The star of My Drunk Kitchen is stone cold sober when we call for a chat. It is 9.30am in Los Angeles though, so if she weren’t, that might be a cause for concern. For someone who says they’re not “much of a drinker”, is it weird to be famous for being inebriated? “Yeah, it is, to be totally honest,” she admits. But then, being famous wasn’t exactly something that was planned.
An accidental celebrity, 28-year-old Berkeley graduate Hannah Hart found fame a surprise to say the least. Having recently moved from San Francisco to New York to pursue a career in translation, she made a video for a friend back home and uploaded it to YouTube. “Then I discovered that YouTube was actually a place where people went to view content. Not just a service you use to send a video,” she laughs. Overnight, the comments section underneath what would become the first episode of MDK “blew up”.
“People were like, ‘This is my new favourite show on YouTube!’ and I was like, ‘Show on YouTube? What are they talking about?’ It was then I realised there was this entire underground ecosystem of entertainers and content creators living inside this world I had no idea was there.”