How Zack Fox Became Too Cool for School

In October, when Abbott Elementary brought back the show’s beloved Tariq — complete with a dance number to Will Smith’s “Wild Wild West” — the Zack Fox-focused corner of the internet blew up. 

It wasn’t the first time. 

The 33-year-old Atlanta-born actor — who plays Quinta Brunson’s character’s now-ex-boyfriend — has a habit of raising online temperatures, and not just when he pops up on Abbott. He’s also a DJ, and recent sets on Elevator Music and at the Boiler Room also spiked some online fevers, particularly among his fans with two X chromosomes. 

“I try to stay away from thirst tweets, but it’s unavoidable,” he tells THR. “There have been moments where women who probably don’t even know I follow them will say stuff like that. I’ll see that and am like, ‘OK, gotta close this whole app now.’ I do think seeking that stuff out eventually becomes self-harm.” 

While his latest Abbott episode was airing, Fox was in the middle of an 11-city DJ tour, but he returned home to Los Angeles the night before this interview (and shortly before his wedding to longtime girlfriend Kat Matutina on Nov. 9) and says he’s now looking to double down on his acting career. “For my entire life, I have always wanted to act and to bring good comedy to life,” he says.

He briefly attended SCAD Atlanta, making a living by working a handful of service industry jobs, including an ill-fated attempt to deliver Jimmy John’s sandwiches on foot because he’d sold his bike to make rent. Eventually, he worked up the courage to pursue what he thought was his dream job at Adult Swim, scoring a meeting with then-exec Walter Newman. 

“I went to him and was like, ‘Bro, y’all raised me, I’ll do anything you need me to do here,’ and he told me no,” says Fox. “He said, ‘You don’t want a job here, you need to go out and do your own thing because you have something else to offer.’ As dejected as that made me, it made me realize I needed to think bigger.”

Bigger came to mean, eventually, a move to L.A. in the hopes of selling an animated series. “I learned really quickly that in this business, you’ve got to get rid of whatever outcome you had in your head and just prostrate to what you love.” So he started pouring himself into every creative outlet that he could find, eventually collaborating with such artistic heavyweights as Thundercat and Flying Lotus. He would occasionally DM with Abbott creator Brunson — they traveled in overlapping comedy circles — eventually meeting IRL at the Improv. When Abbott scored a series order from ABC, Brunson, who stars as second-grade teacher Janine, asked Fox to play Tariq, her character’s boyfriend, sending him an early cut of the pilot as part of her pitch.

“I watched it in bed with my fiancée, and we were sitting there with tears coming down just thinking, ‘This is the cutest fucking thing I’ve ever seen in my life,’ ” he says. “And it also hit me the way a surfer sees a big wave coming — no matter how confident I was in my own skills to do this, there’s still a chance of wiping out.” 

Now in the fourth season, Janine has moved on romantically from Tariq, but Brunson’s writers room likes to keep the character around, so Tariq now dates the mother of one of the school’s students — and he’s installed himself as the head of the PTA, which means the Abbott gig continues to place Fox alongside a slew of young actors. 

“These kids love me,” he says with a laugh. “The moment I hop on set, we be getting in trouble. We get along way too good.” 

Rabid fans would love to see Fox upped from a guest role to regular castmember, but he says those aren’t discussions he’s having with Brunson — by design. “I talk to Quinta all the time, and she does such a good job of compartmentalizing our friendship. I’ve never asked her what’s the plan — she knows I’m out in the world doing my thing and figuring out my voice,” he says. “She’s like, ‘You don’t have to be over here all the time.’ But whenever it’s right for the story, I know I’m going to get that call saying get your ass over here and I’m going to salute and show up and try to put up as many points as I can.”

Fox says his time on the show lately has made him “incredibly hungry” for more acting work and that he constantly reminds himself how “spoiled” he’s been in his still nascent onscreen career. “I imagined a slow burn for myself, I didn’t think I’d even get into these spaces until my 40s,” he says. “I was trying to have a Steve Harvey type of career, to come out and be on some Mr. Hightower stuff. Then I’d get bald, then I’d have a game show.” 

He wants to dig more into the science of acting, focusing less on the clout of any certain project and more on what it can teach him. He also hasn’t forgotten about his animation dreams and has been shopping around an anime project executive produced by Donald Glover. 

All of this bodes well for his future, but less so for his hopes to stay away from the opinions of social media. 

“When I originally got on Twitter, I was just trying to make my 10 closest friends laugh, but then we all got jobs, and some of them even got on the cover of y’all’s publication,” he says. “So now I need to learn how to be internet-addicted in a way that isn’t so self-involved. I’m gonna be the Phantom of the Opera of the internet. I’m in here giggling it up, but I’m not going to engage.” 

This story appeared in the Nov. 13 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.