From TikTok to TV, Robert Irwin is hot property

The stars are aligning for Robert Irwin. For a start, America’s ongoing fascination with Australia’s preternaturally perky, croc-wrangling family has delivered a $58 million, media-impact jackpot for underwear-maker Bonds after the buff 21-year-old appeared in the brand’s racy campaign designed to help it break into the $13 billion US men’s market.

A Bonds analysis of the campaign, which launched in April, revealed that it had generated a staggering nine billion “media impressions” in its first 24 hours in the US.

How much Bonds, which manufactures offshore and was sold to American giant Hanes in 2016, paid Irwin is unclear, but he’s pulled off something previous brand ambassadors, such as Sarah Murdoch, Paul Mercurio, Pat Rafter and even Chesty Bond, couldn’t: becoming the second-most popular global trending topic on TikTok in the first week of the launch. Crikey!

Thanks to Irwin’s khaki-clad, in-house management team, which is headed by “mummager” Terri, the youngest Irwin is fast becoming the brightest star in the Irwin firmament, flogging everything from Twisties and Hello Fresh to Pop! dolls and holiday parks. (The Irwin empire already includes a multimillion-dollar property portfolio, from Australia Zoo to the 130,000-hectare Steve Irwin Wildlife Reserve in Cape York, and a slew of residual-earning TV shows, books and magazines.)

Irwin’s media career started in 2004 when a horrified world watched his dad, Steve, cradle his month-old son while dangling a chicken carcass over the snapping jaws of a 3.8-metre-long saltwater croc. The former chairman of the National Australia Day Council, Lisa Curry, later revealed the stunt cost Irwin snr the Australian of the Year honour.

But the Irwin hatchling survived. Homeschooled at Australia Zoo while surrounded by crocodile-infested ponds and gawking tourists, he was a regular on Jimmy Fallon’s The Tonight Show by his teen years. In 2024, he got his own wax effigy next to his father’s at Madame Tussauds Sydney.

He has also co-hosted two seasons of Australia’s I’m a Celebrity … Get Me out of Here!, was nominated for a Gold Logie, and won this year’s AACTA for “favourite media personality”. Even his fledgling love life has become tabloid fodder.

And now he’s on the cusp of his biggest showbiz break yet: deep in training to compete on the US television series Dancing with the Stars, just as big sister Bindi triumphantly did a decade ago. It doesn’t get much bigger.

Last year’s finale drew a whopping 7.95 million viewers and garnered 32 million votes.

Now that’s a lot of undies.

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.