Avan Jogia Follows Wherever His Curiosity Leads

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Older generations like to criticize millennials as unstable—erratic in their desires, hesitant in their pursuits, and mercurial in their identities as they navigate a confusing world that is transforming even more rapidly around them. The 27-year-old actor Avan Jogia, however, sees his cohort’s mutability as a blessing, not a curse. In Gregg Araki’s new series Now Apocalypse, Jogia plays Uly (short for Ulysses, after one of Western literature’s most famous adventurers), a part-time security guard exploring a vibrantly hued Los Angeles in search of romance, meaning, and himself. His roommate Ford, played by Beau Mirchoff, is a charming dolt of an aspiring screenwriter in love with a kinky paranormal scientist exploring possible alien lifeforms. His best friend Carly, portrayed by Kelli Berglund, is a novice actor who turns to camming for extra cash after a series of rejections. They are all, as Jogia puts it, “wanderers,” exploring themselves, their careers, their relationships, and, because this is Araki, their sex lives, assured only in their own uncertainty. “I’ve played a lot of characters whose main driving force is their ambition and their purpose, a real central, strong purpose to their existence,” Jogia adds. “Uly’s is to wander. I’ve never played a character whose existence does not hang upon one central ambition. I like playing a character who is so wide-eyed and searching.”

In some ways, Jogia shares those qualities with Uly, no surprise given that Araki wrote with the Canadian actor in mind after the two worked together on the short film “Here Now” a few years ago. Now Apocalypse, with Steven Soderbergh as an executive producer and Slutever host Karley Sciortino as a co-writer, celebrates youthful experimentation, capturing Uly, Carly, and Ford in the fraught process of discovering themselves. In some ways, Jogia himself is in the middle of a similar period of growth, although with decidedly more self-assurance, as he works on directing, music, and even poetry in between films like this fall’s Zombieland: Double Tap with Emma Stone, Jesse Eisenberg, and Zoey Deutch and the new Shaft reboot out this week. What connects these threads is Jogia’s own creative ambition and appetite for risk, which he also says is what drew him to Now Apocalypse in the first place. “I’m interested in pursuing stuff I haven’t seen before,” he explains, “and I had never seen anything like it.”

Now Apocalypse examines many of Araki’s longtime interests, from queer identity to what Jogia labels the “surrealness of life,” while updating his idiosyncratic Gen X sensibilities for a new era. Famed for his independent films like Mysterious Skin, Kaboom, and his Teen Apocalypse Trilogy from the Nineties, Araki has never been one to shy away from provocation and aggression, both of which are on ample display, with perhaps a brighter tone, in the series. “Being a character in Gregg’s world is an incredible thing,” Jogia says. “We have such a similar outlook on this, how surreal real life is and rejecting the idea that life is not full of vibrant color. Life is insane, more insane than anything in fantasy.”

Uly is, in Jogia’s words, a “sexual astronaut, exploring as far as he can go into space,” and much has been made of the show’s vivid, memorable, and numerous sex scenes, but there is always the sense that what happens in the bedroom—or, in Uly’s case after a first date with Tyler Posey’s Gabriel, the back alley—is no more or less essential a part of uncovering one’s identity than any other. Like Araki, Uly is Asian and queer, while Jogia is half-Asian and straight, which prompted a conversation about the nuances of representation between director and actor, with the latter admitting to some reticence in taking on the part at first. “Gregg really convinced me that I offer something to this character as the person that I am, beyond my sexual orientation,” he explains. “He had to talk me into wanting to do it originally because I was like, ‘I’m not sure how I feel about that.’ Gregg had to explain to me that my spirit as a person offers something to this part.”

In the end, he agreed because he trusted Araki’s vision, experience, and confidence as a queer person of color to tell the story with honesty and credibility. “If you have creatives who want to tell their stories and have a point of view or come from a background that isn’t what we’ve seen before, you’ll get characters who are fleshed out and not one note, not a gimmick,” Jogia adds. “I feel like there’s a lot of lack of confidence because films are being made by people who don’t share the life story of the people that they’re making films about. There’s plenty of people who are making films about stuff because it’s popular, but they don’t share the same background or story of that main character, so they end up making shallow decisions.”

