Comedian and actor Sieni Leo'o Olo, known as Bubbah, talks mental health breaks and why she got rid of her smartphone. Photo / Sylvie Whinray
There’s so much more to NZ comedian Bubbah than Tina from Turners, Greg Bruce discovers
The PR called me at the appointed time on Tuesday morning. “I have Bubbah on the other line for you,” she said. “Just hold on.”
I held on. I held on some more. I continued to hold on. I held on for quite a while longer. Eventually, I realised something had gone wrong. Still, I held on. I hoped nothing bad had happened. In my head, I ran through the topics we might talk about should she ever show up: Her famous incarnation as Tina from Turners, her outrageous decision to get a tattoo of her castmates on reality show Taskmaster last year, her hilarious short video series I Got You…
The PR came back on the line. Bubbah, she said, had gone. “Sorry about this,” she said. “I don’t know what’s happened.” Bubbah had been there and seconds later she hadn’t been.
It’s rare for a PR-arranged celeb interview to fail and, if it does, it’s usually sorted within minutes, so it was a surprise when the day passed with no further news.
It was 9.40am the next day before I again heard from the PR.
Unable to get hold of Bubbah on the phone, she was going to have to try and track the actor down in person. First stop, her workplace: Tony’s on Wellesley St. Tony’s! Of all the gothic locations for a missing persons story to begin, is there any more perfect than the city’s OG steakhouse and dark, unchanging wooden rabbit warren of meaty nostalgia?
The previous day I had been working on a mildly interesting print article about an icon of the car sales and advertising industries, chilled-out comedian and walking Taskmaster billboard. Just over 24 hours later, it appeared I was working on a true crime podcast.
But a few hours later, I got another email from the PR. Bubbah was alive and working at Tony’s. Nothing bad had happened to her, although something catastrophic had happened to her phone.
The PR and I had already discussed the phone when we were first scheduling the interview. It was a brick phone, a dumb phone, unable to connect to the internet or do any of the basic stuff we now expect from even the worst phones. It could not, the PR said, even send emojis.
As Bubbah was holding that phone to her ear, waiting to be connected to me for our interview, the phone had finally given up, many decades after it probably should have.
The PR told me Bubbah would be buying a new one, so we scheduled another call, but then I got a call from the PR asking if I would prefer to meet her in person. When I did, and Bubbah showed me her “new” “phone”, I understood why.
Her real name is Sieni Leo’o Olo. Bubbah is her nickname, but it’s what pretty much everyone has called her pretty much from birth. She is now 27, but perhaps the most seminal event in her life happened when she was 19, when she had a mental health event that she describes variously as “a break”, “a little break”, “a two-week break” and “a little blip in my life”.
It happened, she says, at her very first comedy show. She started thinking about how weird it was that people had come so that she could make them laugh. “In my head, I, for some reason, put scary music over it, and it became really sinister.”
She had no idea what was happening: “I was like [GASP]: What is that?” she said. “It freaked me out.”
The freaking out didn’t pass. She was still freaking out the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that. After roughly two weeks of freaking out, she was sitting in the living room in the house where she lived with her grandparents, when suddenly, and for no reason she can now identify, she snapped out of it: “I was like [GASP OF WONDER]: Look at the curtains! [GASP OF WONDER] I got to get up! And I’ve got grandparents! What was I doing?!”
In that moment, eight years ago, her life changed. She’s a completely different person now, she says. “Shit don’t bother me.”
That anecdote is extremely helpful in understanding Bubbah. Not just because it’s so obvious to anyone that’s met her that shit don’t bother her, but because it’s a great example of the strange angle at which she views the world. How many people have had life-changing moments in which their curtains play a leading role?
“That was life-changing for me,” she says, “Staring at my curtains, being, like, ‘This is so cool!’”
She felt that the story made her sound like a hippie, and felt the need to say that she wasn’t. She was just living what she believed to be a normal life.
“I’m just getting drunk in a garage,” she said.
Then she said that wasn’t the case either. She said she doesn’t drink any more. Then she added, “Not really”. Then she said she would drink if she wanted to. Then she said: “I don’t not drink”.
“I’ve grown up, man,” she said.
She used to own a smartphone. She got rid of it two years ago. Asked if that was a mental health decision, she said: “No, that was random. I just went off.”
She said she noticed her impulse to post something to social media every time something interesting happened, and didn’t see the value in doing that any more.
