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- Want to Apply for Big Brother 2022? Marley and Other Housemates Told Us How to Get Noticed
Want to Apply for Big Brother 2022? Marley and Other Housemates Told Us How to Get Noticed
Channel 7
This season of Big Brother Australia has had it all. Hectic challenges, alliances and blindsides, friendships and betrayals.
We’ve been hooked from the jump, and as this season gets down to the pointy end, we’re already upset that we won’t be able to tune in every week to see more, more, more (Alexa play “Gimme More”).
Anyway! With applications for the next season open now, we thought we’d take the opportunity to ask contestants Tilly Whitfield and Ari Kimber, finalist Christina Podolyan, and the winner himself, Marley Biyendolo, for their advice for getting on the show. For a friend, we swear.
Turns out, they all had different strategies about what makes for a good audition, which is probably what made it such a good season to be honest!
On the one hand, Tilly’s advice was to “be yourself”.
“I saw a lot of people’s real personalities come out toward the end of the show and they’d been faking their personalities the whole show,” Tilly explained.
“In a house with 400 cameras, there’s only so long you can fake it,” she added. “The producers see through it, the housemates see through it. There’s literally no point, just be yourself.”
On the other hand, Ari’s advice was “just to be a full-blown psycho”.
“If you’re a kind, sweet, innocent person, no one’s going to look at you,” he said. “Producers are looking for drama and fire and people who are confrontational and are a little bit, you know, controversial.”
Ari also said that opening with something shocking and attention-grabbing would help make potential housemates stick out in the producers’ minds.
“My audition video opened with me calling the producers peasants and saying I didn’t care how their day was because I didn’t care about them,” he shared. “I was like ‘Hi peasants, shut up and listen!’
“So I think you just have to say something that’s going to get their attention, don’t be a boring loser!”
Asked what he thought of Tilly’s advice to just be yourself, Ari was quick to disagree. “No!” he exclaimed. “Producers don’t want real, if you’re your real self, that’s boring!
“Be a psycho,” he reiterated, before adding: “I mean, I’m definitely a nutcase in real life, so draw on the parts of your personality that are a bit out there, and blow it up a bit. Be someone more interesting than yourself.”
After that, we had to know: how much of Ari’s onscreen personality was just for the cameras?
“In real life, I’m a very blunt person, I’m very harsh, I mean, I love drama and gossip, I’m quite manipulative in order to get my own way, but I was probably a bit more theatrical on the show,” he mused. “I’m probably a bit more subdued in real life. But in the house, I like to put on a show.”
We love to see it.
As for Christina, who made it all the way to the Final Three despite the target that was on her back for most of the game, she echoed Tilly’s sentiment, and explained that “you don’t know what they want, they want one of everything”.
“These interviewers are so trained to see right through you,” she said. “There were 55,000 people last year, 55,000 audition tapes, they can see right through you if you’re not being genuine and who you are.”
She also said that you should approach your audition like you would a one-on-one conversation with a friend, and not be nervous. “You’re talking to another person and they just wanna see how you’re going to act in a house full of people,” she said.
Her other advice was to “be unpredictable” and to find a way to “make yourself unique”. “Think of how you can stand out from the other applicants,” she said. “Tell a story, take the listener on a journey so that they can really see the kind of person you are by the way you’re talking.”
Finally, our 2021 winner Marley had this to say: “Always be yourself, but throw some quirky things in there to catch someone’s eye, be a little different and unique, because that’s what they’re looking for.
“Throw in the interesting things that have come your way in your life and cross your fingers and have a crack!”
