Boman Martinez-Reid always wanted his own TV series. So the Canadian actor and creator made one himself, and another one, and another one, on YouTube, on Instagram, on TikTok, then signed a TV deal and was cast in an A24 show. Each project will leave you in no doubt of one thing: You’ll be hard pressed to find someone who understands reality TV as well as Martinez-Reid.

With a combined 3 million followers on social media under the Britney Spears-inspired handle @bomanizer, Martinez-Reid has gone consistently viral online for his hilarious, precise parodies of reality TV — namely 2020’s “cough heard round the world” video. But you might have discovered Martinez-Reid’s work through his outstandingly accurate, Kardashian-inspired TikTok series The Bodashians, made with his best friend Eden Graham, which has even people who don’t watch The Kardashians locked in.

Now guest-starring in A24’s Overcompensating and the star of his own Crave TV show, quite literally titled Made For TV, Martinez-Reid embodies the new power players in entertainment, creators and actors blurring digital and traditional media and giving multiple formats a try. In Made For TV, he even plays an exaggerated version of himself, trying various reality television genres from dating to competitive drag, attempting to perfect them all.

Mashable sat down with Martinez-Reid to unpack how he finds comedy in appreciating format, his pop star dreams, how the entertainment industry is finally taking the internet seriously, and exactly how he keeps up with The Bodashians, his TikTok series that now exists within its own universe.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

There’s so much to talk about, including your latest project, but I will start where you probably know I’m going to start. Many people will know you from your TikTok series, The Bodashians. It’s how I came across your work, and honestly, I didn’t watch The Kardashians until I saw your videos. 

I get that a lot, I get that a lot.

Now you’ve got Ncuti Gatwa singing your praises for it on Fallon, doing impressions of your impressions. When did this all begin, the vocal fry of it all?

I have been doing this now for years. When I was in high school, I wanted my own TV show; that was my dream. I was obsessed with The Real Housewives at the time, and my brother one day was like, ‘Well, if you want your own TV show, why don’t you just make it?’ And I was like, oh my god, that is so genius. I didn’t think of it like that. So I created a YouTube series called Reid It and Weep — Reid like my last name, so I was already a genius in marketing at a very young age. I was just making this TV show that was based on The Real Housewives, it was me and my friends, and we would cook up these dramatic storylines. They were 15-minute-long episodes that would span a season, and we made it for four seasons. Absolutely nobody saw it, but that’s OK. It planted the seed for what was later to come. 

In 2019, I started making TikToks… I was like, OK, I’m making these videos, what is going to set me aside from everybody else? And I remembered, ‘Oh my gosh, Reid It and Weep.’ I have this talent for parodying reality TV. How do I take that concept and condense it into a minute and make it shareable for everybody? In 2020, I started making the “but it’s reality TV” series. It wasn’t quite The Bodashians yet, but it was these videos where I would take these mundane problems and turn them into these dramatic reality TV scenes so everybody could relate to it, and then also everybody understood the joke.

So I started doing that. It got really dramatic, and I started going very viral with it. Two years into it, my friend Eden, who’s in many of my videos…

The best! We love Eden!

We love Eden. She was like, ‘Why don’t we do a Kardashian voice?’ This was right when The Kardashians Hulu show had just come out. And I was like, ‘Why? I don’t watch The Kardashians. I don’t care about The Kardashians.’ But she was like, ‘It could be funny if we just try it.’ I was like, OK, because it’s fun to try new things, of course! So we started doing that and we’ve never stopped. At this point, I think we’ve just posted episode 61, which is crazy.

“Yes, I parody ‘The Kardashians,’ but ‘The Bodashians’ now is its own universe. It has its own rules. It makes no sense, but it makes so much sense at the same time.”

