Troye Sivan, the most famous teenager you've never heard of

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This was published 9 years ago

Troye Sivan, the most famous teenager you've never heard of

Perth teen idol Troye Sivan had a Hollywood gig at age 13, a lead role opposite John Cleese at 14 and a recording contract on his 18th birthday - all after a career "failure" at 12. How, exactly?

By Benjamin Law
Updated

To most shoppers out at Perth's Murray Street Mall, 19-year-old Troye Sivan probably looks like any other local teenager - albeit an elvishly pretty one - out running errands with his mum and little brother. But to girls of a certain age (say, 12 to 17), Sivan seems to exist on a different plane altogether. Sporting his trademark quiff and oversized T-shirt promoting Tumblr, he could be a good 100 metres away and still the girls somehow sense him, the way birds detect unseen disturbances in their immediate environment.

Soon enough - in Topshop and City Beach; outside Fossil and the newsagency - Sivan is surrounded by teenage girls in the process of thoroughly losing their minds. To be fair, most of them are lovely and sane, asking Sivan to pose with them in selfies before running off for a private group squeal. But on other days, Sivan's fans have proper, pituitary-induced meltdowns. Some scream at his face point blank, while others shed hot, silent tears.

Last Halloween, fans tracked down Sivan's home address and waited outside the front door, calling out tauntingly, "Trick or treee-eeat?" Troye's younger brother Tyde - who has a face that belongs in Dolly magazine and is fast becoming famous in his own right - deadpans that it was more like "Troye or Tyyy-yyde?" The brothers spent the evening hiding indoors, held hostage in their own home. Later, Sivan tells me that this kind of behaviour is why he avoids being near local schools after 4pm. Sivan's mother, Laurelle, adds that she's in the process of having their home de-listed from the White Pages.

As Laurelle and her sons go up the escalators at David Jones, she whispers to Sivan, "Look." Down by the fragrance section, a primary school-aged girl clutches her mum's hand, staring at Sivan as if she's seen Jesus, or a well-groomed unicorn. Ever the vigilant teen celebrity, Sivan runs back down the escalators to beckon her over, as if to say, "It's okay."

Troye Sivan wants to conquer old forms as well as new media.

Troye Sivan wants to conquer old forms as well as new media. Credit: Cybele Malinowski

As Sivan and the girl pose for a photo, her mother smiles at us, happily baffled. "Sorry, I don't have any idea who youse are," she says. "But clearly you're someone very exciting for my children."

If you don't know who Troye Sivan is, either - never heard of the guy - then congratulations. You are officially old. (Don't worry: I fell into this category before writing this story, too.) Or, at the very least, you're not a teenage girl or young gay man living in the developed world, the two main demographics obsessed with this South African-born, modern-day triple-threat (singer-songwriter, actor, vlogger) from Perth.

You're also not one of Sivan's 3.1 million-plus YouTube subscribers who follow his weekly vlog updates, 2.4 million Twitter followers, 2.1 million Instagram fans, 1.3 million Facebook followers or his myriad fans who bought his first major record label EP (the über-catchy yet infuriatingly unpronounceable TRXYE), which rocketed to No. 1 in the iTunes charts in 58 countries. (Note: 58 countries roughly represents a third of the countries in the world.)

It also means you haven't walked through Sydney's Central Station or hopped onto Melbourne's trams lately, which have been emblazoned with advertisements for YouTube featuring Sivan's other-worldly eyes - long-lashed; almost too big for his face - staring at you like some serene, benevolent version of Orwell's Big Brother. And you're definitely not a member of the Time magazine editorial team who proclaimed Sivan to be one of the world's 25 most influential teenagers of 2014, alongside fellow pop star Lorde, Hong Kong protest leader Joshua Wong and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Malala Yousafzai.

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Snap: (from left) the Mellet family: Shaun, Troye, Sage, Laurelle, Steele and Tyde.

Snap: (from left) the Mellet family: Shaun, Troye, Sage, Laurelle, Steele and Tyde. Credit: Courtesy of Troye Sivan

When Time ran the story online, it included a poll at the bottom so readers could vote for their favourite teens. Sivan beat everyone on the list bar Yousafzai, who had just been awarded the Nobel. When I tell Sivan about his Time online ranking, his eyes widen. "I'm thankful Malala's ahead of me," he says. "That would be completely blasphemous if I was on top." Which is to say, Sivan is relieved he didn't beat a Nobel laureate, but isn't at all surprised he came close.

