Imagine if you were told out of the blue that you were about to interview the stars of your favourite TV show.
You’d freak out, right?
That’s exactly how two students from Newtown High School of the Performing Arts reacted when we surprised them recently with the help of Netflix.
News.com.au was invited to interview the stars of Heartbreak High to promote the hit show’s third and final season, but we thought it would be fun to get some actual high school students to do the interview instead, seeing as they’re currently experiencing the same things as the characters in the show.
We reached out to Newtown High and within minutes they came back to us with the names of two of their students who are superfans of the Aussie drama.
Their teacher, Bel Macedone, called the two students into a meeting room and broke the news to them on camera that they were going to interview the cast of Netflix’s Heartbreak High.
They were visibly stunned.
“Wait, like, the actual cast of Heartbreak High?” one of the shocked students asked.
“Oh my god, that’s so exciting,” said the other.
The day of the interview
The two students, Nika and Eloise, were a tad nervous as they arrived at the studio to interview seven of the Heartbreak High cast members.
They sat in the green room, practising their questions and making last-minute adjustments, before being escorted into the studio.
Now let me tell you, junket interviews can be quite intimidating, even for seasoned journalists.
Imagine walking into a room filled with lights and cameras, a bunch of assistants, managers, PR people and makeup artists, not to mention your TV idols.
It’s a lot.
But Nika and Eloise handled it like pros.
The highlight of their interviews was when they asked the cast for advice about pranks they could pull on muck-up day.
“Muck-up week at my school was actually cancelled because the original ones were so bad,” Thomas Weatherall, who plays Malakai, said. “We actually had cops outside our high school … to make sure no one does anything.”
Some of the previous pranks pulled at his school included when students put a mattress in the swimming pool.
“It absorbs the water and you can’t lift it up, you need a crane,” Weatherall said.
Bryn Chapman Parish, who plays Spider, said he’d heard of students “feeding pigeons laxatives” for a messy muck-up day prank.
Gemma Chua-Tran, who plays Sasha, said, “I know that someone hung a dummy from a balcony, which was really bad, because it [looked] like a dead kid”.
“ I think someone also brought … a cow … onto the third floor so they couldn’t bring it back down,” she added, “It was not good.”
Ayesha Madon, who plays Amerie, sensed that perhaps they were filling the students’ heads with bad ideas, so she told the pair, “ you guys should do whatever you want … as long as no one gets hurt and everything’s safe … and legal.”
“But, like, be a menace,” she laughed.
You can watch the interview highlights in the video player at the top of this article.
The end of an era
The third and final season of Heartbreak High follows the students of Hartley High as they attempt to graduate and enter adulthood.
It’s not all smooth sailing though, with a ‘revenge’ prank on a rival school putting their futures in jeopardy.
The season is a fitting finish to the Aussie series which has won a host of awards since 2022, including an International Emmy and AACTA Award for Best Drama Series.
Season 3 is out now on Netflix.
Read related topics:Netflix