On mocking celebrities now that she is one

Celeste Barber – a quadruple threat as a comedian, actor, wife and mother – recently had to contend with one of those slice-of-life moments every high-profile celebrity with a social media following north of two million must inevitably come to grips with.

Her 12-year-old son came home from school with bad news: “My friends have found you on TikTok,” he said, matter-of-factly. “You’re not weird, it’s just weird for me.”

“And I was like, yeah, that’s fair enough,” Barber replied. “But also, you fly business class now, babes, so you’re good.”

There is no doubt, upon meeting Barber, that she’s a down to earth, happily married mother of four, including two stepchildren. She has a lot on her plate, but home life comes first. She’s only a couple more kids and blonde bangs shy of Carol Brady.

But there is also no doubt that Celeste Barber, as a social media phenomenon and friend to the stars, is simultaneously living an extraordinary life, like the Alexis Carrington version of Walter Mitty, in which it takes an Amazonian effort to keep her feet on the ground.

The 42-year-old comedian has just embarked on a two-month North American stand-up tour, ahead of returning to Australia for a two-month national tour. On top of that, she has a guest part in the second season of hit comedy, Colin from Accounts.

Like many things in Barber’s life, she willed this role into existence. In that sense, she’s like The Secret with a sassy retort. As it happens, Colin from Accounts creators and stars, Patrick Brammall and Harriet Dyer, are friends of Barber’s and when the first season aired Barber enjoyed it so much she resolved to be in it.

“I called Patrick and Harriet and went, what have I got to do?” she says. “It was so funny. These guys are some of my closest mates and they’ve written one of the best shows on TV. I pitched all these ways that I could be on it.”

The trio became friends during what Barber describes as their formative years. It started when Barber and Brammall worked together on the comedy series The Letdown, which ran from 2017 to 2019. “He’s just always working and brilliant and clever and funny,” Barber says of Brammall. And she met Dyer when they both worked at the box office at the Seymour Centre, a Sydney theatre.

Of course, the Celeste Barber story begins even earlier, when a 17-year-old kid from the Gold Coast landed in Sydney with stardust, and a bit of grit, in her boot heels. She enrolled in the University of Western Sydney’s theatre program but almost immediately found it a struggle.

“I was struggling to figure out what the f— to have for dinner, let alone what my intention in a scene was,” Barber says. “I was like, I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“I have ADHD, so the whole focusing thing was really, really hard for me. I found drama school to be quite difficult – I’d always just make snippy remarks.”

CELESTE BARBER

Salvation came unexpectedly in the form of Genevieve Mooy, who was one of her teachers but also had roles in the films The Dish and Thank God He Met Lizzie, and television media satire Frontline. To Barber, however, Mooy became the reason drama school – and a lot of other things in her life – made sense.

“I have ADHD, so the whole focusing thing was really, really hard for me,” says Barber. “I found drama school to be quite difficult – I’d always just make snippy remarks. I was the student who’d sit at the back, whispering, being disruptive.”

One day, Mooy decided she’d had enough. “She pulled me aside and said to me, ‘You need to stop doing that, it’s annoying, it’s disruptive. But the most annoying thing about it is that it’s funny, but you’re not letting anyone hear it. So all you’re doing is disrupting the space and not giving anything.’”

It was sage advice: if you’re going to say something funny, say it loudly. “I’d always been like, ‘I’m a hard student, no one likes me.’ But she was the one who said, ‘If you’re going to do it, hit the timing properly.’ She gave me this dressing down, yet it was a note as well.”

It would turn out to be the most impactful lesson of her training. “Comedy is confidence, and if you’re going to say it, yell it, let us all laugh at it or let it crash. Whatever it is, have a better intention behind it.” That notion has defined everything that has come since.

Many people see Barber as someone who sprang into being via her Instagram account, in which she mimicked celebrity social media posts. But long before social media was even a thing, Barber had a role in the medical drama All Saints, playing paramedic Bree Matthews.

It was not a big part, but it had her working alongside Wil Traval, Virginia Gay and Mark Priestley, who became close friends. “It was kind of fame by proxy, because I wasn’t a regular in the beginning,” Barber says. “I had a scene every other episode and then I Lisa Rinna-hustled the shit out of that and got a regular role.

“It was a massive deal for my mum and my dad and their friends, like, ‘She’s on All Saints.’ But when it came to fame as such, it wasn’t a thing.”

Instead, she would achieve fame – extraordinary fame, as it happens – decades later by gently mocking Hollywood A-listers at their own game. To make it even weirder, some of the people she ridiculed have become good friends. Which begs the question, how do you mock a world while standing on a precipice above it and not risk falling head-first into your own parody.

“It can be tricky,” Barber says. “I think getting success later in life helped – as they say, overnight success 23 years in the making – because I know the hustle, I know what it takes, my intentions become really clear.”

In fact, she says, her intention now that she’s famous, is “not to be famous. At all. I’ve never, ever [wanted it] – I’m a very socially anxious person. I understand fame is a by-product of success in this industry, but I just f—ing hate the word. I’m a very authentic person.”

