Sipping Vodka and Talking ‘Cats’ Buttholes With Jason Derulo, Celebrity King of TikTok

The common joke about Jason Derulo is that he’s fallen down at the Met Gala, or the Oscars or the Golden Globes, or really any place that has a red carpet and suggests a reason to wear a white suit, though not even always that—as recently, he’s fallen down on Zoom. The bit comes from a photo that was taken at Cannes in 2011, when a white-suited man tumbled down a red carpet staircase head-first. Notably, the man was not Jason Derulo. But in 2015, after a Twitter user captioned the photo “Jason Derulo just fell at #MetGala,” it entered that class of meme that outlives the standard 48-hour joke cycle and comes back year after year, like a hydrangea or your aunt’s birthday. “It’s just something that will not die,” Derulo said, sipping vodka on a recent Zoom chat.

If there’s a punchline here, besides the blatant wrongness of the caption and the visual slapstick, it’s the sudden disruption to the relentless churn of celebrity PR machines, a snapshot of something semi-spontaneous and raw in an industry dedicated to curating the opposite. True celebrity slip-ups—not just saying or doing something dumb, but taking an overt misstep so funny, physical, or strange that it merges with the person’s public image—are rare enough to catalogue: Jennifer Lawrence’s Oscars fall, Kanye’s VMAs speech, Tom Cruise’s couch-jumping moment.

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Back in 2012, before people knew Derulo as more than the virtuosic, but somewhat faceless hitmaker behind “Whatcha Say,” he actually did slip, traumatically, in rehearsal, fracturing a vertebra in his neck. But present-day Derulo doesn’t fall much, at least not by accident. His public image is cartoonishly manicured—as most are. For example, while I waited for Derulo to join the Zoom for our conversation, a slideshow played high-resolution portraits of the singer posed on leather couches, set to his TikTok-famous single “Savage Love.”

The reason that Jason Derulo decided to Zoom for exactly 30 minutes each with a lineup of entertainment writers on a Wednesday afternoon in December is his new vodka partnership. This past weekend, he officially linked up with Bedlam Vodka, a North Carolina-based distillery. For the launch, the company sent out big boxes of samples, alongside a note in Derulo’s print calling the brand his drink of choice. They now have a “Jason Derulo” vertical on their website, and last week, the pop star installed himself on one of said leather couches to sip from a copper chalice and give back-to-back interviews about vodka and vodka accessories. “Excuse me if I’m slurring my words,” Derulo offers, without slurring any words.

The main appeal of talking to Derulo though, is not vodka, so much as how, over the past 10 months, he has entirely reinvented himself on TikTok. Since March, the pop singer has attracted 41 million followers through a steady stream of cooking, dancing, and special-effects videos. He was among the first mainstream, non-teenage stars to take TikTok seriously during the pandemic and prioritize the platform over others—and in doing so, he’s eclipsed his earlier fame. When the app released its year-end analytics in early December, Derulo topped two different lists. A version of his summer single, “Savage Love,” took first place for top song; while Derulo himself beat out contenders like Lizzo and Kylie Jenner for top-ranked celebrity across the platform.

Before the pandemic, Derulo had been on the app for nearly four years. He’d joined Musical.ly—a TikTok predecessor later acquired and assimilated by ByteDance—as early as 2016, but remained an infrequent poster. When lockdown began in March, that changed. “I watch numbers. I’m a numbers guy,” Derulo explains. “I know how many people are watching each television show. I like seeing how many people are viewing this, how many people are viewing that. And then when I see my numbers going to the 20s and 30s and 40s and sometimes even 100 millions, I’m like, there’s no TV show that gets this amount of viewership. This is serious. This is not a game.”

It’s so not-a-game that Derulo’s a bit cagey about the specifics of the operation. He maintains that he develops all of the ideas, without assistance or a team, but alludes to help with the special effects. He maintains that the application has not altered his approach to songwriting, though all of his recent singles feature extremely simple dances, as if slowed down for a 10-year-old or viral grandpa. Derulo will also say almost nothing about his most notorious video—a clip of him trying to eat corn on the cob off of a drill, pulling out a tooth in the process. “I saw a drill sitting there and [thought] it’d be funny if I had a corn on the cob,” Derulo says. “That’s really where it stemmed from.” Asked about how they shot it, he takes a gulp of vodka-soda and laughs. “That was real,” he deadpans. “My teeth came out.” (They did not.)

Derulo calls his TikToks “bloopers.” And they often are charming, short scenes of someone making a mistake or doing something illicit—Derulo hiding his junk food habit, or catching his girlfriend dance to “WAP,” or Alicia Keys accidentally removing her mouth. But there’s a pervasive veneer of corniness. His bloopers are silly, but so hyperbolized, so exaggerated, so staged that they’re really the opposite of a blooper entirely: not an accident, but the point. There’s an ever-present sense that they could be commercials—which they unambiguously are. “This is a real business that I never thought would even exist,” he says. “It’s a real avenue for promotion that you can strategically promote things and not shove it down people’s throats. And brands will be the happiest, the happiest they’ve ever been, because it feels organic.”

It may be because so many of his mistakes are staged that Derulo is less excited to talk about his other recent achievement: playing Rum Tum Tugger in the uncannily CGI’d version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats. Before the movie debuted last year, he’d thought it could “change the world.” These days, he has less to say. Last December, he’d told Andy Cohen the editors had “CGI’d the dick out” of his scenes (just one of many selective X-rated edits). Now he’s lower key. “When I first saw it, I was like, yeah, that is different. They changed that,” Derulo says of the censorship.

He adds, “Anything that you decide to do that is outside of the box… you’re just subject to falling flat on your face.”