Meet The Two Legends Who Dressed Up As Dan Andrews And Gladys Berejiklian For Muck-Up Day

If you thought Steve Buscemi recreating the ‘How Do You Do Fellow Kids?’ meme for Halloween was this year’s most iconic costume, just wait until you see the two high school students who dressed as Dan Andrews and Gladys Berejiklian.

Meet Ava and Taliyah, two 18-year-olds from Melbourne who chose to cosplay as the former NSW Premier and ‘Daddy Dan’ for their 2021 Year 12 muck-up day.

Donning the outfits a whole week before Halloween festivities kicked off, Ava and Taliyah quickly became TikTok sensations and won Halloween before it had even started.

Ava, the icon who blessed the world with her spot-on Berejiklian impression, told Junkee that the idea for the costumes — which, of course, included Berejiklian and Andrew’s infamous white and purple press conference backgrounds — had been brewing for ages.

“I actually thought of the costumes ages ago because my mates and I were brainstorming costumes for muck-up day and I was just like, ‘How funny would it be if someone came as Daddy Dan himself?'” Ava told Junkee.

“And Taliyah looked at me like it was the coolest idea ever… in a matter of seconds we both decided that she’d go as Dan and I’d go as Gladys,” she continued.

“We both found their little war funny, so we thought it would be funny to dress up as the people who have been on our TVs nonstop.”

When it came to constructing the costumes, the students just raided their parent’s closets and did a little DIY to knock it all together in three days.

After repurposing an old black wig from a previous costume and gluing the backdrops on cardboard, Ava sifted through her mum’s wardrobe and “tried on blazers and blouses and all that” until she found the perfect ‘Daddy Gladdy’ get up.

As for ‘Daddy Dan’, Ava notes that all Taliyah had to do was “print out the North Face logo and figure out what to do with her hair”.

And the result? Pretty convincing stuff.

Luckily for the crafty friends, their efforts paid off as their costumes went viral on TikTok and were a success at their muck-up day, too.

“We walked in [to school] and everyone kinda stared and was like ‘omg that’s so cool’, some of the teachers wanted photos and some said it was the best,” Ava said about her school’s response to the outfits. “We were actually scared someone else would have come up with the idea too and we’d have a whole group of Dans and Gladys’ but luckily it was just us.”

On their friend @jupiterofpentaclez‘s TikTok account, the love for Ava and Taliyah’s outfits was a lot clearer with the three videos in the Andrews and Berejiklian costumes garnering over 1.3 million views, 200,000 likes, and thousands of comments praising the student’s creativity.

Set to Mashd N Kutcher’s classic ‘Get on the Beers’, Lil Nas X and Jack Harlow’s ‘Industry Baby’ and Nicki Minaj’s ‘I’m Legit’, the girls filmed a few TikTok trends “in the morning just for a bit of fun” and checked back later in the day to see that their videos had blown up.

“I was hoping some people would see it and we’d get, at most, 5000 likes or something, but we never thought it would get that big,” Ava shared. “It was pretty cool.”

Of course, Ava and Taliyah sported their cheeky political costumes before the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) revealed all the messy details of Berejiklian’s involvement with her ex-boyfriend, Daryl Maguire. But the girls don’t regret their decision to dress up as the Victorian and New South Wales foes because it was all for a bit of fun.

“Taliyah and I are fans of Daddy Dan, we just like joking about him but it’s nothing serious at all,” Ava told Junkee. “Not so much fans of Gladys.”

“Gladys isn’t in our good books, but what’s a politician without a bit of [alleged] corruption?”

As for potential plans of cosplaying as other Aussie politicians or reviving their Andrews and Berejiklian get-ups in the future, Ava says nothing’s off the table.

“People said Taliyah looked more like ScoMo, so I reckon she could go as him. But I’m happy with Gladdy,” Ava concluded. “Who knows if we’ll keep the cosplay going?”

“Maybe one day Gladys and Dan will return if we ever go through another global pandemic.”