The Sturniolo Triplets: From Local Boys to Internet Sensations
Nicolas Antonio Sturniolo, Matthew Bernard Sturniolo, and Christopher Owen Sturniolo, born on August 1, 2003, are American YouTubers and social media influencers known as the Sturniolo Triplets. Hailing from Somerville, Massachusetts, they gained online fame starting in 2020 by uploading videos of their conversations in their car. Their relatable humor, authentic personalities, and engaging content have propelled them to become one of the most popular young social media influencers today.
Early Life and Background
Nicolas, Matthew, and Christopher Sturniolo are fraternal triplets who were born in Somerville, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. They were delivered via Caesarean section; Nick was delivered first, followed by Matt two minutes later, and then Chris two minutes after Matt. Their surname is of Italian origin, and they have one older half-brother named Justin. Their mother, MaryLou, is a former family liaison for Somerville Public Schools.
They attended Benjamin G. Brown School for elementary school, where they were cast as the three-headed dog Cerberus in a school play. Chris and Matt both played various sports growing up, including hockey and lacrosse. The family's house burned down the summer before their junior year of high school, forcing them to move to an apartment.
Nick is openly gay and came out to his brothers in 2019 during an argument about dating a girl, later publicly coming out in a post to his Instagram account in April 2020. He is also reported to play the clarinet.
Growing up, everyone in Somerville knew the Sturniolo boys: Nick, older than Matt by two minutes, and Chris by four. They were well-liked in school, by teachers, and by the other kids. Also: They were triplets, and not just any triplets but cute triplets, with big blue eyes and wide smiles. They were nearly identical, other than the times when their mom, MaryLou, cut their hair into different shapes. According to family legend, a pregnant MaryLou went in for an ultrasound and began to cheer and clap when she heard that someone was having triplets. Turned out it wasn’t someone; it was her. “She thought they were talking to someone else!” Nick says.
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MaryLou was extra involved in the triplets’ lives and school-she had been for Justin, too-eventually working as a family liaison for Somerville Public Schools. She features prominently in some of their early videos, joking with the boys in the kitchen, taking them clothes shopping, making them look at new tile for the bathroom. “They were just happy, good kids, from a really nice family,” says Wendy Cliggott, a fourth-grade teacher at the Brown School in Somerville, the triplets’ elementary, who cast them in the fourth-grade play as Cerberus, the three-headed dog. “They were playful and even a little mischievous but never ill-behaved. When they were all together, you honestly couldn’t tell who was who. At recess, they’d stand outside and give me tutorials on telling them apart.” Often, people didn’t bother trying. “When we were getting awards for, like, hockey or graduation stuff in school, we’d get called up as ‘the triplets,’” Nick says. “There was never, like, a sense of doing things alone. Which wasn’t necessarily bad. It’s just been, like, the thing that happened. So people always ask us: ‘What is it like to be a triplet?’ Like, well, I don’t know what it’s like not to be a triplet.”
Elmer Pleitez, one of the boys’ closest friends from Somerville, met Chris first, sometime in middle school, when they both played the violin. He describes Nick as the most confident, Chris as the goofiest, and Matt as the shyest. “Everybody knew them because they were triplets,” Pleitez says. “But because MaryLou worked on the school committee, and also was friends with a lot of the mothers, people would be like, ‘Oh, if you’re going to a party, don’t tell the triplets.’” Except they did tell the triplets because everyone liked them and wanted them around.
But while they were a unit, three is an odd number. Matt and Chris were closer in looks and in temperament-the hardest to tell apart-whereas Nick had broader features he grew into even more as he got older. Matt and Chris excelled in sports, especially hockey and lacrosse. Sometimes Nick felt excluded from their group of guy friends, and he gravitated toward hanging out with girls. In eighth grade, Nick started to understand that he might be gay. He began to come out to people slowly in 2019-female friends first, followed by some guy friends, and then Matt, Chris, and his parents. Finally, he came out to the world in an April 2020 Instagram post. “I don’t even know why I was shocked,” Chris said in a video they later made telling the story of Nick’s coming-out process. “I knew Nick was gay from the second I knew what gay was.”
Even before COVID, the triplets’ high school experience had been what Chris now describes as “terrible.” Starting their sophomore year, Somerville High School was being rebuilt, and kids were bused between buildings all day long. “It was always super hard to tell how many kids were at Somerville High because there was always, like, half of them not there,” Nick says. The summer before their junior year, a fire destroyed their house, and the family was forced to relocate to an apartment.
The Rise to Fame: YouTube and Beyond
The Sturniolo Triplets made their first YouTube video in October 2020. They ate food in a McDonald's parking lot, and in the video, were wearing costumes from Dollar Tree. They made videos of them talking and arguing in their car. These videos became popular.
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They’d been sitting around at home one night a few weeks before Halloween 2020, bored and hungry. It was their senior year, and they hadn’t been to school in person since March-or in Chris’s case, to school at all; he says he hadn’t logged on to do schoolwork since the day everything shut down. The only things they liked about high school-seeing their friends, playing lacrosse, going to volleyball games-were no longer options. But like it had been their whole lives, they had each other, and if there was one thing they’d always been able to do, it was make each other laugh.
Meanwhile, the adults around them were starting to ask what they wanted to do after graduation. They didn’t know what to say other than they wanted to be YouTube stars. None of them was particularly interested in four more years of school. Making videos for an audience, though, was fun. Nick attached his phone to his selfie stick and hit record. “Hi, everyone,” he said into the camera. “We’re about to go to McDonald’s. And before we go there, I’m thinking we stop at Dollar Tree and get, like, Dollar Tree costumes.” And that’s how it all began.
