Arthur Hill is Making an Impression

As someone who’s built a career on pretending to be other people, it’s no wonder that Arthur Hill isn’t quite sure of what, exactly, he is. 

He knows he’s a 23-year-old graduate from Buckinghamshire, and he’s aware that around 1.4 million people from all corners of the globe like, share and subscribe to his online content every day – but anyone famous for being “the guy from TikTok who does voices at the dinner table” can be forgiven for experiencing the occasional crisis of identity. 

“It’s funny,” he tells me when we speak in November, “if I meet someone new and they ask me what I do, I’m like: ‘What do I actually say here?’ I’m definitely not an influencer, that’s the opposite of what I’m trying to be. I’d love to be known as ‘that funny guy who’s got a couple of bangers to his name.’ I think that’s what I want people to say.”

For all intents and purposes, Hill is a content creator – a 2021 inductee into Britain’s club of digital media stars whose day jobs are still baffling to most people over 35. And make no mistake: churning out viral videos on a near-daily basis is a full-time gig. “I was at university until May, so I didn’t properly comprehend that [what I’m doing] is full-time until recently,” he explains. “I was like, ‘Oh shit! This is actually my job now.’ Which is quite weird. And quite cool.”

Nowadays, that job sees Hill regularly posting clips of his internet-famous impressions and, increasingly, his original music (more on this later) – but neither was responsible for his big break. “The first video that did really well was about me masturbating at the dinner table,” he says, without the slightest change to his facial expression. “I had no followers at that point.” The video in question was taken down by TikTok within hours of being uploaded, but not before it had catapulted Hill’s face onto the For You pages of several million TikTok users (he later re-posted the same clip, but it was once again muted for breaching guidelines).

I ask him why he uploaded the video in the first place: “During the first lockdown, everyone got TikTok but no one started uploading stuff – it still wasn’t very cool. Then we had that Christmas lockdown where I started seeing Vine-type comedy begin to emerge – I was obsessed with Vine, I’d actually love to be a Vine star – and I thought, ‘Maybe I should give this a go?’ So I was in the shower before having dinner, and I literally thought of the idea. All my ideas come in the shower. I don’t know what kind of freaky magic happens there, but I always shower for 20 minutes now, wasting all the hot water, watching my bills go way up.”

A series of even-more-popular skits followed Hill’s viral breakthrough, many of which used the same formula (in his words: “intro, dinner table bit, funny bit at the end”) but with familiar caricatures thrown in for good measure. In the space of a few weeks, he had added a hillbilly, an Italian mobster, James Blunt, Freddie Mercury, Elton John, Gordon Ramsey, Dobby and, most famously, Lord Voldemort to his roster of bankable impressions – all of which gave a quick laugh to millions (and millions) of house arrested social media users during lockdown.

Despite the success of these videos, Hill still doesn’t fancy himself as a professional impersonator. “Honestly, I think I’m very close to being found out – in the sense that I actually don’t have many [impressions]. I’m not sitting in front of the mirror practising them. I’ll try them once, and if I can do them, I’ll do them, and if I can’t, I’ll never try them again. So I think my arsenal is actually quite limited. I back myself with accents,” – British geezer is his latest creation – “but when it comes to specific impressions, I’ve got, like, five.”

In any case, Hill’s 10-second turns as Gordon Ramsey and He Who Must Not Be Named proved a welcome springboard for him to build a loyal following of fans. “There’s still this thing with TikTok where everyone thinks your audience is just 16-year-olds, but I don’t think [mine] is like that,” he tells me. “Especially from doing my live shows, it seems like it’s more my age [23] and above, which is cool. I get a lot of people saying that their parents like me, too, which I think is the highest compliment you could possibly receive as a content creator. Normally, if you show your mum a video that you found funny, they’re like: ‘Who is that? How do you know them? I don’t find that funny.’ So the fact that I’m someone that they seem to enjoy is a high compliment, I think.”

