Avan Jogia arrives at the premiere of Babygirl on Dec. 11, 2024, at the DGA Theater in Los Angeles.Richard Shotwell/The Associated Press
Avan Jogia began acting in commercials in Vancouver when he was 13. By the time he was 16, he dropped out of high school to make a TV film in Los Angeles and then in 2010, landed on Victorious, a Nickelodeon show that featured future celebrities such as Ariana Grande, Victoria Justice and Liz Gillies.
Now in his early 30s, Jogia has just published a book of poetry about that time, Autopsy (of an Ex-Teen Heartthrob). “There’s just so many different experiences that people have had,” he says of child stars. “I think it’s really interesting to see the intricacies and the many different types of experiences.”
Many former child actors have opened up about the dark side of those experiences – including iCarly star Jennette McCurdy’s I’m Glad My Mom Died, Camp Rock’s Demi Lovato’s documentary Child Star and former Nickelodeon actors in Quiet on Set. But Jogia doesn’t see his own experience as traumatic, instead characterizing it as “silly.”
The book explores what it was like to live two different realities: One, as the heartthrob on a hit show, the other “a completely different secondary life that I existed in outside of shooting the show as a 19-20 year-old man in a new city like Los Angeles.”
For him, those years are in the past, but for many fans, he’s still Beck from Victorious. “I’m sort of self-dissecting a version of myself that, for me, has since passed but I think for others, it hasn’t. That was cool for me, just to cut apart that old version of myself and see sort of what was going on.”
Jogia says that he wasn’t such big of a teen idol that fame completely encompassed him, so he was able to externally observe what fan culture was like, despite being a participant in it. “That’s what this book really is about – being in that in between place of a participant and observer.”
Despite leaving Canada to work in the U.S., he remains bullish about Canadian indie productions and shot his 2023 feature directorial debut, Door Mouse, here. But, he says, Canadian creatives need more support to tell their unique stories.
Not enough has changed since he left Canada to work in the U.S. almost two decades ago, he says. “As a person of colour, at that time, the Canadian film industry itself wasn’t self creating enough stuff for me to feed myself or to create in that environment,” says Jogia, whose father is of Indian descent.
“When I think about Canadian creatives – Canadian creatives of colour in particular – we need a thousand more writers."
“Our job as creatives is to write stuff that is undeniably electric and on fire that stars people like us,” he adds. “Then the job of government bodies and Canadian film funders is to support these films – and then support their second films, too.”
Jogia has since expanded his artistic repertoire beyond acting, but it wasn’t always an easy road. He says his time as a child star made it difficult for him to initially find his footing as a creator.
“As a prop, as an actor, it’s easy,” he says. “Because they were like, ‘He was the hot guy there, and now he’s the hot guy here.’ But, for creative legitimacy – to get somebody to publish my first book, to give me the resources I needed to make my first film – that stuff was harder.”
Jogia is now an actor, writer, director, poet, singer and songwriter – and he’s not done yet.
“I’m so lucky to have directed a film and written up my first book by the time I was 30. It’s incredible,” he says. “But as soon as you reach one goal, you’re satisfied for about 25 seconds, and then you immediately move on to the next desired goal.”