Mônica Bergamo: ‘The best version of Casimiro few people know’, says streamer in an exclusive interview

It doesn’t matter if the video portrays cleaning the fridge, preparing a Wellington steak, assembling a school lunch box, or talking about Covid-19 testing. Like a Midas of debauchery, in the hands of Casimiro Miguel any of these themes becomes entertainment.

“I just wanted to know what these guys are thinking that Bill Gates wants to know about their lives by putting a chip in their arm. This is a joke”, he says in a video about anti-vaccination people. “No one wants to know, man, what you’re doing in Campo Grande there, no.”

The streamer, as anyone who broadcasts games live on the internet is called, has more than 2.4 million followers on his YouTube channels and 1.8 million on the Twitch video platform — in the latter, more than 100,000 are subscribers. payers, according to the TwitchTracker website.

With lives that start at the end of the night and sometimes go on until dawn, the 28-year-old carioca became famous among young people broadcasting video games and talking about his great passion, football. It was after attracting more than 5,000 simultaneous viewers, while watching and reacting to a fictional series from the influencer and now ex-BBB Viih Tube, that he began to take seriously the idea of ​​expanding the range of subjects and his audience. It worked out.

“I have a huge audience for the elderly, which I would never have expected”, he says. “In the last few months, my female audience has grown exponentially. You would imagine that a streamer who talks about football and has all the possible stereotypes has a teenage, male audience. It’s not quite like that.”

Most of this audience, he explains, reaches him through the channel Cortes do Casimito, on YouTube, where excerpts from the long transmissions made by Twitch are published. “If I open the [site de métricas Google] Channel Analytics Is Crazy Because It’s Too Flat [o perfil da audiência].”

Casimiro spoke with the column this week by videoconference. In addition to the omnipresence of the black and red microphone and the misfit headphones, the portrait of Michael Jordan and the shirts of Neymar Jr. and Alex Teixeira that decorate the wall in the back made it seem as if the interview was taking place on one of his broadcasts.

Having started his career as a journalist on the closed channel Esporte Interativo, today TNT Sports, Casimiro came to work at SBT Rio, which he recently left. Son of Portuguese parents Amadeu, 70, and Maria de Fátima, 66, he remembers his parents’ estrangement when he said he would change television for lives.

“At first they were like ‘but where are you live? I saw the TV and you weren’t there’. Today [em dia] I’m on live and my father sends a message on WhatsApp: ‘Send me a hug’. And my mom complains when she thinks I’m calling her old,” she says, laughing.

“I’m an only child, man. Over-pampered. This is bad, but it’s good, right?”, he tells about his upbringing. “I am my parents’ third child attempt. My mother lost two children before I was born, almost passed away. I was a long-awaited child.”

It was for his father that he decided to commit to streaming from June 2020, when he found himself at home because of the coronavirus pandemic. Amadeu is a partner in an esfiharia in Largo do Machado, in the state capital, and worked at the unit’s counter until recently.

“When I saw that it was possible to earn money doing live, I set as a goal to get my father out of work. My father has always been working, and standing up”, says Casimiro. About eight months later, Amadeu retired. “My dad is my biggest fan. It’s only fair, now that I produce 30 videos a day, let him watch them all. He needs time [para assistir]”, jokes.

On January 24 of this year, the streamer broke Twitch’s national record by broadcasting, firsthand, the first episode of the miniseries “Neymar — O Caos Perfeito” (Netflix). At the time, it gathered 546,000 simultaneous viewers. The audience peak was the ninth largest in the history of the platform in the world, according to the website StreamsCharts. In addition to all these brands, Casimiro also joined two competing giants, Netflix and Amazon, as Twitch belongs to the company founded by Jeff Bezos.

“I never imagined that so many people could like what I do, and that’s very bizarre internally. I think having people that I admire saying they like me and following me is really cool too. I never imagined, like, Neymar following me It’s a business that is out of this world, it doesn’t make sense”, he says, who popularized catchphrases like “did you put this in?”, “Do you accept Pix?” and “forget”.

The PSG player even invited Casimiro to one of his parties at the end of 2021, but the carioca was unable to attend because, the day before, he was diagnosed with Covid-19. The contagion took place after he closed a movie theater to watch “Spider-Man: No Return Home” with a small group of friends. His tragicomic account was watched by over 130,000 people simultaneously.

“I should have a plot for my live, but I really don’t. I put a 15-minute video and it takes an hour to finish because I tell ten stories. There’s no script programmed, I follow whatever comes to my mind. “

He says he doesn’t know how to explain its scope, since he says what comes to mind, or how to pop bubbles, but he ventures a guess: “Nowadays, you comment on something absurd, you say the obvious, it became a reason for exaltation. , how sensible this guy is. Casimiro is very sensible.’

Casimiro’s success even reached the political universe and was replicated by figures such as federal deputy Marcelo Freixo (PSB), pre-candidate for governor of Rio de Janeiro, and the mayor of Rio, Eduardo Paes (PSD).

