Karl and Tony’s bromance laid bare
It’s TV’s unlikeliest friendship - and now breakfast show rivals Karl Stefanovic and Tony Armstrong have crawled under the bed covers together to pay homage to John and Yoko in a revealing new portrait during their “first public outing.”
Stellar
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It was during the pandemic that the bromance between Karl Stefanovic and Tony Armstrong really kicked off.
In an exclusive shoot for Stellar, taken on the morning of The Logies and published in Stellar today, the breakfast TV rivals have gone public with their friendship courtesy of an unlikely image.
Searching up “iconic photos of celebrity couples” Stefanovic was greeted with a shot of John Lennon and Yoko Ono in bed and knew instantly that he and Armstrong could
recreate that same magic.
“Tony, and I have known each other for a few years now and we have an understanding that if one of us rings the other and says: ‘Do you want to do something?’ we don’t need to know the full context of the idea because the other one is duty bound to say yes,” Stefanovic explains of convincing Armstrong to be the Yoko to his John.
“We were both in similar situations where we’re at our homes alone, and so on Friday nights we’d FaceTime and have a few beers and take our shirts off. We got to know each other in that weird prism of that weird time,” the Today Show host tells Stellar about how the duo became friends.
It was him who made the first move, messaging the former AFL player to tell him he admired his work when he joined ABC morning show News Breakfast as a sports presenter in 2020.
“He was just being a nice, older person in the industry who reached out,” explains Armstrong, who went on to win 2023’s Bert Newton Award For Most Popular Presenter for A Dog’s World. “It’s so nice to know you have people in your corner even though they might not be under the same roof.”
That’s why Armstrong was only too happy to agree to his Nine Network rival’s suggestion that he play the Yoko Ono to Stefanovic’s John Lennon and recreate the iconic couple’s 1969 “bed-in” shot (below) for Stellar – although being photographed in the arms of the 2011 Gold Logie winner was a further reminder to Armstrong of how much life has changed since his rapid rise to fame this past few years.
“It was surreal,” he said with a laugh as the shoot wrapped up.
So, what other gauntlets have been thrown down in those calls?
“A lot of it is more private stuff,” Stefanovic jokes.
“This is really our first public outing.”
See the full shoot including all the Logies photos you won’t see anywhere else inside The Sunday Telegraph (NSW), Sunday Herald Sun (VIC), The Sunday Mail (QLD), and Sunday Mail (SA) this weekend.
Originally published as Karl and Tony’s bromance laid bare
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