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“We’re all gonna make it, brah!”
That was the aspirational rallying cry of Aziz Shavershian, better known by his online alias, Zyzz. Once the shy and skinny son of Kurdish parents who struggled to find his place in Sydney, Australia, where the family had moved from Russia, he’d thrown himself wholeheartedly into fitness, spending hours at the gym every day and frequenting the infamous Bodybuilding.com and 4chan forums.
In time, the teenager’s chiseled physique gave him the confidence to develop an online persona that had little in common with the gentle and goofy kid that his friends and family knew. This would be Zyzz, a brash raver who strutted, mugged, danced, and flexed shirtless in front of his webcam while asking if viewers were “mirin’” (that is, admiring his body) and exhorting other men to chase their self-improvement goals. By 2010, his videos had made him an Australian celebrity with fans around the globe.
And as of August 2011, he was dead in Thailand, at the age of 22.
Shavershian’s brief and tragic life is the basis of a new documentary, Poster Boy: Becoming Zyzz, now available on Apple TV and Prime Video. But this keenly nuanced film is more than the familiar tale of an ambitious youth who pursued fame at all costs. It also reckons with the digital forces that could produce a person like Zyzz in the first place, and how his preternatural instincts for navigating a brand-new media ecosystem anticipated an entire generation of masculinity influencers.
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.
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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.
And while acolytes copied his basic workout routines, his own methods grew ever more extreme. In one video, he bragged about obtaining clenbuterol, a prescription drug used to treat asthma in horses, prized by bodybuilders as a supposedly performance-enhancing substance despite the likelihood of dangerous cardiovascular side effects in humans.
Today, manosphere streamers and podcasters can make millions hawking supplements and classes to vulnerable young men looking to take charge of their life in one way or another. Zyzz, Miles says, was “right on the cusp” of that economy, reportedly making about $20,000 in the last three months of his life, which would now be considered a drop in the bucket by major creators. “It makes you realize how much has changed, because you look at how it works today, and it's extraordinary, it's just a gigantic pyramid scheme,” she says.
Poster Boy leaves it up to the viewer to decide the extent to which Zyzz served as a template for the likes of misogynist influencer Andrew Tate, who flashes onscreen in one sequence. (He and his brother, Tristan Tate, are currently fighting extradition from the US to the UK on charges of rape and sex trafficking that their attorney has claimed are without merit.) Setting aside some provocative aspects of behavior, Zyzz did not appear to preach from a place of nihilism or cynicism, and he had a genuine community.
“Aziz did have friends, and I think that male friendship is one of the beautiful themes of this story,” Miles says, referring to the members of the Aesthetics Crew who sat for interviews and remain in touch today. She wonders if they collectively make the case that a currently voguish explanation for radicalization among men, the so-called male loneliness epidemic, “might not be the right term for what we're actually seeing.” In the end, she notes, it was Zyzz who isolated himself from this network as they sought to help him.
Zyzz traveled alone to Thailand in July 2011, having told each of his closest friends that he was traveling with another one of them. After his death, Thai authorities revealed that he purchased a wide variety of pharmaceutical drugs and underwent multiple facial surgeries while in the country. Those who went to identify his body upon its return to Australia recount how they could barely recognize him due to those procedures.
The exact cause of Shavershian’s death was never made public until Poster Boy disclosed the findings of his toxicology report: acute respiratory failure brought on by a combination of morphine, cocaine, and benzodiazepines.
Perhaps it was unavoidable that Zyzz would be mythologized as a martyr for the manosphere. The closing credits of the film show a montage of tattoos in his memory. His brother Said, who runs a fitness brand, sells T-shirts with illustrations of both of their faces and a zeitgeisty, looksmaxxing slogan that would have made little sense 15 years ago: “Mog Them All.” (He continues to follow Zyzz’s playbook when it comes to courting controversy, too, and is shown recording a podcast in which he argues that there is “no such thing as toxic masculinity.”)
But Miles would like viewers to take different lessons from what happened to Shavershian as he evolved into Zyzz, fracturing his real identity in the process of building up the kind of facade that is all too common in the influencer age he prefigured.
“This was this persona that he created, and he felt that it was separate from who he really was, that it was OK to take risks,” Miles says. “It was so successful, and it did kind of take over his life.” Whatever good intentions and ideals he may have had, the incentives of the algorithm “corrupted those, and changed him as a person,” she says.
Yet his formula has clearly endured. There are still a lot of young men who want to hear “that you can be the master of your own universe, you can have some control over your fate, and you can be who you wanna be,” Miles says. “More than ever, men are seeking that sense of hope. And Zyzz kind of gave that to them.”
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