Depending on your perspective, Zyzz can be regarded as the original “looksmaxxer”—though the term had yet to be coined—or one of the earliest forefathers of the manosphere as we know it today.
“I really see this as a cautionary tale,” Poster Boy’s director, Selina Miles, tells WIRED. She notes that Shavershian’s meteoric rise and untimely death left a huge impression on Australian millennials, and that his legend continues to reverberate today. “He had his transformation, and his story has really resonated with a lot of people,” she says. “We have to stay curious as to why. Why has he had this impact on men?”
Through a mixture of Zyzz’s archival content and interviews with close friends as well as his older brother, Said Shavershian—a professional bodybuilder to this day—the documentary circles the question of his outsized appeal during a key shift in human communications. At that moment, few imagined YouTube (launched in 2005, when he was 16) or Facebook (first available to him the following year) as a means to notoriety, let alone financial success. Indeed, Zyzz’s earliest videos amount to little more than a kid playing around in his bedroom; later, he and his pals experimented with showing off their abs and biceps at music festivals and nightlife hot spots, hoping for reactions of any kind.
Courtesy of Stan
While Zyzz promoted values of inclusion and mutual support for men looking to become the best version of themselves, he also began to feed off those who insulted him, online and off: “U mad?” and “Come at me brah” were two of his recurring catchphrases. He understood sooner than most how controversy drove clicks, and even maintained fake social accounts to amplify the war between himself and the haters. “He made this page on Facebook that was, like, ‘10,000 likes and I’ll bash Zyzz,’” Miles says, describing an incident that didn’t make it into the documentary’s final cut. “When the page was doing well, he switched the name of it to be promotion for his protein brand.”
His rhetoric turned homophobic and misogynist, contemptuous of anyone who had not optimized their physical form. A 2010 post on his Facebook page read: “id rather be dead than ‘normal.’”
By then, we learn from the film, Zyzz had more followers on the platform than the prime minister of Australia at the time.
Behind the bravado, however, Zyzz seemed psychologically unprepared for the limelight. In addition to using steroids to sculpt his Renaissance-worthy physique (he and the fitness personalities in his orbit were known as the “Aesthetics Crew”), he took Xanax to deal with the stress and paranoia that came with being mobbed in public, where he was also frequently menaced by young men looking for a fight.