Page 50 - Sharp Summer 2021

W hen The Kissing Booth 2 was released on Netflix in July of 2020, Taylor Zakhar Perez
had roughly 70,000 followers on Instagram.
A couple of weeks later, he had more than four million. But unlike a lot of other actors who have dominated the
young adult genre in recent years, Perez, 29, did not experience his dramatic rise in popularity all at once. “I feel like the release during a pandemic saved me a bit from ego or getting show-ponied around town like Prince Ali [in Aladdin]. It definitely humbled me to be like, ‘I’m having such a moment right now; the world is having such a moment right now. I’m just grateful for the support, so there’s really nothing for me to complain about,’” he says over Zoom.
Directed, co-written, and produced by Vince Marcello, the second installment of the Kissing Booth trilogy stars Perez as Marco Valentin Peña, a charismatic and multi-talented new student who finds himself caught in a love triangle with Elle (Joey King) and her Harvard-bound beau, Noah (Jacob Elordi). After undergoing an intensive four-month audition process — which included acting, singing, and dancing — in early 2019, Perez credits King and Marcello for setting a collaborative on- set tone that he hopes to emulate in all his future projects.
“Vince was just such a champion [of mine] from the begin- ning. We had a chat a bit ago and he was like, ‘Taylor, when I saw you acting, you were Marco.’ He’s just a special and spec- tacular human that knew all the levels of the things that we needed to do,” says Perez, whose other acting credits include iCarly, Code Black, and Scandal. “Joey is just the coolest and the most giving acting partner. When you’re shooting, some actors won’t give you a full performance when you’re getting your [camera] coverage, but Joey is never not giving 110 per cent.
I love having mentors and people to look up to, and Joey was that for me on set every day.”
The third-youngest in a family of eight children in North- west Indiana, Perez jokes that he was the “real-life Troy Bolton from High School Musical,” as he grew up immersing himself
in the wonderful world of musical theatre while maintaining >
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