Brittany Broski Doesn’t Care What You Think of Her. “If You Don’t Like Me, F**k You.”
Brittany Broski genuinely doesn’t care if you don’t like her because she knows her worth.
The content creator, who has amassed more than 7.5 million followers on TikTok and 2.4 million subscribers on YouTube, built an entire brand online after going viral in 2019 for a video of her trying kombucha for the first time. Now, five years later, Broski has interviewed celebrities on numerous red carpets, featured iconic guests on her medieval-themed talk show Royal Court (namely Daisy Edgar-Jones, Cole Sprouse and Charli XCX) and topped podcast charts with The Broski Report, in addition to her day-to-day content.
And she’s nowhere near done with her goals of expanding her presence across social media and establishing Royal Court as an “absolutely necessary press stop for anyone promoting anything,” similar to late-night talk shows.
“The beauty of the show is through all that ridiculousness, you get to actually relax and be yourself. It’s a very human-to-human thing,” she adds of her show.
Below, Broski gets candid about navigating her public and personal life online, and shares what her perfect off day looks like, what she hopes viewers take away from her content and where she sees herself in five years.
A lot has changed for you in a short time span, just five years. What do you make of everything?
The universe has a plan and I trust in the universe, but it’s also a mixture of ambition and discipline with divine timing. I think that it all mixes together in like a nice cocktail that if it’s for me, it will find me. And I really feel that way about, you know, I went to college, I did the corporate job, got fired, got a new job, like I got certified in my job, and I just think that never would have been enough for me, like so many people. And I’m just very, very lucky. … And I wanted to turn it into something bigger than I just make YouTube videos once a week. It’s like building a company, building teams, building IP, a brand. It’s a strange thing turning yourself into a brand. But on the internet, you have to do that, you know, you have to commodity yourself, which is dystopian but also it’s the name of the game. It’s Hollywood.
Sharing your life online can be really heavy at times, with people constantly commenting on everything you do. How do you manage it all so it doesn’t become too overwhelming?
When a singer or an actor promotes themselves, they’re promoting a product that they’ve created or that they’ve starred in, a project that they were a part of in some way. When I self-promote, it’s me. It’s the Broski Report, which is just me. It’s Royal Court, which the whole idea of the show is that it’s a celebrity and me. So if I get a negative comment or if someone shits on the project, it’s a bit harder to separate. It’s not that they didn’t like the product that I put out, they didn’t like me and what I was showing to the world. And that was very hard for me at first because it’s hard to… I’m such a people pleaser, I’m a Taurus. It’s hard to change everything about yourself immediately so that people will like you and that’s just a never-ending spiral.
With Royal Court, what’s your reaction to seeing how much the show has grown in a year, especially with some of your most recent iconic guests such as Daisy Edgar-Jones, Cole Sprouse and Charli XCX.
It is so validating because from the beginning, I said there are only a few legitimate paths that an internet personality can take. And luckily for me after doing a bunch of red carpets and hosting opportunities and interviewing, I found that I really enjoyed it and that I have a personality type that makes people feel comfortable. I wanna see the human behind the character. Because when these people go on [Jimmy] Fallon, when they go on Seth Meyers, when they go on whatever, you have to perform to a certain extent, there’s a live studio audience. It’s like the big song and dance of it that everyone knows. The beauty of an internet show is it’s not that immediate gratification of like, you make a joke and the audience laughs. It’s like, trust me to have done my research on you, the guest, that is respectful, that is understanding and that really gets to the heart of these people because that’s the point of what we’re doing. The reason people love Hot Ones is because Sean Evans does such a good job asking questions and it makes the guest feel like, “How did you know that?” Like I’m talking to someone who really understands me. That was the goal of Royal Court, in such an overly ridiculous set, I make them wear a cape and I make them wear a hat. The beauty of the show is through all that ridiculousness, you get to actually relax and be yourself. It’s a very human-to-human thing. … It’s all a beautiful harmony of my favorite things, my favorite aesthetic, which is medieval, and a good conversation with a celebrity.
You’ve also had some pretty memorable video collaborations over the years, namely with Trixie Mattel. Do you prefer collaborating with other creators or your solo content more?
Collabs are fun when it’s with your friends. Like when you have a genuine friendship with another “famous person” and you get to film a video together, it feels like making a music video with your middle school friends, where it’s like we’re having so much fun, why don’t we just film it? Those to me are the best collaborations. Collaboration in a different way is on Royal Court where I guess you could refer to that as a collab, but it’s more of an interview. So I would much prefer that than like tying yourself to someone else’s brand because the internet takes that and runs crazy with it and that’s not what I want. Especially as a woman online, a lot of people are so hypercritical of that sort of thing. It can never just be in good fun and a lighthearted thing. It always has to be way deeper and more serious and it’s just not. I mean, I’m a comedian at the end of the day.