By any measure, Troye Sivan is objectively famous. Does he feel famous, though? Not particularly, he says. "Maybe it's because my fans are so specific - it's young girls." To everyone else, he's completely unknown - confused-mother-at-David-Jones being a case in point. Still, in an era of plummeting record sales and fossilising big record labels, it's remarkable any artist - Australian or otherwise - still manages to sell so many units globally. So how did a seemingly ordinary kid, raised in Earth's most isolated city, become one of the planet's biggest stars? It all seems faintly implausible. But everything makes more sense once you get to know Troye Sivan, and - more importantly - his family.

Tales of Troye: Sivan, aged 14, playing the lead role in South African movie <i>Spud</i>, opposite John Cleese.

Tales of Troye: Sivan, aged 14, playing the lead role in South African movie Spud, opposite John Cleese.

Old enough to drink and young enough to have never voted, Troye Sivan (full name: Troye Sivan Mellet) still lives with his folks, 20 minutes out of Perth's CBD. His home suburb is so unerringly pleasant, there are actual butterflies fluttering by when I go to knock on the door. When Laurelle Mellet opens the door to greet me, it's immediately obvious one, where Sivan got his looks; and two, that Sivan has had a comfortable childhood.

Boasting Cleopatra hair and apple-shaped cheekbones, Laurelle leads me through the Mellets' plush, multi-levelled warren of a home as we talk about her former career as a professional model in South Africa. As a result, all four Mellet children are what you'd call "genetically blessed". In the living room, shelves upon shelves sag with framed photos of almost scientifically cute children: Sivan's older brother Steele, now 21, younger sister Sage, 17, and younger brother Tyde, 15. Just as I'm thinking Sage could be a model herself, I'm told she's already "dabbling" in the industry, as though professional modelling is a casual hobby, like terrarium-making or badminton.

Every member of the Mellet family has a huge social media following in their own right. They're like a photogenic von Trapp family for the Facebook age. Troye's fans treat the family like virtual Pokemon they need to collect. All of the Mellets - to varying degrees - enthusiastically play along, tagging one another in photos and giving each other shout-outs across platfoms. (Typical comments on @sageybaby's Instagram: "You look so much like Troye"; "Why the hell is everyone hot in your family"; "Is their like whole f...king family perfect? fml.") Even half-hearted non-tweets from Sage ("I honestly need to get better at this whole Twitter thing") will rack up 345 favourites, while Tyde's probing, in-depth social commentary ("Currently sitting in a chair") scores 669 Twitter gold stars. Sage's personal Instagram account now has 101,000 followers, while eldest sibling Steele - who all the Mellets agree is the most "private" member of the family - has more than 7000 followers on Instagram and another 9000 on Twitter. Parents Laurelle and Shaun aren't slouchers, either. Combined, @mamamellet and @Shaunsivan have more than 91,000 followers on Twitter. If you consolidated their followers across all social media platforms, the Mellets could probably form their own small nation state.

Shaun Mellet - an immensely energetic, likeable bald guy - works in real estate and speaks like a South African life coach, pumped on life. "We haven't had to drag any of the kids into it," he says in the living room, smiling with a wall of white teeth. "I'm always saying to them, 'Do what you love! Because you'll get so good at it, they'll pay you to do it!' "

Sivan being a case in point, clearly.

"He was obviously very different ..." Shaun says.

"... from day one," Laurelle finishes, nodding.

"There wasn't any unhappiness," Shaun adds. "He was just ... different. He never kicked a ball, never played sport; didn't like being in the sun. He's got blue eyes and he's sensitive." Laurelle clarifies that "sensitive" doesn't equate to "shy and retiring". When Sivan was a kid in the '90s, he'd make his parents close the curtains in the bedroom - so he could burst out from behind them dramatically, before regaling them with hits by the Spice Girls and Aqua.

Once he took up professional singing lessons, Sivan quickly built a reputation as the must-have child-singer-about-town - "the boy soprano with that church-boy voice", as he puts it now. He'd upload videos of his performances onto YouTube himself, and soon, well-moneyed synagogues - at home and overseas - started inviting the young, Jewish, doe-eyed Troye Sivan Mellet to perform for them. Sivan was on a roll, winning awards at school talent shows, scoring gig after gig, before being hand-picked to perform alongside Guy Sebastian on a state-wide televised fundraiser.