It’s been a very, very interesting experience trying to constantly reinvent the exact same video, but I’m having a lot of fun. Still two, maybe three years later, now into The Bodashians, still having a lot of fun, still exploring what it is. Recently, I posted a video, I was getting a wax figure, and I was just so proud of that video and how it felt like its own thing. It’s like, yes, I parody The Kardashians, but The Bodashians now is its own universe. It has its own rules. It makes no sense, but it makes so much sense at the same time. And much like you said, people don’t watch The Kardashians, but they watch The Bodashians, and that is what matters to me.

You’ve perfected this art of parodying formats that people don’t actually know is a format yet, like your getting ready for the Met Gala video, your Architectural Digest videos, they’re spot on but they’re such niche formats. How do you recognize these elements? Is this back to your love of reality TV and format?

Yes, I think it’s a format thing for sure. The format is where I find the comedy. A lot of my comedy comes out in the edit. I still edit all of my own videos, and I feel like there’s a reason for that, because I feel like that’s the comedy. Me and my sister or my mom, or Eden, we will sit down to film a Bodashian video, and I’ll explain to them what the video is, and they don’t get it. They never get it. And oftentimes I’m just telling them what to say, because I’m the only person that will understand how to manipulate the phrase “there’s something to be said” 80 times and make it make sense in a way that people will watch and be like, how do they still understand the narrative of this video? So for me, it is very much a format thing. 

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I also really love celebrity culture. I think it’s so ridiculous. It’s so fun to make fun of the way that celebrities act in these videos. It’s just not real. Like, Architectural Digest is really just a home tour. It’s like when you go to your friend’s house and they give you a tour of their home. But nobody acts like those celebrities act. What I love to point out is that we are all accepting these concepts as a fact. Like, we accept the way that these reality TV shows are edited with just blatant staring for three minutes in between lines as a fact. We don’t think about these things, and I love to turn the mirror around and show people this is what you’re actually watching.

Yes, that blank pausing is in a lot of your work. It’s even back in one of my favorite of your series, which is JayNeigh and Seighdruah and The Girls Room.

Yes, JayNeigh and Seighdruah!

Absolutely, you know what? There’s comedy in silence. There’s one JayNeigh and Seighdruah Girls Room video where we just stare at each other, and we try to cry. I think I say, ‘Should we cry right now?’ We try it, and it’s one of my favorite moments that we’ve ever shared. Then she starts crying, and I start making fun of her. It’s just so ridiculous. 

And it’s a style of comedy that you brought to your own TV series, Made For TV, where you dabble in every style of reality TV format. When you were making this show, which genres did you learn the most about that you didn’t already know?

Good question. Well, we did sports, and I am not an athletic person at all. Each genre, each episode, I just want to be the star of the genre, and we were trying to figure out if we do a sports episode, who’s the star of sports? When I watch a sports game, all I can hear is the announcer, the caller, or the commentator. So that’s what I was trying to get to: how do I do that perfectly? Turns out that it is really hard. And I was calling a children’s game, which is an easy game to call, but you have to talk nonstop for, like, two hours. Who can do that? I don’t know.

The news episode that we did was also very challenging…because I went to school for radio and television, and news was a big part of that. Growing up, I always thought that being a news anchor would be my fallback if I couldn’t make it as an actor; it’s like I had to be on camera somehow. My parents were always like, ‘Just be a news anchor,’ as if that was an easy thing to accomplish. Now looking back, there was no way I was ever gonna get there.

You know, just fall into it!

Just fall into it! But that was more challenging than I thought. 

However, the one that was the hardest to accomplish was the drag episode. That’s the episode that when we were creating the show, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna ace this. This is gonna be the easiest thing I’ll ever do.’ I knew that I had that confidence within me for a reason. When you watch the episode, you can tell by the end, it’s like, oh, I had that confidence all along. But what you don’t see — I mean, I think you see some of it in the episode — is the panic that I was experiencing because what was really happening was I was going to do drag for the first time in front of my mom and dad, which was the scariest thing that I didn’t realize I was scared of. But as it turns out, you know what? When drag queens are like, when you put on the makeup and you become a character, it’s a real thing. That is a drug. I don’t know what type of makeup they put on me, through osmosis, it sunk deep into my skin, and I became a fierce drag queen. Drag is hard. I will say that it’s not a walk in the park.

