- Brooke Schofield's journey from aspiring actress to influencer began when she befriended Tana Mongeau.
- Her collaboration with Mongeau on the "Cancelled" podcast has led to a nationwide tour.
Brooke Schofield always wanted to be famous — and now she is.
"Well, I wanted to act," she told Business Insider of her motive for leaving Arizona for LA in 2019.
"There was no reason I thought I should be successful in that, but I was like, I'm obviously going to be an actress."
From a young age, she envisioned herself as a Hannah Montana-type figure and dreamed of making it big.
"Can't sing, can't dance, I dunno what I was thinking," she said.
Schofield's career didn't exactly pan out that way. She landed parts in a couple of movies, but for three years, her main income came from working at a restaurant.
But Schofield's fortunes changed when she made friends with the influencer Tana Mongeau, which led to an influx of followers of her own, a hit podcast, and a nationwide sell-out tour.
Schofield is one of the internet's up-and-coming voices, with 840,000 TikTok followers and 167,000 subscribers on YouTube.
She's known for her takes on pop culture, her notable hat collection, and her willingness to call out the people who wrong her.
Schofield spoke with BI about where it all began and how she balances transparency with her audience and knowing when to hold back.
Making the most of a 'nepotism situation'
Schofield felt the pressure of the grind early on.
"What's hard about living in LA is, to afford it, you have to work almost constantly," she said. "So it's really hard for people who are trying to break into really anything. When do you have the time, you're working?"
But her friendship with Mongeau, an internet superstar who has been making content on YouTube since 2015, would change everything.
Schofield said at the start, it was a "nepotism situation" where she was gaining followers simply for being Mongeau's friend and appearing in some of her videos.
"At first, it was annoying because I wasn't really doing anything," she said. "Why would anyone care about this?"
But Schofield's confidence grew once her podcast with Mongeau, "Cancelled," launched in July 2021 and showcased her comic timing, fashion sense, and life stories.
Episodes are posted to YouTube on a page converted from Mongeau's old vlog channel, which has over 2 million subscribers. Early episodes were helped along by guests like YouTubers Trisha Paytas and Jeff Wittek, and weekly installments now regularly amass 1-2 million views.
Schofield and Mongeau are also now taking their show on a US tour, which ends on June 2 in Oakland, California.
While speaking with BI, Schofield was in a hotel room in San Antonio.
The experience so far had been "surreal" and exhausting, she said, but "amazing." Stepping out for the first show, she felt "petrified."
"When you actually show up and walk out, you're like, holy, wow, I cannot believe that many people are here," she said. "I didn't realize people loved it so much."
Schofield said she's a person who struggles with negative feedback but sometimes seeks it out anyway.
"It used to be a guilty pleasure for me to look up what people were saying about us," she said.
Reddit is a particular target, she said, because "there's no positivity" on there.
"You go on there just to see what people hate about you," she said. "It feels like reading a group chat about yourself, you know what I mean? But I had to get over that real quick into this tour because it was making me so anxious and I could not handle it."
Mongeau is a good person to speak to when the negativity gets Schofield down, she said, because she's been embroiled in countless controversies of her own, from TanaCon — an ill-fated convention to rival VidCon in 2018 — to allegations that she mistreated her friends. For the most part, over the years, she's taken accountability and shaken off the negativity.
"She's gotten hate for so many things and she's just really good at not taking it in," Schofield said. "But at the same time, she tells me, you can't place a lot of value in the good opinions. As much as you want to be happy that people like what we're doing, you can't place any of your worth in that because that's how you get affected by the bad stuff."
Staying grounded in the public eye
"Cancelled" went on tour in 2023 too, but got a poor reception. Attendees said the show was disorganized, started late, and didn't live up to the ticket price.
Schofield said she and Mongeau "struggled" with their first tour because they were "fighting a lot." Going into business with your best friend is always "a rocky situation," she said.
"Traveling with a friend in general or spending that amount of time with anyone, a boyfriend, a best friend, anything, you're going to butt heads," she said. "Half the fights were just because we were so overworked and overwhelmed and stressed out and stuff."
Last time, they were handling "a lot of things we probably shouldn't have been handling," Schofield said, because they had a much lower budget.
"It was very, very overwhelming, and we'd take it out on each other," she said. "This time, we've got literally the best team ever, so it's just fun. We get to show up and do the fun part, and it's pretty much cut the fights completely."
Schofield and Mongeau have an open dialogue during their podcast, talking about everything from the day's news to their sex lives.
But this can backfire, especially as podcasts are fodder for news coverage.
For example, Schofield recently announced she had a brief relationship with Matt Rife, a comedian who reached massive success on TikTok and released a Netflix special last year.
She accused him of cheating on her with multiple other women and even brought some of them out on a recent leg of the "Cancelled" tour. (Rife did not return a request for comment from BI).
@tanamongeaulol hahahahahahahaa she’s my president fr
♬ original sound - Tana Mongeau
Several news outlets picked up the story and, she says, mischaracterized what she said.
"No it's the way I absolutely never said that at all whatsoever," she posted on X, linking to a Page Six article claiming she said Rife cheated on her with "20 women."
"The amount of news articles that came out of that that were just so misinformed and just complete reaches, it just really upset me," Schofield said.
"You shouldn't be allowed to be a journalist without researching what you're talking about. I think that should be illegal."
For the most part, though, Schofield manages to stay grounded. She still keeps in touch with a lot of the friends that she grew up with and is learning to realize when she has to physically step away from her phone for her own mental wellbeing. "Social media is not real life," she said.
"I've been there where I get so into it and so involved with all the internet stuff that I'm all of a sudden this shell of a person," she said. "I'm like, oh my God, get off your phone and go pet a dog or something."