How to get famous: Take five young men with six pack abs and curly hair, put them in an elevator and have them perform some modern dance routines in sync. The result? Number of clicks in the millions, a huge (primarily female) fan base and the ticket to the world of stars and starlets. Welcome to the Elevator Boys.
The five guys from the Frankfurt area are considered THE viral sensation in Germany – at least if you believe the millions of clicks and subscribers on TikTok, Instagram and Co. World stars like Brad Pitt or Heidi Klum also seem to be fans of the five guys from the Frankfurt area – and take pictures with them for hip dance routines in the hope of being able to increase their own viral fan base.
So it’s going pretty well, one might think – but the Elevator Boys, consisting of Tim Schäcker, Bene Schulz, Julien Brown, Jacob Rott and Luis Freitag, strive for more. The goal: a television career. Fan and model mom Heidi recently offered them a stage for this in the seventh episode of GNTM. Here, the five Internet stars were allowed to surprise the young models with a “cheeky” dance routine, and they even appeared as guest judges alongside star designer Christian Cowan at the decision walk.
But TikTok is not the same as television. But the otherwise self-confident boys didn’t look really cool during their performance. More badly than right, they criticized the lack of “attitude” of some candidates a little awkwardly, gave plenty of compliments and finally said goodbye to them all with a beaming “Ciiiiiiao”. The group received a lot of mockery and ridicule online for their surprise appearance on GNTM. “The Elevator Boys are by far the most embarrassing thing that ProSieben could hire,” blasphemed users on Twitter.
But the elevator boys don’t let that unsettle them. Another appearance on “The Voice Kids” is already planned, if Wuschelkopf is up to Bene, after two years of social media fame, a real acting career could even follow. The 21-year-old has already made his first major appearance in the new “Tatort” from Bremen, before that he was able to get his first taste of acting in the Prime Influencer series “Toxisch”.
However, the experience at the “crime scene” was significantly “more intense”. As Bene says, the team shot “easily 17 hours”. “It was really exhausting and a great honor,” he summarizes in an interview with “TV-Spielfilm”. In the “Tatort” episode “Donuts” the “Elevator” member plays the cool car tuner Rufus. “Rufus is definitely a cool car mechanic with a tough appearance, but that is nicely countered by my text ‘canned beer is bad for the environment’. The sentence shows quite well that there is more to Rufus than just a tuning fan and the irony with the false bottom suits me well”, the newcomer sums up his role. If he has his way, the guest role in “Tatort” was only the starting point of his TV career.
“I wouldn’t say no to any ‘crime scene’, especially not to a bigger role, I was only a guest in Bremen,” said Bene. The 21-year-old is also open to other larger projects: “‘ZDF-Herzkino’, ‘Rosamunde Pilcher’ would also be funny – ‘Die Bergretter’, for example. But series like ‘Dark’ would also be a total dream of mine,” explains he. He names Hugh Grant as his idol. He was “a huge role model for me in all the tearjerkers, I also want to play such a heartbreaker at some point”.
So will it soon be: Ciao Elevator, hello German television? According to Bene, it is not far-fetched. The group seems to have had enough of funny short clips. “Somehow we don’t just want to be content creators or to be seen as such. In terms of feeling, we’ve already outgrown this topic,” explains Bene in an interview with the “Bild” newspaper. As he explains, the other members also dream of their own independent careers and would like to develop further in the fields of acting, television and music. “Now we’re getting to a point in our career where we just have to decide what we want to focus on,” summarizes Bene.
As he explains, the group will remain. Dance videos will also continue to exist. Well then, TikTok fans can breathe a sigh of relief.
Sources used: “Bild.de”, “TV Spielfilm”