The first time the Sturniolo Triplets met the Internet was on October 1, 2020, in a video titled, “McDonalds Q & A - Sturniolo Triplets.” It began in the brothers’ shared bedroom and ended in the McDonald’s parking lot. Nick had heard that Q & As make great first videos if you want to start a YouTube channel-easy to execute, ideas provided by others, no storyboarding or fancy camerawork required. Besides, late-night McDonald’s runs in Mom’s minivan had become a regular routine ever since Matt got his license, giving them a safe way to get out of the house during COVID.
In the video, the three boys piled into the minivan and headed to the Twin City Plaza Dollar Tree, where they outfitted themselves in bumblebee wings, mustaches, and handcuffs before cruising over to McDonald’s, where, from the backseat, Nick placed their order, barely able to contain himself: a 20-piece McNuggets to share, three large fries, and two large Dr Peppers. Then they pulled away, laughing so hard Matt said he peed a little. Parked, and with a mouthful of fries, they announced the start of the Q & A. First up, Nick said: “What kind of sauce do you each identify as?”
What follows is a mash-up of juvenile humor, teenage lingo, inside jokes, sibling razzing, and pure, banal joy. They are relatable unicorns, kids you could easily know from the neighborhood, but identical triplets. They simultaneously play to an imaginary audience and act like no one’s watching. “They call me silky barbecue on the low,” Matt answered. “On the low. ON THE LOW,” repeating the joke again, and louder, to make it funnier. Chris revealed he’s ketchup “because a majority of people like it, but there’s a few that don’t, and I don’t even like ketchup most of the time.”
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“That’s sad,” Nick said.
The next video didn’t post for another month-a visit to see their grandmother and to Chick-fil-A. Then they started to make them more often, all of them unrehearsed, unpolished, nothing and everything all at once. They were snapshots of life in isolation, in which the little things are what get you through, and an invitation to digital connection at a time when IRL just wasn’t an option. “They give off a very genuine energy,” Pleitez says. “So it’s hard not to like them. It’s hard to not enjoy their videos because one, they’re funny, and two, they’re just super genuine. They just are themselves.”
PinkNews said the Sturniolo Triplets are famous because of their "chaos". Boston Magazine said they were the "best YouTube power trio" of 2023. Amanda Lucidi said their "bickering" was "charming". Alyssa Giocobbe said they were "cute" and "charming". Rachel Chapman from Elite Daily said their videos feel "real". Fan videos of the triplets are also popular. They were on The Hollywood Reporter's list of "most influential influencers" of 2024.
As their videos have gained traction, they’ve brought the brothers closer together. Each triplet has a role to play in their shared career. While Chris is creative and chatty and comes up with a lot of ideas, Nick knows how to execute them. He produces and edits the videos and studies things like YouTube best practices. “Nick is definitely the leader,” Filipowicz says. Meanwhile, Matt, the quietest of the three, says he is just content to do what his brothers tell him to do: “They know what I like more than myself.” Still, they all understood early on that their success was due to their collective dynamic, and not any one or even two of them.
As their senior year went on, they planned to “really grind and see where this goes,” Chris recalls. By then, fans were starting to show up at the Twin City Plaza McDonald’s, where they’d taken to filming videos in the minivan. Once, they were followed home. By the time they returned to in-person schooling near the end of their senior year, Chris says, “I felt like Justin Bieber.”
In a video they posted around the time they hit the major milestone of 25,000 YouTube followers, titled “Are We Overrated? -Sturniolo Triplets,” they pondered their own popularity and opined on that of others. Beginning with Nick stuffed into a Star Market shopping cart, the video issued some verdicts-Starbucks and Chick-fil-A: overrated. Lunchables and Parmesan cheese: underrated. Someone asked about One Direction. “Not a thing anymore,” Chris said. They were divided on naps. Burritos “would be, like, 10 times better if they took all the things you wanted in the burrito and mixed it up, and then put it on, and then rolled up the burrito,” Chris said. “If I wanted a fucking mouthful of rice, I would have just gotten rice.” The segment ends with Nick and Chris punching and kicking the seats of Mom’s minivan, the Dr Pepper having fully set in. It was July 2021, they had only just graduated from high school, and their unconventional career was already taking off.
Tours and Representation
The triplets have embarked on three national tours: the Let's Trip Tour in early 2023, the Versus Tour in fall 2023, and the Surprise Party Tour in spring 2025. As of July 2025, they are now represented by United Talent Agency.
Content Style and Appeal
The Sturniolo Triplets are known for their relatable, unscripted content. Their videos often feature them in casual settings, such as their car, discussing everyday topics, sharing personal stories, and engaging in lighthearted banter. Their authentic personalities and genuine connection with each other resonate with their audience, creating a sense of community and belonging.
They make videos about what appears to be a lot of nothing: 20 minutes making a case for “Waffles, Pancakes, or French Toast,” or waxing opinionated about children on leashes, the virtue of naps, or navigating the aisles at Target. According to the younger set, they are funny, as much as they can be, without giving their content any more than 30 minutes of thought before they film it. They are smart and driven, though one of them says he barely passed high school. Whatever it is they are doing-and it isn’t always totally clear-it is clear that they are doing it right. And along the way, they aren’t just getting rich and famous but redefining, from the ground up, what it takes to be the next generation of famous Bostonians.
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