Page 53 - SHARP November 2021

A VAN JOGIA HAS ALWAYS spring, the film centres on a woman named always touched by how much it has impacted
been drawn to larger-than- life characters. So when the time came to write and direct his first feature film, Jogia
— best known for his performances in Vic- torious, Ghost Wars, and Now Apocalypse — wanted to make something that was “a little more extraordinary,” a more interesting reflection of the fickle nature of life.
“I just didn’t see a lot of movies being made that wanted to make life more exag- gerated,” says Jogia, 29, over Zoom in Sep- tember from his hometown of Vancouver. “There was this propensity towards realism all the time — or not even realism, but this middle-of-the-road entertainment. What I love about movies is that they’re fantastical, and I think that’s what movies are for — so I wanted to write movies that I liked.”
Jogia’s vision materialized in Door Mouse, a neo-noir thriller that was six years in the making, and is slated for release in 2022. Shot in Sudbury, Ontario earlier this
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Mouse (played by Riverdale’s Hayley Law) who is stuck in a dead-end, all-night job at Mama’s Burlesque Club. When a work friend named Doe-Eyes goes missing and the cops do nothing about it, Mouse and her sidekick, Ugly (Keith Powers), take it upon themselves to crack the case.
Jogia jokes that one should never at- tempt to direct a feature film in 18 days unless you have no choice. Although, he says, the “intense” thread of being shut down due to COVID-19 loomed large over the entire independent production, he felt extremely fortunate to be working with “an amazing cast — and people who just gave a shit, who care about making movies.”
“I think, again, the point of making a film that’s bigger than life is that it’s excit- ing for people,” he explains. “We’re not just shooting two people talking in a high-school corridor; we’re in this completely transformed space that has spray paint on the walls. Ba- sically, I was handing out spray paint cans and being like, ‘Spray whatever you want on the walls.’ And just everyone being able to create and contribute to this thing got people excited, and I think that’s why everyone ended up doing a really good job.”
The past decade has seen Jogia trans- form from a little-known young actor with a handful of acting credits into a prolific multi-hyphenate who is on the precipice of another major breakthrough in Hollywood. Having risen to fame as Beck Oliver on Vic- torious, the hit Nickelodeon sitcom that has found its second wind on Netflix in recent years, Jogia has entered mainstream promi- nence with a series of provocative roles that are a dramatic departure from his days on family-friendly television. For instance, in what is arguably his most highly anticipated role to date, Jogia will play Leon S. Kenne- dy in the new Sony reboot of Resident Evil, which is based on a Japanese series of horror video games that he has played for years. “I was a huge fan of the original games, so to play Leon is amazing. He’s a childhood hero of mine, so it’s the coolest thing in the world,” Jogia says.
Eight years post Victorious, Jogia still has nothing but fond memories of an early adulthood working with “an incredible cast of lovely, talented, and generous people,” which included the likes of Ariana Grande, Victoria Justice, and Elizabeth Gillies. “I’m
people’s lives,” he says with a smile. “A lot of people who watched the show are adults now, so I’m interacting with them way more than when I was younger. Even when the show was on, we didn’t feel this level of love.”
The experience, he adds, also forced him to expand his skill set and adapt to different storytelling formats. (“I was never really a multi-camera sitcom kind of actor, so I had to work really hard to fit into that world.”) As he began to make his transition from child to adult actor, which he considers “an exhausted cliché,” Jogia was able to explore the more cinematic style of acting that he had initially been trained to do. “The people who have always inspired me are the ones who genuinely try to be different people, try to inhabit other people’s ways of being and disappear into stuff. I got into the game to be different people. I’m not interested in being a more charming version of myself for 20 years,” he says with a laugh.
But as he continued to audition for projects in Hollywood, Jogia — who is the eldest son of a British−Indian father and a British−Irish mother — noticed that many casting directors wanted him to choose one part of his identity over the other in order to fit into a particular role. He used his decade’s worth of experience as a mixed-race actor and spoke with other people from around the world to write his first multimedia book, Mixed Feelings, which was released in 2019. While he admits that he has seen a lot of “performative change” over the course of his career, Jogia says that, “as a mixed Asian man,” he has seen