As someone who has so much of their life shared online, how do you find a balance between the private and public moments?
It’s gotten easier the more I do it. There are things where I’m like, I would never share that, but there’s still a compulsion to because you are so tight-knit with your audience and you want them to have that access to you. Once you give it, you cannot take it back, so it’s just about being discerning with what you choose to share. And there are times that I’ve definitely overshared. And then there’s times that I’ve been so proud of myself, like looking back six months and thank fuck I didn’t talk about that on the Broski Report because that lives on the internet forever.
What does a perfect off day look like for Brittany?
I would have stayed up till 4 a.m. the night before. Some sort of Red 40 snack in my hand. A diet Dr Pepper. I wake up around 1 p.m., 2 p.m. Close all the windows, I don’t want to see the sun. I will watch maybe some air dry clay videos on YouTube. I love that. They’ll do it to like some ambient music, I’m into that. I might do an art or craft. I’m into reading again. I’m binging some series right now. Probably at least $100 worth of DoorDash throughout the day and then I’d stay up to 4 a.m. again. Literally, my perfect day is I don’t go outside, I don’t see the sun, I’m horizontal for most of it (Laughs). I’m eating garbage like a raccoon. And that is very genuinely the way that I unwind because if you’re on all the time, just being a vegetable on the couch is really nice sometimes.
You’ve also become such an influential voice for the younger generations, and I feel like your relatability plays a huge role in that. What do you make of that and do you feel any pressure knowing people are looking up to you?
I find it strange to be honest, to be applauded for doing something that is natural. It’s not like I’m doing it on purpose. It’s not like I came into this being like, “I’m gonna show you a real bitch.” That was never the goal. I started making videos to make my friends laugh and then look where we are today. I’ve never really changed that mindset. So I think that it’s within the larger context of different trends that the internet has experienced or just the entertainment industry has experienced where you’re coming from the Marilyn Monroe and ’90s supermodels and Pam and Tommy and Kim Kardashian of all this. Like these are celebrities because they are famous and we worship them because we’re American. That’s the closest shit we have to royalty in America is celebrities. That bubble kind of popped during COVID and it allowed the rise of people like me, like a Drew [Afualo], like a Tefi [Pessoa], these women who are just, for better or worse, raw. And it’s like, if you don’t like me, fuck you, I genuinely don’t care. But the people who do like me, I’ll ride for y’all the way you ride for me. It’s this sense of community and almost parasocial friendship. … I don’t know when the relatability thing is gonna burn out.
The past five years have been such a wild ride for you, but where would you like to see yourself in the next five years?
My immediate answer is like, physically, I would like to split my time between Texas and here [Los Angeles]. I miss home. But career-wise, I would love to have Royal Court be an absolutely necessary press stop for anyone promoting anything. I would love to have it turn into like a Late Night With Seth Meyers or like a [Tonight Show Starring Jimmy] Fallon. I think keeping it on YouTube is very important, but that could change. YouTube is the most used streaming platform above Netflix, above Hulu, it has the most users. So I’m very happy that my show is YouTube-centric. It’s free, it’s not behind a paywall. I completely self-finance. I’m very proud of what I’ve built. I would love to have Royal Court turn into what I always wanted it to be, which is a staple.
There also seems to be a thirst for more women late-night talk show hosts.
I don’t want to see women put into the archaic structure of late-night. I wanna see women play to their strengths and not try to fit the mold of what a white man’s done before because, yeah, that worked for them, but I also don’t want to be beholden to network ratings. I wanna just let the voice of the people determine what we do.
You’ve also had a lot of memorable moments over the past five years, between meeting Harry Styles, interviewing Hozier and attending the Paris Olympics, just to name a few. Is there a specific moment that holds a special place in your heart?
It is too many to count. It’s psychotic. I don’t know how I’m still walking. Meeting Harry was — and when I say this I mean it — the best day of my life. Actually on par with that would be meeting Beyoncé. Meeting Beyoncé and Harry were the two best days of my entire life, and I’ll get married one day maybe and it won’t top that. There are things right under that, like meeting Cole Sprouse was crazy because I loved him since I was 13.
If someone asked you what makes Brittany Broski Brittany Broski, how would you respond?
Probably the forehead, the big bug eyes. … What makes Brittany Broski? I think that I know myself, I know myself more than anyone could ever claim to know me. That at the end of the day, I love myself and I know my talents and I know my worth. You’re told a lot as a woman that you should be humble, but it’s such a radical sort of display of I know what I am and am not willing to accept both on a business level and on a personal level. And this generation, specifically of the people that follow me, I think are really attracted to that because if they lack it inside, it’s so refreshing to see someone who’s like, yeah, I can stand up for myself.
