Exclusive: Lil Ahenkan A.K.A Flex Mami Admits the Unexpected Reason She Went On Big Brother

She may have been in the Big Brother Australia 2021 house for just two episodes but digital content creator Lillian Ahenkan a.k.a Flex Mami is the most famous face the new iteration of the series has seen.

In 2014, Lillian left a job in public relations to pursue full-time DJing before landing a presenting gig as an MTV VJ and is now hosting the podcast, Bobo and Flex, which has had over two million downloads.

So, why did someone with an Instagram presence of 140K and counting, want to enter into the Big Brother house?

“I recognised it was a great way to build my mainstream appeal and to also build the credibility of my profile outside of these very niche spaces,” Lillian said during an exclusive interview with POPSUGAR Australia.

“I was not on there to become Flex Mami of Big Brother, and I was not on there to convert my audience into becoming Big Brother fanatics.”

For someone with such a big following, hiding away in a lockdown for a few weeks in a hotel and then secretly filming the series was a mean feat for someone who posted on social media regularly, however, the influencer had a fail-proof plan.

“I curated a bunch of content and went through my phone and counted how many days and then pre-scheduled it,” she said. “Then I saved a bunch of TikToks and random filler posts, like my face with certain filters on them. All of those things gave the illusion that I was here but just less present. Kind of like I was having a mental health day but still posting.”

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A post shared by ✨ Lil Ahenkan ✨ Sydney, AUS (@flex.mami)

Fans of Lillian know that she has some serious brains about her, which is why the conversation she had with Daniel Hayes during the second episode of the hit series was so jarring.

Daniel asked her about her social media following and questioned what she spoke about on her podcasts.

“I’m more of a social commentator,” she told him. “On pop culture, on identity… on my history podcast, for example, we’d use bizarre stories from the past as a jumping-off point to have a critical discussion how history is repeating itself.”

“You’re really intelligent,” Daniel told her, to which she responded, “I guess so.” It was an awkward exchange and one that rubbed Lillian up the wrong way.

“I rememeber it quite vividly. He was grilling me about my employment history and he just couldn’t understand that I had a brain and also work in the entertainment industry,” she revealed. “His disposition towards me changed when he recognised that I wasn’t malleable in a way that he wanted me to be malleable.”

While we see a few glimpses of it in the show, Lillian said that Daniel’s behaviour wasn’t anything compared to what really happened and that he “has this way of asserting this power of people.”

“The way I would describe him, he’s hyper-masculine, misogynistic and a bit sexist,” she said. “His prime role is to irritate those around him and he just asserts his power. I don’t have time for it. It makes them so uncomfortable and it just triggers me.”

Lillian was voted out during the second elimination and while she told host Sonia Kruger that she was confident she had formed alliances to stay, the votes said otherwise.

According to Daniel, she was not “easily read” –—a comment that really surprised her. Earlier, while “scrambling”, she had asked the property manager why he thought she had been put up for eviction and “he told me that I’m a closed book. I was like WHAT?”

“He said to me that I didn’t make an effort with him and that I didn’t know anything about his family, so I said, ‘well, you know, you’re a two-time divorcee, you work in real estate and you’re a motorcycle enthusiast. Like, I know these things because I asked them of you. You didn’t ask me any questions, so you don’t know anything about me’.”

Even though her experience in the house was short-lived, Lil did learn a whole lot about herself.

“I learned that I really have the capacity to be a wallflower,” she admitted. “For a lot of people, it feels like this is the antithesis of my personality because I commodify myself, I get paid to be myself and I’m sharing myself online all day every day but I like to earn my limelight. I want people to want to get to know me. I want people to want to be interested.”

Big Brother continues Sunday – Tuesday on Channel 7.