Brody Wellmaker
@brody_wellmaker in his new apartment.
-Film/Tv-
I never would have guessed Brody’s journey. Ever. And based on our chats recently, neither would he. But he is more then his 7.5 million TikTok followers.
During the last year, I have gotten the opportunity to reconnect with Brody and basically strong-armed him into sitting with me to do this interview. But being the gracious dude he is, he welcomed me into his home and opened up just a bit about his last year.
I think the thing I take away from his journey is that we can all find light in darkness. For some of us it is really hard, others it is easy, and for most it is based a little bit on luck.
“What will you take from this time?” It is more than a question I ask almost everyone. It is a challenge to all of us.
Interviewed 2.18.21
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Casey: Ok, great. I'm going to put that there so I can hear you real good. So first question, how are you?
Brody: I'm good, all things considered with the pandemic and then everything blowing up out of nowhere. Yeah, I'm doing really well. I moved into this place on January 16th, so everything has been kind of a whirlwind of events. But now it's starting to settle, and now that it's settling and I'm getting into the routine of my day-to-day life, I have an opportunity to breathe. So, yeah, I'm doing OK.
Casey: Yeah. So was before January 16th kind of crazy?
Brody: Yeah. In addition to needing to look for a new place, I just signed with a marketing agent and I was getting a lot of brand deals, so I had to organize those and keep up with TikTok videos and keep up with Instagram videos. … And then I was looking for an acting agent, as well. I just signed with People Store, so that's done. It was just a lot of stuff jam-packed into a couple of months, so I was kind of scrambling.
Casey: How's your family?
Brody: They're great. I've got two older brothers, two younger brothers, and a younger sister. Mom and dad are still together, still happily married. My oldest brother and his wife just gave birth to their first child, the first Wellmaker. So, I'm an uncle now!
They had a little scare, though. She didn't do well upon being delivered and she had to stay in the hospital for almost a month, a month and a half. Then she was starting to recover but because she was in there for so long, the doctors and nurses ended up screwing up the medication. That's when my brother and his wife were like, "We've got to get her out of here." The longer people are in hospitals, the more prone they are to experiencing mistakes like that, so they took her out. But she's doing really well now. She's fully recovered.
My other older brother, Josh, is doing really well. My younger brother, Dakota, is doing really well. (My sister) Faith's also a TikToker and she had her first video go viral maybe a week ago. She got, I want to say, five or ten million views on a video. So her following jumped up. She's at, I think, almost 200,000 followers. So I was really happy for her and happy to see that. And youngest brother's doing well. He's in school. Yeah, everybody's good.
Casey: This question may seem kind of dumb, but just to clarify for people, what have you been doing during quarantine?
Brody: So in March, the restaurant that I was working at, Texas Roadhouse, closed down their dining room, but they were still doing curbside and to-go. I was bartending and waiting tables pretty much full-time. But I started TikTok right when the restaurant closed down. Normally, I would have planted myself in front of a computer and gamed all day because I'm a really big gamer, but at the time there was nothing that was interesting me, whatsoever. I couldn't find myself playing any game for longer than 30 minutes without getting bored. So I was looking for something to keep me entertained. I had also been wanting to get back into the acting industry, which is one of the reasons I grew my hair out. I was trying to rock a different look because the traditional, short-hair boy-next-door-look was incredibly competitive. So after taking a break from acting, I wanted to get back into it.
I asked my sister about TikTok because she had been on it for a little while. She gave me the rundown of what it was like, very similar to Vine. I remember making Vines casually, back in the day, but I was looking for something to keep myself entertained and exercise my creative side. So I started making TikToks during the pandemic and it blew up all of a sudden and my growth exploded. Then Roadhouse ended up re-opening in like April or May. I went back to work for a couple of months and then I quit in October, right after I signed with my marketing agent. They ended up finding me a deal with Dial Soap, and I did a campaign for them on TikTok, which was like, "Why am I waiting tables now?" So I left Roadhouse around October and then I've been full-time content-creating ever since.
Casey: That seems to be filling your creative cup, but is it doing it for you? You're with People Store now, and the goal is obviously to go back and do, I'm assuming, film and television and theater and whatever. Is TikTok still doing what it did for you in March when you started?
