In October, when the show’s beloved Tariq was brought back — complete with a dance number to Will Smith’s “Wild Wild West” — the Zach Fox-centric corner of the Internet exploded.
It wasn’t the first time.
The 33-year-old Atlanta-born actor — who plays the now-ex-boyfriend of Kuyta Brunson’s character — has a habit of raising temperatures online, and not just when he pops up. He’s also a DJ, and recent sets at Boiler Room have also raised some online fever, especially among his fans with two X chromosomes.
“I try to stay away from thirsty tweets, but it’s inevitable,” he explains. “There have been moments when women who probably don’t even know I follow them will say things like that. I’ll see it and I’m like, ‘Okay, now this whole app has to be closed. will.’ I think finding that stuff is ultimately self-defeating.
When his latest episode aired, Foxx was in the middle of an 11-city DJ tour, but he was in Los Angeles the night before this interview (and shortly before his Nov. 9 wedding to his longtime girlfriend Kate Mitutina). comes back home and says He is now trying to double his acting career. “All my life, I’ve always wanted to act and bring good comedy to life,” he says.
He briefly attended SCAD Atlanta, earning a living by working a handful of service industry jobs, including an ill-fated attempt to deliver Jimmy John’s sandwiches on foot as he sold his bike to make rent. was Eventually, he plucked up the courage to pursue what he thought was his dream job in adult swimming, scoring a meet with then-executive Walter Newman.
“I went to him and was like, ‘Bro, you all raised me, I’ll do whatever you need to do to be here,’ and he told me no,” Fox said. are “He said, ‘You don’t want a job here, you need to go out and do your own thing because you have something else to offer.’ As much as it frustrated me, it made me realize that I needed to think bigger.
Big meant, eventually, moving to LA in hopes of selling an animated series. “I learned really early that in this business, you have to get rid of whatever outcome you have in your head and just worship what you love.” So he began throwing himself into every creative outlet he could find, eventually collaborating with artistic heavyweights like Thundercat and Flying Lotus. He would occasionally DM with creator Brunson — they traveled in overlapping comedy circles — eventually meeting IRL. When a series order was scored by ABC, Brunson, who plays second-grade teacher Janine, asked Fox to play Tariq, her character’s boyfriend, and gave him the role. Sent the early part of the pilot as part of the pitch.
“I saw her in bed with my fiancee, and we were sitting there with tears in our eyes thinking, ‘This is the sweetest thing I’ve ever seen in my life,'” he says. “And it hit me the way a surfer sees a big wave coming – no matter how confident I was in my ability to do it, it still ended. There’s one chance left.”
Now in the fourth season, Janine has moved on from Tariq romantically, but Brunson’s writers’ room prefers to keep the character around, so Tariq now meets the mother of a student at the school—and she has installed himself as head of the PTA, which means the gig continues to place Fox with many young actors.
“These kids love me,” he says with a laugh. “The minute I get on the set, we’re in trouble. We’re pretty good.”
Crazy fans would love to see Fox go from a guest role to a regular cast member, but he says those aren’t discussions he’s having with Brunson — by design. “I talk to Quinta all the time, and she does such a good job of dividing our friendship. I’ve never asked her what the plan is — she knows I’m doing my thing in the world and doing my own thing. making noise,” he says. “He’s like, ‘You don’t have to be here all the time.’ But whenever it’s right for the story, I know I’m going to get that call saying get your ass over here and I’m going to salute and show up and get as many points as possible. I will try to present.
Foxx says his time on the show recently has made him “incredibly hungry” for more acting work, and he constantly reminds himself that in his still-nascent on-screen career, How “bad” has it been? “I envisioned a slow burn for myself, I didn’t think I’d get to those places until my 40s,” he says. “I was trying to have a Steve Harvey-like career, to come out and be on some Mr. Hightower stuff. Then I’d go bald, then I’d do a game show.
He wants to dig deeper into the science of acting, focusing less on the impact of a particular project and more on what it can teach him. He hasn’t forgotten his animation dreams either and is shopping around for an anime project executive produced by Donald Glover.
This all bodes well for his future, but less so for his hopes of staying away from social media’s opinions.
“When I originally got on Twitter, I was just trying to make 10 of my closest friends laugh, but then we all got jobs, and some of them even got on the cover of your publication,” he said. say “So now I need to learn how to be addicted to the Internet in a way that’s not so self-involved. I’m going to be the Phantom of the Opera of the Internet. I’m laughing here, but I’m not going to engage.” ”
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Credit : www.hollywoodreporter.com