When I ask Sivan and his parents separately whether he has ever failed - you know, at anything? - they all groan before telling the same story. Sivan was in his early teens and had been flown to Los Angeles to perform at a big Jewish gala, but he was also going through puberty and his voice was breaking. "They wanted him to sing a specific song - a Declan Galbraith song - and it was a very high song," Laurelle says. "We'd worked with his singing teacher and were even calling her from LA. He got onto the stage and was performing beautifully, then he switched a verse around. It just threw him." One wrong note and the song was beyond recovery. It's probably one of Sivan's few live performances you can't find on YouTube.

"I was pretty scared," Sivan says, tousling his hair. "But at the same time - and I know it sounds ridiculous - by age 12, I was pretty burnt-out."

Shaken, Sivan decided he never wanted to sing again. Laurelle and Shaun were upset, but as Shaun puts it, "We backed right off and left him alone for three years."

It's a particularly charmed life in which a career low so quickly leads to one's greatest successes. With his new-found spare time, Sivan started heavily getting into vlogging, partly inspired by South African YouTube sensation Caspar Lee, who was rumoured to have earned his first million by age 20.

Using an iPhone and digital SLR, Sivan taught himself how to edit videos on Adobe Premiere and stitched up chatty YouTube segments on topics ranging from "Annoying Things People Do On Instagram" to "What Underwear Do You Wear?" - the kind of fodder churned out by any commercial FM radio DJ. However, Sivan's hyperactive chats, combined with his looks and a loyal target audience of school-aged girls, proved a mighty money-spinner.

Nowadays, Sivan earns a substantial portion of his income through the money generated by YouTube advertising on his videos, with social media analysts Social Blade concluding that Sivan's annual YouTube earnings could be anywhere between $55,000 and $444,000.

One of Sivan's all-time most popular videos - viewed more than 4 million times - was a simple to-camera confirmation that he is gay, uploaded just after his 18th birthday. Though it was a huge moment for his queer followers and Sivan's female fans - typical comment: "Wait, so, if he's gay, I can't marry him :(" - Sivan was sharing something about himself that his family and friends had known since he was 14. Still, Sivan was terrified of uploading the video - mainly because of the YouTube subscribers he'd potentially lose. ("I have a majority girl audience on YouTube.") Sivan ended up gaining several thousand instead.

Sivan had already come out to his family several years before, during a period he earnestly refers to as his "journey of self-discovery". Early into puberty, he started joining gay teen forums (all anonymously, since he was already building a profile) and watched coming-out videos on YouTube. He became a fan of openly gay, slightly older Australian role models such as comedians Tom Ballard and Josh Thomas. After initially telling a close female friend he was bisexual, before reconciling with the fact he was actually gay, he decided to tell his dad, Shaun. "It kind of gets to the point where you feel it's all you can think about, and it's like repeating in your head over and over again, any time you're alone with anyone," he says. " 'Should I tell them or shouldn't I? Is it the right time? How can I get the conversation to that point?' It's a really weird thing to start talking about."

One night, Sivan and Shaun were up late talking about anything and everything, when religion came up.

"If you could change anything about Judaism, what would you change?" Sivan asked his father.

Shaun thought about it. "The way that it deals with gay people," he said. "What about you?

Sivan said he felt the same, then took a long pause and added, "Because I'm gay."

Thinking about that moment now, Shaun and Laurelle get a little glassy-eyed.

"The truth of it is ..." Shaun starts

"...We knew, deep down," Laurelle finishes.

Sivan recalls, "I told my dad and within a week we had told the whole family. My big brother walked into my room one day, crying, and he hugged me. The next day it was my sister; the next day, it was my brother. When they told Sage, 'Troye's gay', she went, 'With who?!' "

Which begs the question - the question every young gay kid in the Western hemisphere wants to know right now: is Sivan looking for anyone at the moment?

"Not really," he says. "I kind of have someone, but with travelling it's a bit full-on."

When I ask how he manages to maintain a relationship long-distance, Sivan shrugs. "You don't. It's the most complicated thing in the world. I'm not saying where they live. They could live in Perth, they could live in LA, they could live in Sydney. But it's going to be 'long distance' [anyway], because I'm always away from anywhere. It's difficult."

In the days I spend talking to Sivan, this is one of the few times he says he finds anything genuinely hard.

After the errands at the mall, Laurelle packs us all in the family Highlander 4WD to visit Kings Park, so we can get a better view of Perth city. As she looks for a parking spot, she encourages us - half-jokingly, half-serious - to ask the universe for a free car space.