“There were just times that I was like, ‘I don’t need to post this. This is me. What a cool moment.’ And I didn’t want to post it. And then I didn’t want to post anything. And then, literally, the first week that I was off social media, I went to the laundromat, and everyone was face down. And that’s two hours – the washer, then the dryer. Two hours, everyone was head down, and I was like, ‘Hello? Helloooo!’”
Just like the curtains during her mental health break, the laundromat played a strangely significant role in the story of her break with her smartphone.
“It was literally the laundromat where I was like, ‘Oh, let me get off’.”
She finds it odd now that when she goes out with people, they’re on their phones instead of interacting with her, yet it’s her that’s supposedly “off-grid”.
“I think, ‘I’m the only one here!’” she says. “I’m the only one on it!”
She hasn’t owned a smartphone since the laundromat, and can’t imagine a future in which she will. She showed me her phone. I winced. It would have been like looking into the future, were it still the early 1970s. It had a numerical keypad beneath a tiny screen. The middle row of buttons didn’t work at all, and nor did random others. The phone was essentially useless for anything besides receiving calls.
A few days earlier, a Samsung product manager had demonstrated for me the brand new Galaxy S24 Ultra, which can do things like add missing family members into your photos and summarise long articles like this so you need never read them. I imagined that manager there with us, shaking with fear, using a pair of S24s to make the sign of the cross at Bubbah’s phone while screaming “The Power of 5G Compels You!” If Bubbah had owned a phone capable of recording and editing high-quality 4k video of the scene, it would have gotten her big engagement on TikTok.
The second season of her show I Got You has just been released on RNZ’s Tahi Platform and on @igotyou social media platforms. It’s called a “vertical”, which means it’s designed for watching on portrait mode on a smartphone.
I Got You tells the story of a character, played by Bubbah, who accidentally becomes a professional matchmaker, despite the fact she’s terrible at it. The show is of the length sometimes called snackable, and is perfect for it. It’s full of great lines and some strangely excellent singing, and it’s extremely funny, for many reasons, but the main one is that Bubbah could sit – still and silent – in a pitch black room and you would find it impossible to walk into that room and not laugh.
Fame being what it is, though, it’s not her brilliant show that she’s most famous for, but the iconic advertising campaign in which she plays Tina From Turners. She told me she was contractually not allowed to talk about it, which seemed strange, so I asked why, but she was contractually not allowed to talk about it. Immediately before speaking with me, she had done three radio interviews at which she was also asked about being Tina from Turners. “How did that go?” I asked. She looked at the PR. “Not well,” the PR said.
The reason her star is on the rise is the same reason she landed the role as Tina: She is funny and relatable. She sees life at a slant and she lives that way too. It also helps that she isn’t interested in being a star. What she’s interested in is family and community. She is doing much to democratise comedy. She frequently puts on free shows in South Auckland, where she lives. She once put on a free show in her Māngere backyard. She expected a small gathering. She got 250 people: “It was, like, wow, Polyfest,” she says.
“We’re a community in South Auckland, man,” she says of that show. “The Polynesians showed up.”
When Covid hit, she ran a competition for people to win a spot in the audience at one of five tiny shows she staged in five South Auckland suburbs: Māngere, Papatoetoe, Ōtāhuhu, Manurewa and Ōtara. The maximum audience size was 10 and venues included a barbershop and her cousin’s sleepout.
She doesn’t do it for the money. What would she need money for? A smartphone? Last year, she told Woman’s Day her dream was to put on a free show at Spark Arena.
“It’s like, the one up I have on the industry is my people,” she says. “Because there’s such a thing to come here [to the central city] and make it. I’m like, ‘We got magic over here. Why would we come there?’ That was my whole vibe for doing the backyard shows.”
Eight years ago, after emerging from her mini-break, she says, she began to think about her life roughly as follows:
“I’m like, let’s see where this goes. Like, let’s see where it can go and let’s see what happens when I do this. And then at the same time, it’s all out of my control. So that’s also amazing because you just never know … It’s like ... I think I’m just free.”
If there’s one thing to take from her story, it’s this. Because for all your Big Magic, Deepak Chopra, life coaching, positive affirmation, Power of Now visualising, the more profound and powerful realisation is that you’re not always in charge of your life. Dream big, make big plans and strive to do good, of course, but remember that life is, more often than not, something that happens to you while you’re staring at the curtains.
I Got You is available to stream now on RNZ’s Tahi Platform and on @igotyou social media platforms
Timothée Chalamet had long been interested in playing Bob Dylan.