“Does anyone have a plastic fish?” Celeste Barber is poolside, in a pair of bathers and a silk robe, exuding sunniness on this 14-degree day. After pocket-patting and giggling among the assembled crew for The Weekly’s shoot, it seems no one has a plastic poisson to hand. Ever the improviser, she throws a rubber thong into the swimming pool so she can hunt it down with the pool net. Quarry caught, she holds the net up like a fisherman with a fresh flounder – and hams for the camera.
Her mum, Kath, has dropped in for the shoot at the Blue Water Motel and Beach House in Kingscliff, just below the Queensland border. “She was just naturally, giftedly funny all the time,” she says. “And so is her sister and so is her father. So you get them together and it’s interesting.”
That happens a lot because Celeste and her family live walking distance from Kath and dad Neville, and older sister Olivia, not far from where we’re shooting today.
“She was never a show-off as a child,” says Kath. “That’s the funniest thing.” Instead, she says it was an end-of-year dance concert in nearby Tweed Heads when Celeste was maybe four years old that planted the performing bug. Fresh from tapping her way through New York, New York with the other tiny tots, she ran to her mum at the side of the stage and said, “Mama – they love me!” Kath says, “That was it – we couldn’t get her off stage.”
Celeste’s career today flits unrelentingly from stage to screen to social media – and now even supply chains as the co-founder of BOOIE Beauty. Celeste recognises that the pace she’s working at “is a little crazy”.
“But that’s the actor in me. [You think] every job’s your last job. When a job comes up, you take it. And that felt well and good when I was getting one job every three years, but now it’s like, I need to stop doing all the things.”
From the outside, it seems there’s no stopping Celeste Barber – comedian, actor, author, podcaster and beauty mogul. Last month she finished up the Australian leg of her Backup Dancer tour, which took in 24 cities in the US and Canada earlier this year, and the feature film Runt, which she shot late last year in Western Australia, was recently released. And in between there are her #CelesteChallengeAccepted videos, in which she skewers the antics and unattainable beauty standards of celebrities and influencers including Bella Hadid, Kim Kardashian and Gwyneth Paltrow. It was thanks to this social media lark that the one-time jobbing actor hit global stardom and has now amassed almost 10 million followers on Instagram.
Back in 2018, three years into posting the videos, US designer Tom Ford made her a proposition. “He was the first person in the industry to literally put his money where his mouth was [and say,] ‘Want to work together?’” He flew her to New York and the hilarious results – in one parody video the pair pash on a train – gave her fashion industry clout and showed the world that Tom Ford had a sense of humour.
She thought that people might be getting bored of her celebrity videos, but she still gets reminders of why they’re an important part of her repertoire.
“This very lovely young girl came up to me at the airport yesterday,” she says. “She was beautiful. She went, ‘Can I get a photo?’ Absolutely. And then she went, ‘Thank you so much. You helped me so much with my body image.’ And she walked off and I went home like, oh, God, it’s still needed, you know?”
Back at the pool, Celeste pulls out a supermodel swagger along its edge – and very nearly falls in. The team draws a swift breath before everybody – especially Celeste – falls about laughing.
With the first shot done for the day, the team heads back to the Beach House. A white HiAce van pulls up outside, driven by Celeste’s husband, Api Robin. Their sons, Lou, 13, and Buddy, 10, tumble out, one clutching a football, the other leading their labradoodle-terrier cross, Ricky Baker – named for the main character in the Taika Waititi film Hunt for the Wilderpeople. Api takes over dog duty while the boys immediately start throwing the footy around in the front yard.
“Oh my god – my husband and son have turned up in the same T-shirt!” says Celeste, noting the matching Quiksilver tees, before greeting the trio with hugs. These are soon swapped out for alternative looks for our shoot. When Lou appears in his outfit, Celeste immediately hollers, “You look wicked!” Going over to check on him, she asks, “Do you feel comfortable?” With a yes from Lou, Api and Buddy soon emerge in their ensembles, and Celeste ensures that everyone is happy with their looks before they join her in front of the cameras.
