Henry Rowley @rowleyy
Did Henry Rowley set out to become a TikTok sensation? Sort of. “My girlfriend at the time was showing me this girl from TikTok and she was like, This girl’s just bought a flat from TikTok money,” he recalls. “I downloaded [it] immediately.”
He initially tried his hand at travel vlogging - for the “free holidays” - but, after that bombed, he discovered the route to social-media stardom was simply being himself. Or being other people, rather. “I was on holiday with some mates, and I was doing that posh character, Minty, with the husky voice. One of my mates specifically, he was just dying. I got back and I was like, ‘Wait, do you reckon I could make a TikTok out of this?’”
Minty spawned a catalogue of niche yet painfully recognisable characters - the Morning-After Posh Boy, the Walking Ick, the Home Counties Parents Baffled By Their Child’s New Northern Friend - and the numbers crept up. Most of it is improv, he says, and he leaves his (frequent) character breaks in. Still, you get an inkling he’s not entirely new to this. “Yeah, I did do drama as a kid…” he says.