As the son of a British-Indian father and an English and German mother, the issue of representation is an essential one for Jogia. It forms the subject, in fact, of his forthcoming book Mixed Feelings, a compilation of poems, stories, conversations, and art about being biracial in a world where the topic of race has become increasingly polarizing. “I’d always been learning about my mixed identity and what it means to be mixed and whether mixed-ness has its own unique identity that’s different than anything else,” he says. “I’ve been interviewing people for the last couple years trying to get an idea of what that concept is. It’s been really rewarding and really interesting and an incredible journey for me, exploring what it means to me but also exploring what it means to other people. That’s where all that stuff springs from for me, curiosity. I just let it take shape and follow whatever it wants to be.”

Jogia has seemingly always approached life with that same inquisitiveness. As a child growing up in Vancouver, Canada, he says he was drawn to acting because of the variety of opportunities it opened up. “As a kid, there’s only a few things that you can do where people take you seriously and acting is one of those things,” he laughs. “I really like acting but how I got in the game was watching movies and being like, ‘I want to be a pirate,’ or, ‘I want to be an astronaut, I want to be a doctor, I want to be a fireman.’ You only get so much life, but I realized if you’re an actor, you can do all of those things.” He moved to Los Angeles as a teenager and was quickly cast in the Battlestar Galactica spin-off Caprica and then in the Nickelodeon high school series Victorious opposite Victoria Justice and Ariana Grande, a massive hit that earned him millions of tween fans over the course of four seasons.

Hollywood these days is full of former Disney Channel and Nickelodeon stars, each of them finding a unique way to navigate the transition to adulthood. Jogia has come through unscathed, but he rejects the formulation entirely. “I think that much is made about being a kid actor then moving away from kids’ television, but to me that’s a lazy, antiquated narrative, like, ‘He hated this and he didn’t want to do that so he just broke away and he wanted to be taken seriously’—all that’s horseshit,” he says. “At the end of the day, as an artist, you follow what excites you and the things I’ve been doing up until this point have all excited me. At the time, Victorious was exciting and now I’m doing other things. I think if you have a limited worldview and you don’t take yourself seriously, there’s this mad scramble trying to find validity or weight or gravitas or whatever, but I think ultimately, you have to just follow what makes you interested at the time.”

Those interests led him recently to the new reboot of Shaft, with Richard Roundtree reprising his role as detective John Shaft from the iconic 1971 blaxploitation film and Samuel L Jackson as his nephew John Shaft II, a role he first played in the 2000 movie of the same name. The latest version focuses on Jessie Usher’s JJ Shaft Jr, the son of Shaft II and a cybersecurity expert and MIT graduate, shedding new light on a series that has long taken a critical view on questions of race and masculinity. “It’s interesting, like how do you read Shaft in this day and age?” Jogia muses. “In this movie, his son is just a nice guy. He’s in tech, he’s everything that Shaft is not, so it’s cool to see that generational difference and the difference in the concepts of masculinity and how it evolved. Let’s be honest, it’s all a good fun comedy—it’s not trying to change the world—but it is asking interesting questions like, ‘What does Shaft do in 2019 as a person? How is he treated by the world? How does the world treat him?’ I don’t think anyone has time for his shit in 2019.”

Given his various creative outlets, it’s no surprise that Jogia has been focusing himself behind the camera as well. After a number of short films and web series, he is set to direct his first feature this year, the details of which he is keeping closely guarded but which will “inject some art into the popcorn and inject some popcorn into the art,” he promises. “I’ve been acting for a little while, so after a decade of doing that, it goes back to the concept of following what interests you creatively and this is the next step for me as an artist.” Endlessly enterprising and adventurous, Jogia reflects the multitudinous nature of artistic ambition today, when exploration and experimentation are worthy goals in their own right. “It’s going to be fun to direct,” he says. “I just want to start making shit. At the end of the day, that’s what I’m here for.”

Now Apocalypse is now streaming on Starz. Shaft is out Friday.