Troye Sivan has one very specific nightmare. A ball sails over a fence, lands near him, and a group of men waits for him to send it back. “That just, like, is a very terrifying experience to me,” the 31-year-old pop star says in a new video for A View From A Bridge, the Instagram series where people pick up a red telephone on a bridge and talk.
The clip runs 2 minutes and 43 seconds. Sivan leans on a railing in a black sweater, sunglasses pushed up into his curls, and walks through masculinity, a school swimming carnival and the teacher who got him out of the pool. By Sunday morning the post had roughly 50,000 likes and more than 1,700 shares.
How School Sport Shaped Troye Sivan’s Take on Masculinity
He opens with the thesis. “I think I’ve, like, always had a very complicated relationship with men and, like, my own masculinity,” Sivan says.
Some of his earliest memories, he explains, involve feeling like “a bit of a failure as, like, a boy.” The culprit was sport. He says he really, really didn’t like it, and he’s blunt about his skill level: “I’m honestly, like, completely useless at it.” The ball-over-the-fence scenario is where that old feeling still lives, years later, for a guy who has since performed in front of arenas full of screaming fans.
The Swimming Carnival Deal That Let Troye Sivan Sing Instead of Swim
Then comes the story at the center of the video. Sivan grew up in Perth, and like a lot of Australian kids he had to compete in his school’s swimming carnival, a pool-based sports day. Everyone had to swim. It was compulsory.
It went badly. He says he could manage about four strokes before he had to “hold on to the middle things” and catch his breath. “The whole school was watching,” he recalls, including the boys who already teased him for singing like a girl. He remembers wanting to cry in the middle of the race.
The next year, he went to a teacher he describes as “so fab,” someone who “always just looked immaculate and was so warm.” He told her he did not want to swim. She already knew he liked to sing, so she offered a trade. He could skip the pool if he sang the national anthem at the carnival.
He took the deal. The whole school clapped afterward, he says, “and then I got to go home and I didn’t have to swim.” That is elite negotiating from a kid who could manage four strokes.
The Teacher Who Saw “a More Real Version” of Troye Sivan
Looking back, Sivan reads the moment differently than he did at the time. “I think she saw something in me that I was really afraid of, which was, like, a more real version of myself,” he says.
He frames it as a lesson in good leadership. Seeing what makes someone different, treating it as the thing that makes them special, “and celebrating that.” For him, it was the first time he felt seen and supported for who he was, instead of being squeezed into “a box that I probably just don’t belong in.”
The ending of the video is the part that gets you. Sivan says he isn’t sure she even remembers. She lives in Sydney now, he adds, and runs a big school there as principal. “I think that those are very, very lucky students,” he says. For her it was probably just another day at work. For him, it “really just meant the world.” He figures she has done the same thing for hundreds of other kids by now.
Inside A View From A Bridge, the Red-Phone Series Behind the Clip
A View From A Bridge is the project of London-born artist and filmmaker Joe Bloom. The format is simple and weirdly disarming: no studio, no visible interviewer, just a person on a bridge holding an old-school red phone. Bloom films strangers and famous faces alike, then cuts the conversations into short videos that usually run one to three minutes.
The series has grown into a podcast on the Talkhouse network, which releases longer cuts of the conversations in themed episodes. Season two launched in July 2026 with David Byrne. The post’s credits list Bloom as the person who filmed and interviewed Sivan. No extended Troye Sivan episode has been announced.
Where the Bridge Story Fits in Troye Sivan’s “She’s the Best” Era
The timing tracks. Sivan released his fourth studio album, She’s the Best, on Oct. 9, and he has called the title track a love letter to the women in his life. He told Clash he named it to honor the feminine as “the one constant in my life.” The title track’s video starred Nicole Kidman, his co-star in Boy Erased, the 2018 drama about so-called “conversion therapy,” a practice every major U.S. medical and mental health group condemns.
It’s also the same album that gave us “Canada Dry” and its very filthy explanation. So yes, the kid who talked his way out of a swim race is now writing back-arched club tracks about handsome Canadians. Growth.
The bridge video adds a softer origin story to all that. Before Kidman, before Charli XCX and the arena tours, a teacher at a Perth school looked at a kid who couldn’t swim, figured out what he could do, and gave him the national anthem instead.
Watch the full video on A View From A Bridge’s Instagram. Then text the teacher who did that for you, if you had one.