, Soul Mates, which embraces the idea of reincarnation to tell four separate storylines from the ages, but with the same actors, we have decided to split our in-depth chat with co-creators/stars, Christian Van Vuuren and Nick Boshier, into four parts. “Our end game is that we wanted to make TV and films,” starts Christiaan, who arrives for our chat first. “We wanted to be seen as actors, writers, directors.” “It was our platform,” adds Nick Boshier once he joins us for tea on this chilly but sunny Sydney morning.
Both coming into the game quite late – Christiaan was selling advertising and Nick was managing the musician, Lior – the goal was to produce loads of content, post it on YouTube, find an audience, get discovered, and open doors. “I’m sure that fifteen, or twenty years ago, had I been in a similar position and made a similar decision, it would have been the short film, film festival route,” says Nick. “It would have been the audition route. It’s just what I had access to, so it was really chancy.”
The controversial Trent from Punchy was born, with the St. Ives-reared Nick Boshier taking the piss out of a Western Sydney wastrel. Soon after, the cartoon Beached Whale, went online, and later turned into the ABC show, Beached AZ. For Christiaan Van Vuuren, who grew up on the opposite side of town in Cronulla, time spent in quarantine for a bout of tuberculosis turned into The Fully Sick Rapper. “I started gathering YouTube subscribers, and because my brother [Connor Van Vuuren] just finished a couple of short films, he was like, ‘Bro’, do you have any idea how hard it is to actually get people to see the shit that you make? If I’m lucky, I get into a film festival and 3,000 see it…and that’s if you get five runs! Right now, you’ve got that many subscribers, and they’re gathering weekly. So, let’s just make more stuff and let’s just keep putting it online and this will snowball and will give us other opportunities.’”
Appropriately, Christiaan and Nick met at a YouTube conference. “I just saw Christiaan’s shit, and I was like, ‘Fuck me! That Sick Rapper video is good,’” says Nick. “It was just my kind of humour, and I creatively courted Christian after that. It was one of those things where I was like, ‘I’d like that person who made that stuff.’”
“I got home from the thing, and was just like, ‘I met this guy who made that Beached Whale cartoon,’” says Christiaan. “Connor was like, ‘you know he also did that Trent from Punchy thing?’ I’m like, ‘Bullshit!’”
When the Van Vuurens won a competition run by MTV to produce a TV pilot around The Fully Sick Rapper concept, they cast Nick in a small role, and soon after, the Bondi Hipsters were born. Quickly finding a massive following on YouTube with their heightened but highly recognisable depictions of a couple of Bondi Beach personalities, Christiaan and Nick were asked to come in and pitch ideas to ABC-TV. “We pitched four ideas,” says Christiaan. “There was The Bondi Hipsters show about them trying to launch their fashion label, a show about two cavemen doing everything for the first time, a show about two kiwi assassins coming over from New Zealand, and the futuristic time travel agency. We pitched all the separate shows, but we always knew that we really wanted to do a show with all of them together. We saved that for last. We went, ‘Or there’s this, which is Soul Mates, and it’s all these things together.’”
Soul Mates became one of ABC2’s biggest shows, and was a massive hit on social media for ABC-TV. It has sold to Netflix in the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. Season 2 will premiere on ABC1 at 9:40pm on August 3, and in September, both seasons will become available in the US on NBC’s comedy portal See So.
Part two of our four-part chat with Nick and Christiaan will go live tomorrow.