Brody: It is, in a sense. I think right now, with the following that I have, it's just the expectations. Not to say that my followers do this to me. I kind of do it to myself. I feel there's a really big expectation of me to come up with relatable content that makes people laugh on a daily basis. Even though the videos can range anywhere from 10 seconds all the way to a minute, it's still stressful at times. But at the same time, what job isn't? It's keeping me satisfied creatively. I'm kind of revisiting my roots. What got me started in TikTok was lip-synching and doing Disney scenes and turning them into live-action shorts and some other favorites, but I always enjoyed lip-synching.
I've never really considered myself the most creative writer, so now I'm getting to this point where I feel like I'm almost experiencing writer's block with coming up with original and relatable content. It's just nice to go back to a default. The problem with it is that it doesn't perform well, though. I don't think that's on me, it just has to do with the platform. But yeah, it's keeping me entertained creatively. This is the most fun I've ever had doing something as a job full-time. But it's not quite the thing that I want to do. The idea and the goal is to use my following and my platform to help catapult my acting career, so hopefully that'll happen.
Casey: I feel like you've gotten more traction than any other actor in Atlanta, in terms of moving towards a career path since we've all been stuck at home.
Brody: The thing that I need to do now is figure out the best way to approach people. I've got showrunners that follow me — showrunners on Starz, showrunners on HBO Max and Disney Plus. I've got writers that follow me. I've got producers that follow me. But I haven't really found a way to approach them. I think, at a certain point, I'm going to have to understand that a huge portion of the business is networking. I think everybody understands that, so there's nothing wrong with reaching out to somebody and being like, "Hey, I saw that you follow me. You're in LA, I'm in Atlanta. But if you ever find yourself in Atlanta or if I find myself in LA, I'd love to treat you to a cup of coffee or something." And just come across as me, and not be so afraid of rejection. Because worst case scenario, someone's like, "Thanks, but no thanks."
I think that's the next step for me as I patiently wait for auditions from my agent — to be better about networking and not be afraid of being turned down.
Casey: It sounds like there's been a lot of work and a lot of positive focus on creating, right? What's been difficult during this year?
Brody: I've never been this stressed out before in my life. Each day, depending on if a video does well, I gain anywhere from 20,000 to 100,000 followers. I think the highest amount of followers I've gained — because I had a video go really viral — was 250,000 followers in one day. So with each day, more and more people are following me, and not only following me but following me because of one specific video that they've seen. I do a variety of stuff on my channel, so it gets stressful knowing that, "OK, I'm doing this niche and I'm appealing to this crowd. But then (there’s) this crowd over here who followed me originally for this niche, they're like, "Well, when are you going to bring more of this stuff back?"
The longer I do it, I come to terms with the fact that there's not going to be any way that I can please everybody. That was really hard for me to accept because I've always wanted to make people happy. I've always wanted to please people. So when I found out that, "Dude, there's no way that you can do this. You'll eventually get back to it. You'll eventually do an upper-half duet. You'll eventually do a scene as Amber. You'll eventually go back to Vampire Girl." In a way, it helped me understand that even though people want to see it, it makes them appreciate it even more when they have to wait. Then when they finally get it, they're like, "Oh, yes!" They get a couple of skits in that niche, and then when it goes away they end up craving it again. So it's definitely been extremely stressful.
Like I mentioned earlier, (I feel) like I've got a lot of expectations on me. I don't like letting people down, so the struggle for me has been trying to come to terms with that, and then also find a balance in my life, having time just to myself. I spend a couple hours every day not worrying about TikTok, not worrying about Instagram, not looking at the views, the comments, or the likes, and just playing video games. I'm settling into that routine where there is a period of time where I do work and I do stress and I do worry about what it is that I'm doing, but then starting to treat it more like a job, and having time where I put everything away and I focus on me. I exercise, I play video games, I watch a TV show or movie, or I've been cooking a lot for myself too — cooking and spending time with my family.
Throughout the whole experience, the biggest struggle has been definitely dealing with the stress of it all, because it came so fast. It came out of the blue and just slapped me in the face, and I was like, "Shit. What do now?"