On the subject of mums, it’s worth noting that Hill’s own mother, Lisa, features in (and often provides the punchlines for) several of his most popular videos. In fact, it wouldn’t be unfair to say that Lisa Hill made Arthur Hill – in both senses of the word. “She used to be an actress in the West End, so that’s definitely where I get it from, my singing and everything,” he explains. “I come from a very musical family, which is lucky.” I ask if Lisa is aware of her viral fame. “I remember when it first started, I would go downstairs – and I’d be buzzing, I couldn’t believe it – I’d go downstairs and say, ‘Mum, two million people [have watched you]!’ Now, though, she just expects it. She’ll say, ‘Oh, only two [million]?’ It’s quite funny.”

In Hill’s case, then, success – or something close to it – really did come overnight. But that’s not to say he hadn’t already spent his adolescent years finding laughs much harder to come by. “I wasn’t really confident enough to be publicly funny [when I was younger],” he admits. “I wasn’t necessarily the coolest guy in school. It was more like, I’d be funny within my friendship group, but very much not outlandishly funny. But I always wanted to do some kind of performing. It was actually my drama teacher who said they thought I’d be good at stand-up. So I did that when I finished school for about two years. And it was really hard.”

He elaborates: “[Stand-up] is honestly the most nerve-wracking thing – I had to stop doing it. I’d start uni, and I wouldn’t be able to do work because I’d book a gig, and it would be all I could think about for the next two weeks, even though it was just five minutes of things I’d have to think of.” I get the impression that Hill’s uni-era comedy appearances didn’t always go to plan. “Oh yeah, I’ve had [some shockers],” he says. “The worst one, I was at this random pub in Finsbury Park, and it was open mic, so the only people in the crowd were comedians – there were like 12 people. This would’ve been four years ago, pre-Covid. It was a Thursday night and Arsenal were playing in the Europa league. They were playing some German team – Frankfurt, I think – and all these German away fans suddenly flooded into this pub. So there was me, these 12 comedians who didn’t want to laugh at each other’s jokes, and then literally about 100 Frankfurt fans. They actually won the game. I was mid-set, and they scored. I was completely drowned out by the Germans. It was pretty awful.”

“But that experience definitely helped with my music shows,” Hill adds, “because it’s nowhere near as nerve-wracking [now]. I think it’s nice to know that I could do [stand-up]. I’ve proved that I can be funny in really hard rooms – not just on the internet with luck and a bit of algorithm.”

This is probably a good time to say that Hill is as much a musician as he is a comedian. In fact, by the end of our conversation, it’s clear that his ambitions for the future are far more concerned with Spotify than they are with TikTok. To date, he’s released four singles – five, if you count “Middle-Class White Boy” by his long-forgotten parody persona, Lil Hill (“my management team are trying to get me to get rid of all traces of that, but I refuse”) – and his first, “Tiny Room”, has to date earned him an impressive 3.3 million Spotify streams.

“That’s still wild to me,” Hill says. “I would’ve happily taken 100k in a year. I’m trying not to be a one-hit-wonder, basically. That’s the plan.” He’s already performed a string of successful live shows to paying audiences – none of which, as I understand it, were interrupted by 100 German football fans. Instead, the crowds were there for him. “It was funny, because I came out one night and it was the first time I’d used in-ears, so I couldn’t really hear much. I could only see the first row, and I was like, ‘Fucking hell, is there anybody here?’ Then the lights came on, and I thought, ‘Oh, okay. That’s a lot of people.’ It was really fun.”

And what does an Arthur Hill show look like, exactly? “I love the idea of bringing back old school [entertainment], of doing live shows that have a bit of variety, with funny bits in-between the songs,” he explains. “I watched the Elvis movie recently. I’d love to have a show where people have tables at the front, where I’m talking to the audience – it’s more like a night out than just a gig. I’d have special guests and comedy bits, with really solid tunes in the middle. An evening of entertainment.”

“My guilty pleasure is crooner music,” Hill continues. “My grandad bought me a Dean Martin CD when I was about 16, and I just loved it. So the crossover of a soulful crooner with hip-hop lyrics [a persona he adopts in several of his videos] I just think is the funniest thing. But it’s weird when I think about it. I’ve always wanted to sing, but I never thought about the songwriting aspect. The amount of times I’ve watched Queen’s Live Aid performance is insane. And Michael Jackson. Elvis. All those guys – the proper showmen. That’s how confident I want to get. They’re the ones. I think Bruno Mars is underrated, performance-wise. He’s got his own thing, and his music has changed so much. He’s unbelievable.”