You get the feeling that the boys are nonplussed about their mother’s career. Celeste confirms this suspicion, adding, “When I say things like, ‘I’m gonna go hang out with Kevin Hart’ – then they care. They just see me working and they see us creating this life and they see the work that goes into it.”
Celeste and Api have put the work in from the beginning of their relationship. They’ve been together for 21 years, meeting at a Sydney pub where Celeste was working, aged 21. Api was 30 and had two daughters, Sahra and Kyah, then aged two and four. “I was a young 30,” says Api, “so I just think we were fairly similar in age [despite the gap].”
Api was living on the mid-North Coast and the couple started a long-distance relationship, and Celeste stepped into being a stepmother to the girls.
“It was super hard,” says Celeste, looking back on that time. “I love those girls so much. They’re in their 20s now and they say to me, ‘I don’t know how you did that’.” She says the four children are “obsessed with each other – it’s very sweet, their relationship”.
Celeste says that she and Api are “pretty strict parents”, adding that she might be the stricter of the two. “We back each other up. Just putting boundaries into place for these kids is really important.”
Raising boys in a world where masculinity is in the crosshairs brings with it its own issues, which the couple say they are tackling head-on. Celeste calls Lou and Buddy over. “I have a quick question,” she says to them, before asking: “What’s the word of the day?”
In unison, they reply: “Consent.”
“Thank you,” she says before sending them off to play with the footy again. “How good are my boys?” She concedes it’s an approach she picked up from US comedian Chelsea Handler and her nephews – but it works.
“So we’re already in those sort of heavy conversations. I point things out to them about the differences between men and women. It’s hard, though, because I love men and I’m a feminist and my husband is a feminist, and we are raising feminists. It’s so tricky to [explain that] patriarchy means that everything is skewed in the favour of men … to understand it’s not an equal playing field.”
That kind of openness has been a part of the couple’s dynamic since their earliest years together. Celeste was working multiple jobs while trying to get her acting career off the ground after studying at the University of Western Sydney’s Theatre Nepean, while Api was working as an arborist.
“We had a conversation really early on about our hopes and dreams and how we see ourselves,” says Celeste.
“I said, ‘I really want to work in this industry. It’s my dream. And I’m going to actively work toward that’. And Api was like, ‘Well, I really want us to have a family, and I would love to raise our children and support you in that’. And we decided, let’s have this big life together. People are often like, ‘You’re so lucky to have Api’ – which, obviously, I am – but [they mean] ‘a man that’s happy to stay home while you go and do everything.’ We have so many friends who are stay-at-home mums … ”
“ … and I get pats on the back for doing all the things the other women do,” finishes Api. “I see it. I get it. But that’s inequality.”
There was a time, back in 2019, when Celeste’s career was really taking off in the US, when the family considered relocating to the US and started looking at properties in Los Angeles. But then COVID happened, along with the realisation that “we don’t want to raise our kids in America”, says Celeste.
Ultimately, the reason that the relationship works, says Celeste over lunch of a chicken banh-mi, is simple: “We’re just desperately in love with each other. Sometimes to a fault.” Timed to perfection, Api reaches over to wipe some hoisin sauce from her chin, and they both laugh at their own expense. “We just love each other, so we will make it work. It’s super lucky, especially now, getting the success that we’ve got. There’s no way it would be this great if I was doing it on my own. I’ve no interest in that at all.”
Celeste has her eyes locked on the lens, her gown billowing around her as she walks towards the photographer, cool as a cuke. She is flanked by Api and Lou, both carrying surfboards that Api shaped by hand. Inaudible to the crew, Lou poses a question to his mum.
“Did you hear that?” she asks everyone when they reach the end of this take. “Halfway through the shot, he asks, ‘What’s for dinner?’” Laughing at the inherent comedy of the situation, she swiftly pulls him in and asks him, “Do you want butter chicken?” A conversation ensues between Celeste and Api about what’s in the fridge, like so many other couples with kids.
