Dom Mazzetti is a fictional character portrayed by Mike Tornabene. He is best known as the Bro Science Guy or Brofessor and pokes fun at the typical muscular ‘gym bro’ through his content. Over the years, Dom Mazzetti has become an inseparable part of Tornabene’s identity, at least on the internet. This article explores Mike Tornabene’s journey that led him to Dom Mazzetti and also sheds light on the diet and workout routine that helps him stay in an excellent shape.
Mike Tornabene had a flair for the dramatic since childhood. He met Gian Hunjan, a friend for the lifetime and the co-creator of Dom Mazzetti all the way back in the second grade. They immediately clicked together and started their artistic journey then and there. The duo worked together at a restaurant during the senior year of high school. The duo would write comedy pieces together and entertain the restaurant staff when they ate dinner.
The ‘business partners’ had to part ways to pursue higher studies. While Tornabene went to New York University for college education, Gian called Temple University his home. They continued to write and during the college years, they wrote a few television scripts as well as a feature length comedy screenplay.
While in their senior year of college, Tornabene and Gian decided to kick start their comedy business, which, at the time, started as a mere Facebook page. However, they soon started posting comedy sketches on the page as well as on their newly started YouTube channel. A series of videos called ‘Intern’ was the first piece of work posted on the channel.
Gian and Mike graduated from the college in 2010 and decided to move to the city to pursue their dream. However, dreams come crashing down when they are not backed by financial stability. The duo was hellbent on realising their dreams, no matter how distant they seemed to be. As a result, they spent the entire summer of 2010 to make some extra money and raise funds for sustaining the business. In Tornabene’s own words:
“We spent the summer stuffing mailboxes with flyers advertising our willingness to do any job for extra cash to “fund our dream.” We did some pretty strange work that summer, including picking up an autistic kid from camp and driving him home or taking him on trips. We took him to the Shore, we even took him to Denny’s.
At the time I was also studying to get my personal trainer certification so I could work at a gym in the city for my day job. All of which had absolutely nothing to do with what I went to school for. In October 2010 we moved to the Upper East Side, where we worked day jobs and did the comedy thing at night.”
Around a year after starting their business, Mike and Gian had the idea of making a sketch around the UPS bomb scare in 2010. It used Dom Mazzetti as a character and satirized the process of dealing with a bomb scare. The video was a huge success and the duo decided to use him for another video.
The Dom Mazzetti content started getting viral across all platforms. Realizing the huge potential this idea had, Mike and Gian started posting the Dom Mazzetti content every couple of weeks and the views started pouring in.
The character eventually developed different facets and became a multi-layered complex act as time passed by.
But was Mazzetti always intended to be the character he is now? Not really. According to Mike Tornabene, Dom Mazzetti was initially envisioned to be ‘this middle-aged, dumb, italian character’ that they wrote for a sketch about cooking.
Slowly but surely, Dom Mazzetti became one of the most popular characters on the internet. Mike Tornabene weaved many sketches with Dom Mazzetti and ‘bro-science in fitness’. It became Mike and Gian’s most successful venture. So much so that Mike’s name is now literally synonymous with Dom Mazzetti, their identities intertwined seamlessly.
Mike Tornabene was able to build an independent creative career because of a platform like YouTube. The freedom to take decisions and having full control over the content has enabled him to express his creative side with utmost sincerity.
Everything has a downside and so does YouTube and the internet. While advising aspiring people in the industry in an NYC Local interview, Mike Tornabene shed light on some of the downsides of a YouTube career and opined:
However, Dom Mazzetti has risen way above these factors since his inception in 2011. At the time of this article’s publishing, Mike Tornabene’s YouTube channel BroScienceLife that features Dom Mazzetti has 2.52 million subscribers. The future only looks brighter for Mike and Gian as they are optimistic about their own and the character’s prospects going forward. According to Mike: