What ever happened to the Bondi Hipsters?
Previously touted as the “sexiest straight male alive”, Nick Boshier, most recognised as being one half of the famous online duo Bondi Hipsters, is ready to go viral once again.
For the person whose job may one day require writing the official history of viral videos in Australia, a few notable side-splitters might require their own chapters.
Think Corey Worthington’s infamously surly TV interview. Or Clare Werbeloff, who will forever be known as the “Chk Chk Boom” girl.
And then there’s Bob Katter, pivoting wildly from same-sex marriage to an apparent scourge of crocodile attacks in North Queensland.
But a peculiar, low-quality 2008 cartoon about a whale will almost certainly have to be where the story begins.
Beached Az, as it came to be known, sort of happened by accident.
Three Sydney flatmates, 20-somethings who’d known each other since school, were hanging around, talking to each other in New Zealand accents — for no particular reason other than thinking they were funny.
One of them, Nick Boshier, started riffing on the idea of a whale explaining his plight to a seagull who’d dropped in to offer him a “chup”.
The others joined in. Someone whipped out a Handycam and filmed a snatch of dialogue. Soon after, they got a friend to knock up some animation to go with it and stuck it on the internet.
“It was just a dumb thing we did to amuse ourselves,” says Boshier, 37, who at the time was working as a music manager and volunteer DJ for a Sunday morning radio show.
“We sent the link to our mates, they sent it to theirs and that’s how it began to spread. We thought, ‘That’s cool.’ But when we checked later and saw it had 300 views, we lost our minds. The next day it was 10,000 — and it snowballed from there.”
New Zealand’s Flight of the Conchords blogged about it. Merchandise came next — 80,000 Beached Az T-shirts sold in the months after, and its choicest phrases entered the vernacular.
“Plinktun” was to 2009 as “Look at moi, Kimmy” was to 2002, or “Whassup” was to the year 2000.
At the time Boshier, who’d done nine months of an arts degree before dropping out and describes himself as “not the most academic egg”, had no ambition towards a career in entertainment.
“I didn’t consider myself an actor. I had no idea what I wanted to do — only an inclination to create.”
Yet off the back of what he calls a “quirky, pointless, 90-second cartoon animated not by professionals”, Boshier has gone on to become one of our most prolific comedic actors and screenwriters.
After quitting his day job to work on his first web series, Trent From Punchy, Boshier met another internet-famous screenwriter, Christiaan Van Vuuren.
Over avocado smoothies at a cafe in (fittingly, it would turn out) Sydney’s Bondi Beach, they built a web series around two characters Van Vuuren had conceived and begun workshopping with his brother Connor during a six-month spell in hospital quarantine with tuberculosis.
From the first two-minute episode, Bondi Hipsters quickly became a cult classic that perfectly skewered two yoga-practising, green-juicing, coke-snorting would-be fashion designers with sleeve tattoos and statement facial hair whose clothing line is too high concept to have a name.
“We wanted to make a pointy social commentary, attacking the hypocrisy we all have as humans, within the prevailing culture of a trendy, well-to-do suburb,” says Boshier. “We’re both huge f*cking hypocrites — and so are those characters.”
The show — first filmed from a friend’s couch — eventually moved from the fringes of the net and directly to the airwaves when the ABC caught notice.
There were fashion spreads in GQ, an Australian Story episode, and award wins. One magazine named Boshier the “sexiest straight mate alive”, noting his status as a minor gay icon.
“It opened a ton of doors,” he says. He and Van Vuuren landed another show, ABC2’s Soul Mates, in 2014; Boshier’s short film Jeremy The Dud arrived three years later, and featured a cast comprised predominantly of disabled actors. That project hit particularly close to home.
“I took a long time to decide, thinking ‘How do we make it well?’” says Boshier.
“But my dad worked in disability his entire life, so I called him and asked what he thought. He said, basically, that people with disabilities have exactly the same mental, emotional and spiritual capacity as the able-bodied, even if the machinery works differently. So just don’t patronise. And that’s what got me over the line.”
In the end, it became a tribute to his father, who died last year. As such, Boshier says, it is the project in which he has the most pride.
“All the people [my dad] worked with adored him dearly, so I feel like it honours something that was incredibly important to him.”
Still, it’s those insufferable hipsters who will probably always serve as his most powerful calling card — and yet, asked if he and Van Vuuren ever plan to bring them back, he replies: “We’ve always thought about killing them — do we do an episode where they get run over by a bus or shot? But the older they get, the more tragic they’re going to become...”
So, that’s a maybe. In the meantime, Boshier and those long-ago flatmates have dusted off Beached Az for 10 new episodes to mark a decade since its breakout — each focused on an aspect relating to ocean health.
“I’m quite a green thumb and an environmentalist at heart,” explains Boshier.
“So I’ll do what I can to bring light to it. And we’d chatted about another series, but we needed a reason beyond it just being fun. The idea of contributing positively to a cause made sense.”
That said, looking back over the past 10 years and a stardom that has gone from viral to verified, he quips: “It’s never not been fun.”
The new season of Beached Az is slated to air on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube next month.
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