AVAN JOGIA

Avan Jogia is upset. Or maybe riled up is a better way to put it. An enthusiastic gesticulator prone to fiery, pathos-driven argument, the 27-year-old actor, author and director is currently railing against the constraints of masculinity. At one point his forceful motioning causes an unceremonious collision of his head against the concrete wall behind him.

Bam! He curses, pausing to take stock before quickly reverting to his breezy, Hollywood-engineered disposition.

“Anyway.…”

Jogia smiles and expresses a sentiment he’ll repeat several times in the course of our hour-long conversation. “It’s just weird. I refuse to be told who or what I am,” he says.

Unfortunately, that’s precisely my job, something he jokes about as we embark on a discussion about preferred pronouns. “‘He feels limiting, yet here I am; here he is.” Jogia rolls his eyes. “As soon as you say ‘This is what a man can be,’ you’ve ruined manhood. By labeling what it can be, you’re actually limiting it.”

A beat passes, and then: “Sorry, I’m ranting again.” Jogia, once a fixture on Nickelodeon (mainly via the series Victorious, which also featured a promising upstart named Ariana Grande) and now an in-demand actor (he’s the lead on Now Apocalypse, which premiered on Starz in March), speaks at times with the sort of hesitation common among celebrities who are conscious of the way the world watches them. But Jogia is far more prone to overexplaining than evading—perhaps out of fear of being misquoted, or perhaps because he doesn’t want to leave any room for confusion.

“The weirdest part is observing yourself through the eyes of someone else,” he says, absentmindedly rubbing the back of his head in between sips of iced coffee. “That never happens in real life. Usually you make an impression and you walk away.”

My immediate thought, though, is that Jogia most definitely makes an impression that sticks with people. For example, today his look is “casual,” which for him means no purple faux furs, holographic sunglasses or two-toned leopard-print buzz cuts. Instead he’s channeling 1970s suave, his leisure suit opened to display carefully manicured chest hair—though the choice to dress head to toe in pink linen ends up turning heads outside the chain coffee shop we’re sitting at.

“As soon as you name something, it loses an element of what it is, because it’s been so unceremoniously defined,” Jogia says, explaining that it’s human nature to try to classify the world around us. He later adds, “But as far as labeling my sexuality, I don’t gain anything from that, because all it does is isolate the possibilities of my life. It’s the same thing with gender. If I say ‘I’m a man’—whatever that means—I’m limiting the depth of my humanity.”

Jogia’s goal is to provide options for other people, particularly “little brown kids” who need to know that “we’re not a monolith,” that there are a myriad of intersectional identities they can occupy outside some de facto norm.

“That’s why I have to be loud,” he says. “My goal is to try to display something different so there are options for who you can be.”

In Jogia’s view, the only idea of masculinity the media presents today is an intensely “buttoned-down version” that lacks room for deviation. Long gone are the days of David Bowie and Prince, his childhood heroes. Instead, all the kids have now is that “singular, leather-jacket-wearing, chestnut-brown-haired guy.”

To Jogia, the pinnacle of masculinity was his father, who was “the strongest man” he knew despite the fact that Indian men are often emasculated—something Jogia says he experienced when he could audition only for “goofy Asian male sidekick” roles, none of which he’d end up getting anyway.

In the past decade Jogia has managed to morph into a Hollywood hotshot with an impressive level of creative freedom. This June he’ll appear in the sequel to Shaft and in October in Double Tap, the second Zombieland installment. He’s also directing his first full-length film, an “electric, fun little punk-rock movie” called Door Mouse.

His takeaway from all this? Maybe it’s best to “lose people,” namely the family-friendly audiences who propelled him to top billing in the first place. “The biggest lie would be to organize my life to appease more people,” he says.

That attitude is evident in his choice to play transgressive “sexual astronaut” Ulysses in Now Apocalypse. Helmed by Gregg Araki, a luminary of the 1990s New Queer Cinema movement, the series has faced an uphill battle gaining viewership and traction. Still, Jogia is happy to headline a show that depicts boundless sexuality as something worth celebrating. “I happen to think sexuality is fun,” he deadpans. “Fucking shocking, I know.”

He did, however, have reservations about taking on the Ulysses character. Recalling a conversation he had with Araki, Jogia approaches the question of the limits, and constraints, of allyship—especially for a straight-presenting cis-man.

“Uly’s queerness isn’t the totality of who he is. Gregg said to me, ‘There’s a part of you, a part of your soul, that makes you right for this person.’ It’s an aspect of who he is, but that’s not the character,” Jogia says. “It’s not a one-note character—it’s a human being, and human beings have a lot of currents.”

Although he avoids addressing his quiet parting from Straight But Not Narrow, the LGBTQ-ally organization he co-founded, Jogia is reinvigorated by my question about the importance of sexuality in his life and how he chooses to present it to the world. “Why would I purposefully make it boring for me?” he says. “Because of pride or fear or guilt? No!”

He pauses for a moment before paraphrasing legendary queer cabaret artist David Hoyle. “We’re all going to die. The world’s burning,” he says, laughing and wiggling his shoulders. He slightly extends his arms into the air, and a grin spreads across his face.

“Let’s masturbate.”

I tell him that sounds wonderful.

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