Clearly, Hill has big ideas for the future of not just his own career, but of the entertainment industry as a whole. I ask him whether these rapidly expanding musical ambitions spell the end for the type of TikTok content he’s become known for – will we ever see the return of Voldemort at the dinner table? “I will always want to do some kind of comedy, whether that’s associated with music or not,” he says. “But since I’ve started doing music, I’m desperate to be successful in it. I’ve definitely felt more hungry to [have success in this industry] than success in stand-up. Chasing that hit is something I’m kind of obsessed with. 

“But I’m finding out [how hard it is],” Hill adds after a pause. “I think that’s part of the reason why I want to do it so much. With the comedy stuff, I’ve definitely worked hard for it – but once you’ve got that viral moment, it’s pretty easy to grow. But with music – especially on TikTok – there’s so many people trying to make it. It’s super competitive. And I’m the most competitive person ever. It’s [especially difficult] because a lot of my followers didn’t come for the music. Trying to get them to make that transition into being fans of my music – or my music and comedy, ideally – is a mission. Most people who meet me in public are like, ‘You’re the dinner table guy! You’re the Voldemort guy!’ It’s not often that I get, ‘You’re Arthur Hill!’”

I ask him whether the latter situation has ever occurred. “Yeah! I got on this really busy tube a few months ago, and this girl opposite me put her phone up and she was halfway through listening to ‘Tiny Room’. So I was like, ‘No way!’ And then this other guy in-between us took out his headphones and said: ‘It is a banger to be fair, mate.’ That was a proper ‘made it’ moment.”

Like every rising star, though, Hill is plagued by the fear of losing momentum – of not making the most of his small window of opportunity. “I’m absolutely terrified,” he admits. “I’m terrified of those comments saying, ‘You fell off.’ You can have one bad week with the algorithm, and it feels like your career is over.” At one point over summer, Hill posted a rare Instagram story that didn’t feature one of his customary punchlines. Instead, walking through the streets of London, he candidly asked his followers for advice on how to combat anxiety. Is this a new problem he’s had to face since finding success? “I mean, I’ve had anxiety for a while now,” Hill explains, “but I think it’s definitely gotten worse with the pressure. It definitely stems from the idea that I’ve got to keep on it. This is what I’ve wanted for so long, and the fear of losing it is a bit daunting. But the only solution to that is to keep working hard, I think.”

Hill has some advice for anyone in the same boat: “I was actually very glad I did that [Instagram post]. [One of my followers] told me to download this app about nostril breathing. I’ve done it ever since and it’s really helped. That and cold showers. I have cold showers every morning – they’re honestly life-changing. I did it when I was really anxious that night. Because you can’t think about anything else except being cold. It’s really good.”

By the sounds of things, then, Hill has the whole tortured artist thing under control – which is handy, because his next release is a biggun. “It was weird [when I made ‘Tiny Room’], because I couldn’t put my full attention into my music – uni was finishing, I had dissertations and stuff to do,” he says. “But since I’ve finished, I think I’ve written much better quality music. The next song I’ve got coming out is my favourite song I’ve ever made. I’m going to put pressure on it. It feels like me in a song, and it’s a much bigger sound. It’s coming next year, and I hope everyone in the world listens to it. That’d be great. If not, then a couple of billion would be acceptable.” 

Before Zoom prematurely ends our call for a third time, I quickly press Hill for a word on his fashion inspirations – mainly so we can both walk away feeling glad that we discussed at least one highbrow subject, but also because his Instagram feed suggests he’s got a real thing for V-neck sweaters. 

“I can’t ever say that I’m really into fashion because I don’t follow anyone [in that world],” Hill explains. “But I think I’ve found my own style, which is cool. And it probably comes from listening to those crooner guys. I’m very much inspired by that 50s, 60s classy style – not so much streetwear. I love feeling like a bit of a grandad. A drippy grandad. That’s my vibe, for sure. 

“I’m just worried about being in front of the camera [for this shoot],” he adds as we wrap up. “I’m good at being funny, I’m not good at pouting.” And that, ladies and gentlemen, is Arthur Hill.

Follow Arthur Hill on Spotify, TikTok and Instagram.

Read our interview with our previous cover star, Josh Denzel.