Her YouTube videos often garner an impressive seven million views, she chats casually with Instagram pal Channing Tatum, and she’s known for quizzing her horrified mum on everything from pubic hair to sex toys to amuse her 293,000 Facebook followers. Bree Tomasel is the first to admit her approach to life has never been ordinary.
In fact, the new radio host for ZM says it’s all the result of her unique upbringing on an apple orchard in Australia’s rural Queensland.
“My family all have the same sense of humour,” laughs Bree. “I was talking about this with my mum lately and she was like, ‘You have always been such a dickhead your whole life. Even when you were little, you were always playing pranks on people.’
“Our family deal with anything with humour. Even when my nan passed away, which was one of the hardest times in recent years, our whole family was at my nan’s place cracking jokes. That’s how we dealt with it.”
Growing up in Stanthorpe, in an isolated patch of the Sunshine State, Bree, 28, admits that family life was pretty idyllic. There was older sister Amber, 31, and a younger brother Aiden, 26, and the trio would drive around the farm in cars when they were just kids.
But for Bree, a self-confessed “girl geek”, the focus had always been on carving out a career in radio. And at 15, she begged her parents to be allowed to move to the bright lights of Brisbane to attend boarding school.
“I actually forced my parents to send me there,” admits Bree. “Even now when I look back, I think I was a weird kid. My mum says that I wanted a better education.”
After completing a journalism degree in Brisbane, Bree started to intern at her local radio station Nova Entertainment and, after a year of working for free, finally got a gig. But it was her life off the airwaves that was really getting her noticed.
At the end of 2016, Bree started posting videos of the awkward real-life moments that plague our existence, such as what it really looks like to get an Uber home when drunk. Back then, she’d be happy if they attracted a few thousand views.
But when she introduced videos that included her mum Dianne screaming in horror at her antics, she soon found the views clocked into the millions. And over the last few years, she has continued to ask her mum all things rude and crude, filming her hilarious reactions.
“She secretly loves all the attention,” says Bree. “But it’s never staged. And that’s what people like about them. It all started after my first year in radio and I had all this content that I was itching to do, but I couldn’t do it on radio as it was a bit naughty.
“It was my own thing that no-one was telling me what to do. It’s a great way to really connect with people and if someone gets a laugh out of it or if it changes their day even a little bit, then what an amazing thing to do! I’m addicted to that.”
And last year, a certain Hollywood hunk by the name of Channing started to follow Bree on Instagram after becoming a fan of her scandalous videos.
“What do you do when Channing follows you? You have to inbox him,” she laughs. “So I messaged him and was really casual like, ‘Cheers for the follow, mate,’ with a thumbs-up. He replied, ‘No worries, sis. I’m obsessed with you and your family, and want to come around for a family Christmas.’
“He was great and you know on your Insta stories how you can see who is looking? He looks at mine all the time. He only follows 300 people, so all the girls at work are like, ‘Can you put me on your Insta stories so Channing can see me?!”
Recently, Bree brought her trademark “idiot” humour to her new gig as the host for ZM’s Drive Show with Kiwi favourite Clint Roberts. She packed up her life in Australia earlier this year, much to her mum’s despair, and is now living in Auckland’s Ponsonby with housemates. “Mum’s already been over and is coming again,” smiles Bree.
It’s a big move, but the Aussie admits she’s grateful that Clint and his wife Lucy Slight have “adopted” her, and she now spends a lot of time with them and their two cats.
“We’ve been hanging out quite a lot. It’s kind of like an arranged marriage or something,” she giggles.
“But it is so important to have that relationship with your co-host. And Lucy is a gorgeous woman. So yeah, I’m definitely already loving my Kiwi adventure.”