Sydney
June 19-21, 2026
Sydney Showground Olympic Park
Ahead of Supanova Comic Con & Gaming in Sydney (19–21 June 2026) and Perth (27–28 June 2026), we had the chance to pick Supa-Star Adam Savage’s brain for advice and anecdotes!
To kick things off, we asked Savage to reflect on his career, and for any tips he had for those wanting to explore a similar path. As an individual with decades of crucial experience, we had to know what might shock fans the most about his exciting and unique career.
“I think they’d be surprised that there wasn’t a cohesive plan,” Savage said. “Every life looking back from the current moment looks pretty linear. I saw Star Wars when I was 10 years old, and ended up working in the ILM model shop 20 years later. In the middle, it didn’t feel like a plan. It felt more like triage. At each stage, I simply took the step that seemed natural to me.”
With the ever-evolving world and its technology it would be fair to assume that the educational resources would’ve been quite different at the start of his career. We simply had to know how he got into special effects and model building back in the day.
“I found my way into the industry through theatre,” Savage responded. “I think it’s one of the most important art forms in the world… I cut my teeth building sets, rigging, set painting, prop building, costume making, furniture construction. Eventually, my skills caught the attention of a couple of shops and sadly, film pays way better than theatre. So, I had to leave theatre.”
If you’re not caught up with what Savage is doing as of late, he has a YouTube channel called Tested, which is a paradise for any kind of nerdy interest. If you like behind the scenes, product testing, pop culture and sci-fi, then Tested is the place for you. Uploading content online and hosting a network television show in the early 2000s are two very different beasts.
“The list is pretty endless,” he said on the differences between the two. “On a network television show, they want a very specific amount of content. In our case, it was about 20 to 25 episodes a year. Every single episode needs about 51 minutes of content. That had us working pretty much full-time for the whole 13 [and a] 1/2 year run of MythBusters. The production team that made that show was around 25 people all in.
“On YouTube, it’s dreamy. We put out a video a day… we’re actually making more content than I was for MythBusters, under a massively different structure. Some of our videos are eight minutes long, some of them are 80 minutes long. We are unrestricted in terms of length and content. And, the team that produces the Tested YouTube channel is only seven people.”
Even though he’s produced countless hours of content across his career, he admits there’s a long list of myths they weren’t able to bust back in the day during MythBusters’ run.
Savage informed us that “the list of myths we could have done gets longer every year. But that’s OK, it’ll be there for another generation of science explorers and explainers”.
The list of what he has achieved and Tested is probably longer though.
“On my gravestone, I want it to say, ‘He taught generations how to set stuff on fire,’” he laughs.
“Seriously, though, we used to joke when we were making the show that we were never thinking of the children. The fact that the show had so much saturation, despite the fact that we were not actively trying to teach, was so rewarding. Really, the structure of the show was just the five of us hosts trying to figure out what we were interested in – and how to answer the questions we had. The idea that that had such a deep, cultural saturation around Australia, and around the world is amazing,”
Many of Savage’s projects have ties to Australia and New Zealand, which makes it even more exciting to have him returning to our shores.
At the Wētā Workshop Unleashed experience in Auckland, New Zealand, fans can see a face cast of Savage on the tour.
“The entire Wētā team is like my extended family. I love those folks so much. Getting to be in their LBE in Auckland was like a fantasy camp. I got to play a villain reading lines in a terrible Kiwi accent, they moulded my entire head and then punched hair in it to make a version of me that’s so realistic I can barely look at it.”
Savage highlights that MythBusters was produced out of Sydney.
“It’s a deeply Aussie show and we have a lot of friends here,” he shares. “I love this country, I love the people. I love the national sense of humour.”
Catch Adam Savage at Supanova in Sydney (19–21 June 2026) and Perth (27–28 June 2026).
