"to navigate where I want this ship to go," Avan Jogia said, and he means it literally: Backrooms, a film he worked on with Kane Parsons, was released Friday as part of a turn he describes as deliberate and inward-facing.
At 34 and after what he calls “20 years of having been making stuff, I might be arriving at what my boundaries are,” Jogia says he is picking projects that demand more than a single-note performance. He points to two recent choices as examples — the constructed, immersive dread of Backrooms and the intimate psychological romance 56 Days, in which he starred opposite Dove Cameron earlier this year — and says both reflect a move toward world-building that pulls the audience inside the story.
Those credits are the measurable weight behind his argument. Working with Kane Parsons on Backrooms gave him a chance to play inside a deliberately built environment; 56 Days on Prime Video showed him anchoring a small, intense drama. The combination, he says, helps him decide “how I want to make and what I want to make” and offers him the kind of creative latitude he didn’t have when he was younger.
His present choices are clearer when set against the path that led here. Jogia began talking about a career in entertainment at age 6, started formal acting classes at 12, and after commercial and narrative work in Vancouver he dropped out of high school and drove to California. He lived in a trailer behind someone’s house for $300 in the valley, then landed Victorious on Nickelodeon and later roles on the ABC family series that followed — the shows that made him a recognizable young actor.
That early run left a mark on how he thinks about responsibility and audience. He told the interviewer that performers sometimes “end up being the sort of de facto ambassador and co-parent for every single person of an entire generation or two,” a burden he now recognizes as part of what being a child star can become.
At the same time, Jogia describes a period when the kids’ television program machine pushed him through and then out; he said he felt “spit out” by that system in his late teens and early 20s. The contrast frames the current moment: he insists he now has more authority over his choices, yet those choices are born from a history of being shaped by others’ priorities.
He says that history is precisely why he is leaning into projects that let him contribute to world-building and into work behind the camera. “Maybe I do deserve to decide how I want to make and what I want to make,” he said, phrasing the claim to autonomy as both permission and practice. That line sits at the center of his present career strategy: less passive casting, more active construction.
One obvious test of that strategy is immediate and concrete — Backrooms is out this Friday, giving audiences a chance to judge how successfully he inhabits and helps create an immersive environment. A longer test is on the horizon but currently unresolved: Jogia mentioned collaborating with his fiancée, Halsey, on a new movie but offered no specifics about the project.
The next move that will prove whether he has truly steered his ship will be the form that collaboration takes. If he signs on chiefly as star, he will be continuing a familiar arc; if he steps into producing or directing credits in that work, it will be a public step toward the control he says he has earned after two decades in the business.