Celeste has built a career on her relatability. And it’s on full display even at the photo shoot. Some of those on set are close friends who are also part of her team, including hair stylist Brad Mullins, who recently chopped Celeste’s hair into a short bob and is tending to her locks again today. Kath says her daughter’s friends really ground her. “They’re just lovely people, and they’re all so down to earth.”
“I have to like the people I work with,” says Celeste. “Especially if this is going to take me away from my family, it needs to be with people I like.”
Celeste is adamant that while she always wanted success, fame was not the goal. Finding success – and with it, fame – as a late bloomer is “100 per cent” a positive. “No one needed a famous 20-year-old Celeste,” she says. “Success to me, in this industry, is working, not fame. Fame is a by-product. I really don’t like it. But I think if I was younger … I would have been the greatest brat.”
Another by-product of finding success as a late bloomer is a genuine appreciation of her audience, something that Celeste never takes for granted.
“People that come to my shows, they organise babysitters and they organise flights and they organise their girlfriends and they have drinks before. It’s an effort to get there and they spend money to see me. I see them. I get it.”
Her audience was also a driving force behind her desire to launch BOOIE. (The name is a spin on the nickname she has always used for her sons and stepdaughters before them.) Her ambitions were clear: “I want it to be good quality at a reasonable price. For my audience to be able to afford it and love it and wear it every single day.”
She wanted it to be for women of all ages and to keep things simple. “People are going to Sephora and are like, I don’t know where to start. I’m having an existential crisis in Sephora! I just want lip gloss! It’s too much.”
The range has only five products, and one of the hero products, BAM! BAM! BAM! Lip, Cheek and Eye Tint, is a one-product-fits-three solution. Celeste has had the idea bubbling away for a few years, working on everything from the design to the colour scheme, down to the checkerboard motif on the packaging. “I love checkerboards because they’re soothing for an ADHD brain. They’re just very clear, clean and decisive – everything I’m not.”
A lunch with friends in Byron Bay reintroduced her to Claire Greaves, who earlier this year exited activewear label P.E Nation, the brand she co-founded. When Celeste told her about her idea, “She just said, ‘Well, I would love to in any way be involved in that’. Until then, it was just in my head. And then Claire came on board and turned it into a business.”
The Weekly’s shoot takes place the day after BOOIE’s website went live – the Bloody Delicious Hydrating Tinted Illuminator in Champagne had already sold out in the US, while the Rosé shade of BAM! cleared out in Australia a day later. Such is the everywoman power of Celeste – and those 10 million followers.
She’s so passionate about the brand that she has fully funded the project. “Because I’m not having some old investor who’s on his seventh wife and she’s 24 and she just really likes blue mascara, so I’ve got to make blue mascara … I’m not doing it.”
Having a sense of control is something that Celeste has come to relish, especially in an industry where actors are at the whim of directors and producers and someone else’s vision. “That’s why I love touring because I’m the boss. I choose when I want to go. I choose what the show’s going to be. I don’t answer to anyone.” That said, she’s also happy to be a cog in the wheel of someone else’s project. “I love getting a script and a call sheet and showing up and going, ‘This is fun!’ I’m lucky – I get to do both.”
Finding that sense of balance in work as well as life is something that Celeste says she’s getting closer to. “Balance. What a fun word! It’s different for everyone as well, isn’t it? It’s just a mental shift for me. I’m retraining my brain around that, because I cannot continue at the level that I’m at and think, ‘It’s fine! I’ve got the adrenaline! I’m excited!’ And I also don’t really want to – 2022 burnt me out a lot. We shot [Netflix series] Wellmania and then did a world tour. It was too much.”
Celeste is on the front steps in a blazer that matches the doorframe. Ricky Baker is at her feet, looking every which way but at the camera. “It’s hard,” says Celeste, smooshing the pooch’s face in her hands and going nose-to-nose with him. “People think it’s fun and easy, but it’s hard.”
Ricky Baker gets there eventually. But Celeste makes it look like a breeze.
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