You’re pivoting into movies; you’re guest starring in A24’s comedy drama series Overcompensating created by Benito Skinner. What can you tell me about your role in this, and how did this all come about?

This all came about so fast. I want to act. I think I’m an actor first, and in this industry, it’s been an interesting ride as a creator, trying to transition over because I feel like you have to work hard to maintain the image that you’re not an influencer. No shade to the influencers, that’s a very, very hard job to do every day, but I am a creator and actor first. So over these last few years, I’ve been hustling and auditioning and grinding, so I think that was part of it. 

The other part of it was Benny [Skinner]. Benny has such an eye for creators, and he wants to platform creators that he appreciates. I’m not going to speak for him and say that he appreciates my work, but we’ve worked together in the past, and I like to think that when he saw my tape, it felt like there was some sort of like, how do we put Boman in this show that’s already done? It all happened very fast. Of course, it’s not like a humongous role, but I will say, showing up on that day and filming was so fun. The cast and crew made me feel so at home. I was so, so excited to play the character that I played in that show, and I’m so excited for everybody to see it because I’m not playing a character that anybody would expect me to play. I had a lot of fun with it.

This line is blurring between digital and traditional media. Mashable culture editor Crystal Bell published a feature about how creators are becoming the new power players in entertainment. Have you come across much conversation around this new era of Hollywood and the blurring of the lines between YouTube, Twitch, Netflix, A24?

Much like yourself, I think it’s so interesting. I think that, finally, the entertainment industry is meeting people where they are at and respecting what people are watching. Now seeing all of these actors and musicians promoting their music online and prioritizing that is so, so refreshing, because I think it gives validity to so many different mediums.

“Finally the entertainment industry is meeting people where they are at and respecting what people are watching.”

Of course, there are the big shows like Hot Ones that have paved the way for that importance in the industry. But then there are also so many people that I know, people that I’m friends with, who have podcasts that have gotten Chappell Roan or huge, huge celebrities to do their podcasts. It’s just a testament to, as I said before, now we are finally ready to meet people where they are at, and also, it’s a testament to where we are going. With respect to my career, it feels interesting. I’ve had this dream about being on TV and being an actor, and that is still my dream, but I live in this duality of, well, I’m already doing the thing that people want me to do.

Whoops!

I know! So I feel like I have to navigate both, but I think there’s a joy in that. It’s so exciting to be on this side of it and be creating in an environment where nine times out of 10 you’ll be successful with whatever you’re doing, because it’s the internet. And that’s where everybody wants to be right now.

In my career, I really want to be able to do everything. I told my team the other day, I want to be a pop star. And I’m like, how do we figure it out? How do we get there? Anything feels possible at this point because of where we are on the internet. Last summer, I had a song, “I Have a Thing.” Surrounding my song, I had this fake documentary, but now it’s becoming like, OK, how do we make that a real thing? Because now with YouTube and longer format and longer videos, you have so much room to play in terms of character work and how you create a character. Like, what does that Bomanizer pop star character look like? How does it exist on Hot Ones? How does it exist in its own documentary or on a podcast? How do we have fun with that type of Andy Sandberg character? So I’m really excited by where we’re going in terms of the internet and what’s possible because I feel like the rules are slowly being peeled away. 

Congratulations on your song, by the way. I know you’ve created a character there, but that was all of us.

It’s relatable, for sure. 

You just feel like playing it out loud to leave a situation. 

Sometimes you’ve gotta go, and that’s what the song’s about.

Well, I don’t mean to play your song back to you right now, but I feel like I should let you go into your day.

I think we all have a thing, don’t worry.