By Dov Kornits
“Basically, two guys sit in a tomb in the era when demi-gods were on the earth,” Soul Mates co-creator and star, Nick Boshier, explains of the concept behind the latest story addition for Season 2. “Hatshepsut is the pharaoh of the day. She is spawned through fornicating with Cyrus, a demi-god child with a bird head. Which is Ian Roberts by the way…”
Ian Roberts the ex-rugby league star, who was the first player to come out as gay and who has since gone on to study at NIDA? “Yep!! I was expecting him to be huge, and have a massive cock. Just be like Ian Roberts,” Nick answers. “Oh, he definitely does. It’s all in proportion. It’s the size of, literally, the width of my wrist. I mean, not only is he the nicest human roaming planet earth, and not only is he actually quite a demi-god himself…he fucking smashed it! He’s a good actor! Full of great ideas.”
“I saw it this far away from my face in one scene,” adds Soul Mates co-creator, star, and Boshier’s partner in crime and comedy, Christiaan Van Vuuren, placing his hand just in front of his nose to illustrate how close Ian Roberts’ penis came to his face. “I should set the story up a little more,” he elaborates. “There’s the one demi-god son and then Hatshepsut’s other son [played by Nick Boshier]. He’s like this bastard child who is a bit sick in the head. He’s like a Joffrey-ish type dude who gave his own mum his penis mummified for his sixteenth birthday.”
Nick: “Well, it’s not so much in the story. We don’t make a scene out of that…”
Christiaan: “But that’s the type of guy he is.”
Nick: “That’s the fastitidous, detail-oriented storytelling that we really wanted to develop.”
Christiaan: “So he’s this put-upon, semi-jaded, kind of dark bastard child who can’t interit the throne because he’s a bastard and he gets tasked with building a tomb for his older brother, this demi-god guy. He’s lived in his older brother’s shadow his whole life, and then all of a sudden, he’s given the job of building his tomb for him. He’s a bit like, ‘Fuck this. I’m going to build it how I want it.’ He goes about building it full of death traps and snake pits and fucking boulders and arrows shooting out of the walls. He has to team up with this slave who’s my character, a guy named Amram, who’s just trying to stay alive in the world of slaves, which is very precarious. So he gets tasked with building this fucking death trap and has to deal with all the standard workplace bullshit that goes on like, ‘How many snakes do you want?’ ‘What kind of snakes?’ ‘How are we supposed to get them in?’ ‘The fucking boys are really struggling bringing in wheelbarrows of puff adders’ and those types of things; important stuff.”
All this repartee illustrates Nick Boshier and Christiaan Van Vuuren’s relationship, and what each of them brings to the table as both writer and performer, whether it’s creating a scenario to riff on for Soul Mates, or their popular Bondi Hipsters online sketches.
“We pick a point in time and then play to the truth of that time but also fuck with it comedically,” says Christiaan.
“I am genuinely interested in the ancient world as an extremely broad concept,” adds Nick. “We recently put out a Bondi Hipsters episode, which is my favourite, where we’re talking about Flat Earth conspiracy. We go down this huge rabbit hole of conspiracies and esoteric candy…”
“But to me, that works entirely on the truth that there are people that believe in a flat earth,” adds Christiaan. “To me, the truth of that is that it’s taking a thing that, like Flat Earthers, is fully a thing, and there are a lot of people that believe in that, and finding the comedy angles on the truth.”
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.
Part four of our four-part chat with Nick and Christiaan will go live tomorrow. Click here to check out Part 1. Click here to check out Part 2.