Paes shared one of Casimiro’s speeches in favor of the booster vaccination campaign against Covid-19. “Imagine the idiots in the chat who are like ‘I’ve never seen this booster shot for a vaccine’. ‘If it’s so good, why does it need a booster?'”, the streamer said in the piece. “Take the booster, damn it,” he added.

“Whoever doesn’t understand now will never understand,” commented Paes. Casimiro was not very happy with the initiative. “There were political figures that I won’t say they took advantage of, but they used this video to publicize, to promote… I think that when these people do that, it loses strength”, he says to the column.

“When I speak my way, I’m communicating directly to this guy [espectador]. And, when a figure who is already totally worn out in the middle of a group of kids uses this, people say: ‘Gee, look where Casimiro is, bro’, ‘wow, it ended up on the politician’s Twitter’. I try to fulfill an important role, but sometimes the video circulates, it is misused.”

The carioca, who considers himself progressive, also dispenses with suggestions so that one day he can enter institutional politics. “People say: ‘I would vote for you’. I say: ‘For God’s sake, man, please don’t do that. And when you go to vote, vote right, man. If you’re saying you’re going to vote for me , it’s already wrong there, it’s already indicating that you’re not well’.”

“Obviously I have to know the responsibility of being a guy who has a great influence, who speaks to a lot of people, and I’m slowly understanding. Sometimes I say nonsense here, nonsense there, and people say: ‘Gee, Cazé, you have a cannon in your hand, you can’t do that’.”

“I think the main problem with being famous is this exposure, man. I have a hard time understanding what I’ve become, you know? I don’t like this deification of Casimiro because at the end of the day I’m the guy who sits and does the live. “

“I love it when people come to talk to me, say they’re my fan, it’s awesome. But there are things that go too far. who goes to my old school and looks for my photos in a graduation book and takes a picture”, he continues.

While his lives and videos are watched by people who seek entertainment without compromise, Casimiro says that his relaxation sometimes takes place by doing the same things he would do during a broadcast, but without thousands of viewers following his movements.

“I’m going to turn on the television, I’m going to watch a game, I’m going to talk to my friends, I’m going to talk to my girlfriend, I’m going to see a movie. I think I know how to differentiate well the moment from the live, the moment when I’m there in vogue , from the moment when I’m just the same Casimiro as always. It’s the best version of Casimiro and that few people know. I think my escape is my real life.”

At home, one of the lessons he learned from an early age was his love for football, especially for Vasco da Gama. Despite his predilection for the sport, Casimiro says that his first memory related to the team is linked to a basketball game, when he was five years old.

“I remember seeing my father celebrating a victory for Vasco in basketball. And then I said: ‘What the hell, father, what the hell?’ [diz, imitando uma voz infantil]. And he said: ‘Vasco, Vasco won’. I didn’t even know what Vasco was. Vasco was an idea for me.”

Casimiro says that it was Gigante da Colina who took him to his girlfriend, Anna Beatriz, and to his first job, at Esporte Interativo — he had a profile dedicated to the team on Twitter and that was a highlight during the selection process. If today he is a satisfied Vasco? “Then you complicated me”, he replies.

“Vasco is very important in my life, he is a fundamental part of my happiness like any fan who loves the club. So seeing Vasco in this situation hurts me a lot. [humorista] Whindersson [Nunes].”

“Whindersson, when he became famous, I charged him on Twitter. Chatão. ‘And then, buy a player for Vasco’ [escrevia para o humorista]. I thought it was great, I thought I was rocking it. Today, when it happens to me, I say: ‘Oh my God, boring guy’. To buy a player for Vasco, for God’s sake!”

Recently, one of Vasco’s games was streamed exclusively by Casimiro on Twitch. The opportunity came through LiveMode, a company that manages the rights to sports games and that signed a contract with the streamer. In addition to having the partnership, the carioca says he employs about ten people to do editing, moderation and other work on the platforms where he operates.

“It’s not a one-off project,” he says of LiveMode. “I think I have everything to make my biggest dream come true, which is to make as many broadcasts as possible like this, the way people learned to like it”, he says. He says he sees the internet broadcasting model as revolutionary and, at the same time, complementary to television.

Casimiro is now one of the official channels of the Carioca Football Championship, but he says he doesn’t want to stop there: why not the World Cup? “Perhaps this Cup is very much in the face of the goal”, he says about this year’s edition, in Qatar. “It’s a dream, and dreaming is beautiful, there’s no way around it. But better than dreaming is realizing it, so we go after it.”

“I don’t know how long I’m going to ‘stream’ [fazer transmissões ao vivo]. This day-to-day routine of you being there and having to always be in a good mood is very heavy. But when it’s over, let the crowd look back and let me look back too and say: ‘Gee, it was cool, bro. It was pretty cool.”

_{JOELMIR TAVARES (interim)}