Casey: It's like a runaway train.
Brody: Yeah, absolutely.
Casey: What do you miss about before? Because your life was very different.
Brody: I miss socializing. I just miss everything not feeling so uptight, you know? I really wish that I could see my niece right now. I'm not holding it against my brother or anything like that. I'm holding it against the situation and this pandemic. I don't know if things are ever going to go back to the way that they were. I don't think that they will.
You know, I don't have a problem with wearing a mask in public. I think that it's a healthy habit, in general, to practice. But everything feels so wishy-washy and so uptight, as it should. But I miss it not feeling that way.
In regards to my life, I miss my ex. I miss Alex very much, but that's honestly it. I don't miss working at Roadhouse. I don't miss not knowing what the fuck I'm going to do. I was 29 years old and I've done all sorts of stuff. I did a couple of months of IT recruiting, and that felt very adult-like working that nine-to-five job, and I fucking hated it. I did. I was trying to act full-time. I did a little bit of professional theater and I did a little bit of television. I was working at the Woodruff Arts Center, at the time, in the box office.
Casey: We were working at the same time.
Brody: Yeah. Then I did Twitch full-time. So I've done all sorts of stuff.
I was feeling like I was having these waves of success, and then not success, and then success. It was kind of a pain in the ass, like life was just toying with me. … So I'm really happy and grateful for where I'm at now because I've been on this rise. I think even if something does happen to Instagram or TikTok, it's not going to be a scenario where I go back down. It'll probably be more like a plateau and then maybe, eventually, I go back up.
I certainly don't miss that feeling, that sense of panic, of not knowing what I was going to do. I felt like I was getting kind of old, not that thirty is old, but thirty is an age where I think everybody has that thought, "Man, I got to figure my shit out. I've got to figure something out." And I just think I'm so lucky. I'm so lucky to have stumbled upon something that blew up because I didn't go into it with any expectation. I didn't go into it thinking that I was going to be an influencer, but it happened. And it's a line of work that I really enjoy, not something that I want to do forever.
Casey: It's not really the nature of that career path.
Brody: One that falls into your lap? Yeah. And the whole "being an influencer" thing. I don't even consider myself an influencer because I feel like I don't influence anything. I think people who vlog and are followed for themselves — if people follow Brody to hear Brody's opinions, then that would make me an influencer, I think. But because all I really do is comedic content with occasional horror stuff, I don't consider myself an influencer. I consider myself a content creator.
Casey: “Influencer” does seem kind of weird.
Brody: Yeah. I mean, what do I influence? I don't influence anything.
Casey: I don't know. I hope you're not influencing people to watch more Twilight.
Brody: I would hope not too.
Casey: What are you going to take out of this? What do you think you'll look back on in and be like, “Dang, I learned this hard?"
Brody: Hmm. I don't know. What would you say? That's kind of a hard question.
Casey: I don't know. I mean, obviously, you've had a big relationship change. Obviously, a completely new house. You quit your job, you became a TikTok person that makes things that everybody else watches. Your life is very different. Like you said, if you plateau and you do decide to move on from TikTok and you start doing something else, whatever that is, hopefully a Netflix series…
Brody: That would be great.
Casey: That would be fucking great. What do you find yourself thinking about a year into Covid? That's a better question, probably.
Brody: I think one major thing that I learned was the importance of self-love because of the relationship that I lost and feeling like I have all these expectations and all these eyes looking at me. It's really important to find time to really focus on your mental and physical health. That's just my personal opinion. A lot of other people would say otherwise, but for me — and especially with where I want to be — I think it's really important to not be so insecure, mentally and physically. I was unbelievably insecure. I still am, but I was so insecure for 28 years and having this time to myself has really given me the opportunity to reflect upon that and really focus on what I can do to better myself and to be more confident and to be more understanding, to be more patient. Not with other people because I think that's honestly all I've given my whole life and it's what I'll continue to give — patience towards other people and being really understanding and empathetic. But I have not been that way towards myself. I have been very critical. So, in light of everything that's happened, it has helped me understand the importance of that.