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Barber’s home life is fairly straightforward. Barber has been in a relationship with Api Robin for more than 20 years. They married in 2013 and have two children, sons Lou and Buddy, and Barber is also stepmother to Api’s two adult daughters, Darah and Kyah.

Despite this regular domesticity, there are still a lot of pinch-me moments. At the time of our interview, for instance, she’s packing for her flight to the US, where, in addition to her comedy tour, she’ll be hosting the Fashion Los Angeles Awards, returning to a stage she shared in 2019 with Lady Gaga. She’s friends with Tom Ford and Cindy Crawford. And Drew Barrymore is a fan.

“My intention has always been to work and to make people laugh,” Barber says. “I have real respect for people who are at the top of their game, and success to me looks like work. It doesn’t look fake. And now that I’m in, I’m just planning on blowing it up from the inside. That’s what I’m slowly doing.”

Perhaps the thing that has come most to her is an ease within herself that is striking. There is, for example, a clear line between the performed self and the real self. Neither is wholly Celeste Barber, but looking in the mirror, the 42-year-old understands who she is. “That’s something I’ve been learning about myself,” Barber says. “Other people’s perception of me is very different to my perception of me.”

Her on-stage self, Barber adds, “seems really cool and confident, which is totally different to how I find myself. I think I’m getting there more as I get older, but that’s the one point of departure for me, for sure. There’s a lot of turmoil going on inside, but you’d never know.”

The hard bit for Barber is living in the intersection of several complicated universes: her comedy takes on brave topics like the way the media portrays women’s bodies; her fame is a by-product of social media; she’s a mother of children grappling with these things in real time.

To some extent, Barber says, it feels like body positivity was a phase. “I feel as though the fashion industry’s kind of like, ‘Oh, thank god we got through that. We played the game, we put Ashley Graham on the catwalk a couple of times, and now we’re good.’

“I really do not think we’ve won that battle,” she adds. “And the conversation doesn’t open up, it’s always quite targeted. I always get asked about my body. Ashley Graham gets asked about her body. Lizzo gets asked about her body.

“But no one’s asking any of those Victoria’s Secret models what regime they go through. That’s never asked of models, because that’s what women are expected to look like. Until we’re talking to everyone about how they look, we should talk to no one about how they look.”

At the centre of the issue sits the bugbear of most modern ills: social media. Barber’s two younger children do not have social media accounts, but her adult stepdaughters do. “I always say to my kids about their phones, it only has the power you give it. You have to remember that it’s a highlight reel of someone’s life. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s a magazine.”

The schedule of her US tour is brutal, but Barber doesn’t mind. She doesn’t see herself as a stand-up comic in the traditional sense, so she doesn’t “test” jokes in clubs and refine them for a tour. Instead, she says, she treats each tour more like a one-woman show.

“We rehearse and rehearse and rehearse, and then I go on stage on opening night and hope to f— people laugh,” Barber says. “I’m all right with the endurance part, I’m quite a workhorse. Once we go, I’m good. I work and work and work. I’m happy to do that.”

Though many comedians find the stage a solitary and uncertain space, Barber says she’s become comfortable up there. “I absolutely love it because I know my audience, who have followed me for all these years now,” she says. “I love going out on stage and seeing all those women essentially going, ‘Hi, you’re here.’ I really feel that.

“To be able to do whatever you want [on stage], that’s a really nice feeling. I’m quite a perfectionist, especially when it comes to my work. So, I try to be freer on stage. And when I am, it’s the absolute best. Not having to answer to anyone except the audience is pretty exhilarating.”

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Barber’s career, so far, seems split into her early life as a working actor, followed by the burst of global fame as an Instagram personality and comedian. What happens next for her professionally could be framed as her third act, though she’s not entirely sure what form it might take.

“We all are authors of our own story,” she says, then pauses. “I get to a point sometimes where I look at people I work with and I’m like, ‘Can you tell me what to do?’ Because I don’t know. Like, there’s just a lot going on and I don’t know what’s next.

“I’m going to live until I’m 130,” she adds, laughing. “That’s my plan. I’m going to be a centenarian. But also, I’m not. I’m 42 and I’m not ready to be middle-aged either.”

In Barber’s immediate future there is a new television series, Codependent, an eight-part comedy/drama in which she stars as a marriage counsellor Darcy, an old-school romantic tackling other people’s unhappy marriages. She also has a movie, Runt, described in its publicity as a “heartfelt and hilarious contemporary Australian family film”, coming out later this year.

“I think the next chapter, for me, will involve working smarter, not harder,” Barber says. “I work really hard. And because I have international success, I’ve got to be away a lot. I wouldn’t say I’m grappling to keep up, but there’s a lot that goes into maintaining it.

“I want to work a bit smarter and make the most of the success I have.”

The second season of Colin from Accounts airs on Binge from May 30. Celeste Barber’s Backup Dancer tour begins in Australia in August.

Fashion editor, Penny McCarthy; Hair, Brad Mullins using Oribe; Make-up Filomena Natoli; Fashion assistant, La La Ryan

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