She once eliminated The Bachelor on Celebrity Treasure Island. Now Brynley Stent is the one on a televised quest for love.
Having first burst onto New Zealand screens in Funny Girls, Brynley Stent has gone on to have a rich and varied television career. She’s worked on shows like Jono and Ben and Golden Boy, and starred in Shortland Street, My Life is Murder, Taskmaster NZ and Celebrity Treasure Island. But her latest venture, Bryn & Ku’s Singles Club, reveals a new side to the comedian, actor and writer, as she and close friend Kura Forrester travel the country on a surprising search for love.
Whether it’s a student party in Dunedin, a game of pool in a Stewart Island pub and or a black tie ball in Canterbury, Bryn and Ku travel far beyond their comfort zones to find romantic connections. The series is hilarious and heartwarming, but it’s also full of honest, vulnerable moments as the longtime mates reflect on what it is to be single in their 30s and 40s (“I’m a Cancer, there were a lot of tears,” Brynley tells The Spinoff). By end of their adventure, Brynley reckons her heart was full in ways she wasn’t expecting.
“I was a bit of a cynic going into the show, saying ‘I don’t really need to find love, it’s just a TV gig, I don’t really care,’,” she says. “By the end of it, I was like, ‘oh gosh, how nice is love?’”
Since Bryn & Ku’s Singles Club began, Stent says they’ve had “a beautiful mix” of responses from both singles and coupled-up people. There’s also been an unexpected side-effect for their love lives. “It’s weirdly become one giant ad for us both being single. You get the slide-ins of the DMs like, ‘hey, you’ve actively told everyone you’re looking for love, so here I am’.” Even My Life in TV couldn’t resist getting in touch, and asked Brynley all about her earliest TV crush, her love for a 90s dinnertime puppet and what it was like to send The Bachelor packing.
My earliest TV memory is… Sesame Street. The song that’s been etched into my brain for all eternity is that ‘1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12’ song. I was born at the very tail end of the 80s, so I’m a Sesame Street girl through and through, especially when it was the dark days. It was originally kind of grungy, not as colourful and flashy as it is now. It was kind of creepy. Mr Snuffelupagus looked scary.
The TV show I used to rush home from school to watch was… Pokémon. I was a huge Pokémon fan, and me and my brother were very close in age and we had to compromise around television. There was a lot of “well, we can watch Powerpuff Girls, as long as we watch Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles after that…”
My early TV crush was… Uncle Jesse from Full House, and this is very bisexual of me, but there were these two Android characters from Dragon Ball Z, a boy and a girl, and I found them both really hot. They were called Android 18 and 17.
The TV moment that haunts me is… An episode from Goosebumps called The Haunted Mask, where a girl puts a scary mask on her face. I’ve never been able to unsee that image.
The TV ad I can’t stop thinking about was… Getti, the spaghetti monster from the 90s. I just love him. I think he had fingerless gloves on, which is very confusing. He partially scared me, and partially I was enamoured by him because I love kooky creatures.
My TV guilty pleasure is… RuPaul’s Drag Race, without a doubt. It’s just a bunch of drag queens kind of going at each other. It’s so formulaic and so camp and trashy in the best possible way.
My most watched TV show of all time is… Friends. I used to go to sleep to it during drama school. I had this tiny little box TV that my grandparents sent up with me from Christchurch that had a DVD player built in, and every night I would put Friends on and fall asleep. I know it like the back of my hand, but I would say it’s now probably a guilty pleasure, considering it’s about six white people living in America at a very different time, with some questionable homophobic jokes peppered through it.
My favorite TV moment from my own career is… Sending Art Green home on Celebrity Treasure Island. It’s not that I don’t love Art. I love Art so much, but I was such an underdog in that season. I didn’t even know what I could do. I was like “I’m going to go home first”. Art was this behemoth in the competition, the favourite to win, everybody loves Art Green. He’s this huge, buff dude, and when I won, me and Chris Parker just looked at each other in shock. We couldn’t believe that this relatively unknown comedian sent home THE Art Green, the hottest man alive.
The funniest TV show of all time is… The one that makes me laugh the most is the Saturday Night Live Women’s Special with all the past female performers of SNL. They show highlights of their old sketches and do new sketches together. I’ve watched that so many times because it just makes me laugh so much. It’s got the old Debbie Downer sketch in it where they all corpse on national television.
My favourite TV project that I’ve ever been involved with is… Taskmaster NZ, without a doubt, with an honourable mention to Funny Girls, which gave me my foot into the industry. Taskmaster is fun because you’re encouraged to fail. It’s like you can’t put a foot wrong, because your failure can be a success, depending on how everyone else does. You get paid to turn up and play games all day, and then watch it all back with your friends and laugh. It was my dream come true. It’s sad I can never do it again.
The TV show I loved and wished I was involved with is… Succession. I think the acting and writing is absolutely insane. I could have played some rich cousin coming in there, being a bitch.
The funniest person on television is… Kura Forrester, without a doubt. I know I’m biased, but she makes me laugh the most. If we’re going international, I probably laugh the most at Kristen Wiig from Saturday Night Live and beyond.
The TV show I’ll never watch, no matter how many people tell me to, is… Breaking Bad. I feel stubborn because so many people have told me to watch it that now I’ve got to see how long I can live in this life without ever watching Breaking Bad. But I hear it’s great.
The last thing I watched on television was… Severance. It’s really good. I skipped last week, so I got to watch two episodes back to back, and it was a real treat.
Watch Bryn and Ku’s Singles Club here. New episodes drop every Tuesday.
