We caught up with with Dylan Yeandle, Alex Biffin and Andrew Linton who star in “Thunder From Down Under.”
How did you get into this industry?
ALEX: Myself, I annoyed our bosses, so I got the job. I was working up on the Gold Coast, where the main office is, in Australia. I heard about the job, and I was just like, I want to be in that. And I pretty much just rang them once a day for two weeks, until they finally got sick of me ringing, going: “hey, its me again, just waiting to come in for an interview”. I got a text back, Monday saying: ‘ring this number’. It was the office, and then it pretty much goes from there. I just heard about it, and wanted to travel the world, and have fun.
ANDREW: Well, I was just in Canada; continuing a working Visa over there. I was looking where to travel into the countryside, and I stumbled across them [Thunder From Down Under], and applied for them pretty much a year later. And then, just two weeks later I was in Vegas.
DYLAN: I was on a TV show in Australia, and the guys from Vegas saw me on there, and flew me over here. I was very excited about that.
How did you all end up coming to America?
ALEX: Well we all get hired in Australia, generally speaking, and they send us over here to be trained, and become part of the show. You join the tour group when you first join, it’s sort of like the initiation. You stay in the tour group until a spot comes up in Vegas, and then you can either come, or you can stay on tour.
How long have you been with the company?
ALEX: I’ve been with them about six years now.
DYLAN: About three years, yeah.
ANDREW: A year and a half.
How do you come up with your routines?
ALEX: I came up with my routine, well I came up with the idea, because I was walking outside after the show, doing the signings and stuff, and everybody was calling me Tarzan anyway. So I thought, oh, well, I may as well try to do something about that. I sat down and I thought about it for a bit, and that’s how I came up with that routine, or that idea. So I suppose it was everybody else’s idea, and I just stole their idea.
ANDREW: My one, I’m just doing 300, so that was given to me. But I’m working on another one right now.
Are you allowed to say what that is?
ALEX: No.
ANDREW: No.
Top Secret?
ALEX: It is top secret, yeah.
Tell us about the 300.
ANDREW: So I do the 300. It’s a gladiator routine. If you’ve seen ‘300’, the movie, its pretty much like that.
ALEX: Capes, and swords, hats, shields.
DYLAN: Actually, some of our routines are structured by the producers of the show. So they produce it, and then we work together to try and find music that the girls would find appealing – and also music that we like, so we can give it all the energy, and we can really enjoy it too.
ALEX: That’s the thing; it’s a group effort as well. Everyone has great ideas in the show. They all have their own ideas, which all work, so we try and incorporate everyone’s opinions, everyone’s ideas, which I think makes for a better show. The more that’s in there, the more ideas, the better – that’s just my opinion.
Do you have any embarrassing stories from any of the shows?
ALEX: We’ve got a few of them. I don’t know how many of them we are allowed to tell. I’ve put on my thong the wrong way once before. I’d undone the tear of the jeans, and thought [does the motion of undoing jeans, looks down at crotch, gasps, and then covers crotch]. I tried to fix it up, and then {motions rearranging crotch area], yeah, it was not so good. I mean, I’ve fallen of the stage, fallen off tables and stuff, but as long as you get up laughing, you play it off.
ANDREW: Well, I don’t really have many. I just had one tonight where I was jumping up on the stage, and then the trampoline didn’t bounce my up high enough. I hit my shin on the edge of the stage.
ALEX: Its because he’s the biggest human being in the world, so the trampoline just couldn’t handle it.
ANDREW: It was special.
DYLAN: I had a couple moments like Alex, but Alex covered most of them, yeah.
ALEX: I have knocked myself off on stage one night. I jumped off the trampoline and I over-rotated. Luckily I broke my fall with my head. And I was onstage winded, and I was going [makes a pained noise], and I was crawling off-stage going [motions army crawling with arms]. Luckily the lights were out, but I think a few girls noticed.
ANDREW: Nice sound.
ALEX: Yeah, [repeats pained noise], that’s my pained face. Our other MC [Marcus], he brought an old lady – did I say old – I meant older. Sorry, more mature, experienced lady. He brought her on stage while her husband was in the bathroom. He came out of the bathroom, looked up on stage, and his wife’s up on stage, and Marcus, the MC, is doing his thing, and he jumped up onstage and tried to fight the MC. Chivalry isn’t dead. He got up there and was like “whoa, whoa, whoa”, but its kind of sweet, you know. He was almost 90.
What sort of training regime do you have to maintain these amazing bodies?
ALEX: As far as gym? I mean the show, as you saw tonight, its pretty high energy – it’s a pretty good cardio workout. Myself, I try to go to the gym at least 5 days a week, and do some weights, and do some different exercises, just to keep the body mobile, and stuff like that. But I don’t know what these guys do – whatever he’s doing [motions to Andrew] its working.
DYLAN: I think a lot of us love extra-curriculum activities as well. A lot of us like to go hiking, and some of us do swimming, and surfing, and skateboarding, so that also keeps us in shape as well. But as Alex said, the show is very high intensity, so that helps with the body as well.
ANDREW: Just consistency training basically.
How do you find the time for all of these activities? You do a lot of shows some days.
ALEX: Yeah, I mean we do. We are very lucky in the fact that we do have our days off. We do have days, like I said, we do have a little bit of time. We also do a lot of promotional work, in summer we are very busy; we’re doing promos, and 13 shows a week, and going to the gym. But we’re not complaining. We’ve been lucky enough to be involved in a Disney movie – it was myself, Dylan, and another guy in the show – and that was really awesome.