Years ago, Shaun and Laurelle were heavily involved in Alpha Dynamics seminars. It's an organisation that advocates positive thinking, espousing similar ideas to those found in books like The Secret. As a result, New Age concepts like "putting things out to the universe" and "the laws of attraction" pepper everyday conversation between the Mellets. After scoring a park - the system works! - Sivan and Laurelle tell me they'll be spending this evening recording Sivan's audition tape for an upcoming international psychological thriller.

How confident is Sivan about getting the role? Sivan shrugs, but Laurelle radiates confidence.

"We just put it out to the universe that we need to [nail] the audition," she says happily.

Acting was never something Sivan actively gunned for, but this side of his career has proven to be just as lucrative. Early in Sivan's YouTube days, a talent agent spotted his videos and got in touch, fuelled by a hunch Sivan would do well on screen. Laurelle - who had once worked as a talent agent herself - helped guide Sivan with the ins and outs of the industry, and they immediately hit the jackpot with his very first video audition. For his first-ever acting role, Sivan played a young Hugh Jackman in the superhero blockbuster Wolverine.

Other roles followed: acting on-stage alongside Sir Ian McKellen in Waiting for Godot, and the title role in Spud, a South African film franchise starring John Cleese. Meanwhile, Sivan's YouTube following was swelling, and he got back into singing, composing his own songs. His track The Fault in Our Stars - inspired by the John Green tearjerker novel about childhood cancer - went berserk on iTunes, and Sivan donated all proceeds from the song to Perth's Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation. It was around the time John Green himself tweeted about the song to his 3 million-plus Twitter followers that EMI approached Sivan and offered him a record deal.

When I ask EMI Australia's managing director John O'Donnell how much his label has invested in Sivan's forthcoming debut album, O'Donnell baulks. "Oh, that would be very improper of me to tell you!" he says, laughing. What O'Donnell will say is that Sivan is working on a "reasonably modest" budget. Considering Sivan has, according to EMI, already sold 750,000 tracks and 180,000 copies of the TRXYE EP, O'Donnell is confident about the album. "Already he's a profitable artist," he says, "so our investment in the album is pretty ... fine." He chuckles, satisfied.

If 2014 was the year of Taylor Swift, EMI is hedging bets that 2015 will be the year of Sivan. He already has more Instagram followers than Michelle Obama, and several weeks after we meet, Sivan will land in New York and find his face featured in a YouTube advertisement in Times Square, no big deal. He'll turn 20 in June, and he's been thinking about moving to Los Angeles in the long run.

When we get back to the Mellet home, Sivan invites me into his bedroom to listen to his new tracks. This bedroom is famous now, being the HQ where Sivan records a lot of his YouTube vlogs. Minimalist and Ikea showroom clean, there is not a trace of clutter: no books or decorations; just an ornament in the shape of the "@" symbol. It strikes me that if Troye Sivan ever started his own religion, "@" would be a fairly appropriate symbol of allegiance.

Across from Sivan's low-set double bed framed by fairy lights is his wall-to-wall desk, on top of which sit two studio-quality Rokit speakers and his 15-inch MacBook Pro. On the laptop, Sivan cues up songs-in-progress from his forthcoming debut album. In normal conversation, Sivan is prone to breaking off eye contact and can seem distracted, but when he talks about music, it's like he's been jolted and electrified - he's focused, animated and almost jittery with enthusiasm. The new songs he plays me are towering pop anthems of heartbreak and wanderlust, sung by a voice that sounds like someone twice Sivan's age.

At one point in Talk Me Down - a Frank Ocean-esque ballad custom-made for stadium sing-alongs - Sivan jabs the air with his finger excitedly. This, he says, this will be the part in the song where, when he performs it live, he'll point his microphone to the crowd so that they can sing the lyrics back to him. In this moment, he will be moved by the crowd. He will cry. In fact, Sivan can see it so clearly already - visualise it, even - that you can see why the Mellet family members are such strong advocates of the idea that visualising goals makes them manifest in the universe. For Sivan, at least, it works.

If music doesn't work out, Sivan says he has plenty of other plans. He might study acting at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts. His dad thinks Sivan would make a great spokesperson for gay rights.

One of Sivan's final vlogs of 2014, which has since racked up more than a million views, was titled "Becoming You". Over footage of him pensively staring into the middle distance and tousling his hair, his voice-over tells fans: "I'm on the path to being someone I'm equally terrified by, and obsessed with. My true self."

At the end of the video, Sivan signs off, without a trace of irony or cynicism: "I love you guys so much, and I'll see you all next week."

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