DYLAN: That was awesome, yeah.
What film was it?
ALEX: Alexander and the…
DYLAN: Alexander and the Very Bad, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, Very Bad Day.
ALEX: Something like that. Whenever we were doing interviews, after the movie, and they were like: “what movie was it”, and we’d be like: “Alexander, and the no good, ter… ah. You know what I mean”.
DYLAN: There are more words to it.
ALEX: It was a cool movie.
DYLAN: It was a Disney movie that had Jenifer Garner, and Steve Carell. It was surreal to be out there, on the set with those guys. Just working alongside those guys was something; Alex and I couldn’t believe our luck, really. We are both country, small-town boys, and then to be over in Hollywood, with those guys, was… [shakes head in awe].
ALEX: Myself personally, I thought they might have kept to themselves a bit, but Jennifer Garner and Steve Carell were so nice. We’ve also been lucky enough to do shows like ‘Project Runway’ – met Heidi Klum, she was amazing, she was also very nice. We’ve had some amazing opportunities in this job, so we’re very grateful, and very lucky.
DYLAN: And not only that, sometimes the stars come to us: we’ve had Kelly Clarkson, Demi Moore, Nelly Fertado, and Chilli from TLC. It’s really good to be performing, and look down and the crowd, and see an A-List celebrity. It’s pretty mind-blowing.
Do they get the best seats?
ALEX: I’m not sure how it works, but they always seem to be in good seats.
DYLAN: Sometimes they’re incognito. They’re trying to enjoy the show.
ALEX: The other thing, with Demi Moore, when she came in the show, she was sort of looking a bit different than what she did in the movies and stuff. She was obviously just not the same. And some of the guys were like: “is that Demi Moore?”, and she’d go up on stage and he said: ‘What’s your name”, and she said: “I’m Dem-Eye”, its Demi. In Australia we say Demi.
What challenges have you faced working on the show, if any?
ANDREW: Leaning to dance. Most of us aren’t, well we weren’t dancers before the show, so they taught us.
ALEX: That’s the thing about this show; we all came from, I suppose, what you’d call normal jobs. I was actually performing in a horse show. I grew up riding horses. Dylan was a plumber. Andrew, you were a personal trainer. We’ve got all sorts in these shows: tradies and PTs. I hung up the seven and pulled on the G-String.
How long did it take you to learn to dance?
ANDREW: I’m still learning.
ALEX: How long did it take us to get on stage? It’s on a range. Some guys, like Dylan, pick up stuff really quick. Some guys might take a month, myself; I took about three months.
ANDREW: Me, a year and a half.
ALEX: I took about three months before I was ready to get on stage. But you can never stop learning.
What is your favorite part of working with Thunder From Down Under?
ALEX: We’re big kids, and we get paid for it. Nah, like I was saying before, there’s lots of great opportunities. We get to do lots of cool stuff.
ANDREW: Travelling.
ALEX: Yeah, travelling. Just having fun. This jobs all about having fun. Of course it’s serious as well, but having fun, for me, yeah.
DYLAN: We are all pretty passionate performers too, so we love getting up on the stage, and turning up the heat, and having some fun.
ALEX: It’s a happy place.
DYLAN: Yeah. Also, its good to meet the girls. They come from all over to Vegas, and it’s really good to find out where abouts they’re from, and what they do, and all that sort of thing.
Do you talk to the girls after the show a lot?
DYLAN: Yeah. That’s the best thing about our show. The show is very interactive, and then the guys go out, and the girls can obviously come and have a picture, as you saw. And then the guys will come out and sign the photo, and do a few selfies, and that sort of thing. It’s good for them to meet us, and find out that we are all actually Australian. You have to have an Australian passport to be in the show.
Is it common for people to try and pretend they are from Australia?
DYLAN: I’m not too sure about that one. But as I said, our show, we’re all Australian. And I think the Australian accent is one of the hardest to fake. I wouldn’t know, but a lot of people try it, and its not good. The English are shit.
ALEX: They go: [in a strong English accent] “Hello, we’re from Australia”. And we’re like: “No darling, you’re from England. Would you like a cup of tea and biscuit now, or what?”
Are any of you in relationships?
ALEX: Girlfriends?
Girlfriends, or married.
ALEX: No. We’re all very single, and very ready to mingle [he winks].
So if people were in a relationship, not necessarily you, have there been challenges that anyone has faced with that?
ALEX: With the guys that have been in relationships, yeah, definitely. You have to have a very confident girl that trusts you. I mean, its up to us to create the trust as well, but you do have to work a little bit harder, in my experience, to create that trust. Generally speaking, the girls are naturally confident. But, like anything, once you’ve got a good girl, then its all good from there, in my experience.
ANDREW: Perfectly sums it up.
ALEX: I think with the guys that have had girlfriends in the past, some of their girls might come to the show, and it’s harder for them to understand sometimes that that’s an act, it’s the act. I mean we do like what we do, but that’s an act up there. You separate work from home.
Is there anything you would like to address that we have not already?
ALEX: Just that we love performing; we love the audience coming to the show. Our show is about good times, and empowering women. Its not sleazy, it’s not bump-and-grind, like the stigma of stripping is, it’s not that. Just all about having a good time, and putting a smile on your faces. A non-tipping show.
Final question: if you could tour anywhere, what country would you pick?
DYLAN: England.
ANDREW: England.
ALEX: 100%.
Are you going to England?
ANDREW: Yeah, Europe.
ALEX: Yeah, we’re going to see our Australian origins.
