Josh Segarra just really loves things. He loves his work. He loves his wife and three children. He loves Nickelodeon, musical theater, and Justin Bieber. When he speaks about them, his speeches aren’t just tributes. They aren’t even odes. They are arias of earnestness, sincere praise from a person whose unrelenting enthusiasm shouldn’t seem real—except for the fact that, when you experience it in person, it is so touching and so infectious that it is actually the most tangible thing you could encounter in this cynical, superficial age.
Segarra plays a character who echoes that perspective, Lance Arroyo on the HBO Max series The Other Two. The comedy is a biting showbiz satire that’s also about thirty-something existentialism, while also probing the question of whether pure happiness is attainable in these post-COVID, chaotic, everyday-seems-like-a-new-doomsday times. Lance is the kind of person who looks at every moment and processes it through a filter consisting of rainbows, butterflies, and sprinkles on an ice cream sundae.
He is genuine. He is nice. And those attributes are—and he is—extremely attractive. On social media, Lance, thanks to Segarra’s brilliant performance, has been praised as the king of what’s become known as the pop culture phenomenon of “hot idiots”: characters who delight in simple pleasures to a buffoonish extent, whose lives are unbothered, because their attractiveness is a privilege. But spend some time chatting with Segarra and getting to the root of Lance’s perspective on life, and you come away realizing that Lance is not an “idiot” at all. He may actually be the most enlightened among us. (The “hot” part, though, is inarguable.)
“I have heard that,” Segarra says of viewers’ impression of Lance, unleashing a laugh that practically explodes through the computer screen. “I’ve also heard ‘himbo.’ I think it’s perfect. I love it.”
The Other Two begins its third season this week, picking up its tale of thirtysomething brother and sister Cary (Drew Tarver) and Brooke (Heléne Yorke). They are siblings who aspire for fame and success in the entertainment industry, are constantly kneecapped in that pursuit by a level of toxic delusion that is sadly all-too-relatable, and then must attempt to observe with dignity as their younger brother (Chase Walker) and mother (Molly Shannon) accidentally achieve superstardom instead.
Lance is Brooke’s fiancé, a man she started dating because he was attractive and obsessed with her. She didn’t expect that they would end up being a perfect match—let alone that there would be something profound about Lance’s generally ecstatic nature, which would force her to change her own life.
In the first season of the series, Lance worked at Foot Locker and brainstormed wacky ideas for his own sneakers. Like Brooke’s brother Chase and mom Pat, he becomes accidentally famous, after those designs take off. The couple breaks up, but finds their way back to each other, become engaged, and, this season, face the scary question of commitment: What happens when you’re not wondering whether or not a person is good for you but instead have such certainty about them, it actually unsettles you?
It shouldn’t be possible to say entire sentences while maintaining a smile the whole time, but that seems to be Segarra’s unique ability. When we talk over Zoom, he is in Atlanta; he’s shooting the second season of Apple TV+’s The Big Door Prize, a series about how people’s lives change after a machine arrives in town that reveals their potential. He plays a small-town restaurant owner who has a heart of gold, because of course he does.
After moving from Longwood, Florida, a suburb near Orlando, to New York to study acting at New York University, Segarra has worked steadily. He’s appeared on the reboot of the classic kids’ program The Electric Company, on popular series like Arrow and Orange Is the New Black, and in the Broadway production of On Your Feet! as Emilio Estefan. And, while it’s cliché to say things in celebrity profiles like “he’s having a moment,” the fact is: Josh Segarra is having a moment.
He just appeared in a pivotal role in Scream VI. In addition to the first season of The Big Door Prize, this past year, he also starred in She-Hulk: Attorney at Law. You might have seen him in the Dick Wolf procedural drama FBI or as a scheming love interest opposite RuPaul in the TV series AJ and the Queen. You also may have seen him singing, dancing, and praising the lord in the charming, very Christian musical movie Christmas on the Square starring Dolly Parton.
The horror fans, the Marvel fans, the Dick Wolf crowd, the drag-race gays, the Dolly Parton gays, and the comedy connoisseurs: It shouldn’t be possible to appeal to these many demographics at once. Segarra is a bit of a Hollywood unicorn, in that regard. And it’s The Other Two, and its passionate fanbase’s intense love for Lance, that seems to have kicked off this spectacular run.
“The way I think of him, by no means is he a fool,” Segarra says about Lance. “He’s real smart. There’s not a cynical bone in his body.”
Lance is a person who doesn’t think too deeply about things, which, believe it or not, is an attribute. “Sometimes I can fall into this trap myself. I’ll think things through, and then all of a sudden, by the end of the thought process, I’m kind of mad about the issue. And I’m like, ‘Why did I get myself mad about this? Is it really that big a deal, Josh? It’s all good. It’s light. Chill, bro. Just chill.’ So I feel like Lance is the ultimate chill you know? Like, ‘It’s all good. I got your back, Brookie Monster [a nickname Lance uses for Brooke]. Don’t you worry about nothing. Because we’re in this together.’”
In the new season of The Other Two, the characters are trying to get back to a version of their normal after being unmoored, like so many people, by the pandemic. Brooke embraces her freedom from the expectation to be nice all the time. “We banged pots for like two weeks,” she tells someone at a Hollywood premiere party. “It’s 2023. Enough with the nurses!”
The irony—and hilarity–is that, during the pandemic, Lance quit his job as a sneaker designer to become a nurse. At first, Brooke is annoyed by how corny this all is. Not only is Lance now a nurse, a career move he made because it seemed like the right thing to do in a dark time, but he also really enjoys it, and the hospital staff really enjoys him. The fact that he still, in the Year of Our Lord 2023, is dabbing, yet his coworkers find it delightful, is preposterous to her. But that’s the appeal of Lance. (And Brooke secretly knows how great it is, too—even if she won’t admit it.)
“There are these moments early on, like the fact that Lance is still dabbing two years late, that was a very special thing about him. He’s just, like, happily dabbing. Not ironically. That, in and of itself, is something that I want to have in my own life,” Segarra says.
It’s surprising how much the rest of us could learn from the way that Lance behaves. Segarra, unsurprisingly, has always seen that in the character, and taken it to heart.
“He loves hard, you know? There are lessons in that. He loves Brooke hard. That’s his Cook Brooke. That’s his Brookie Monster,” he says. “He’s all heart and he just sees the best in people. That’s what I read [in that first script], and I just wanted to stay in that world with him.”
The attraction was mutual, according to the show’s creators. Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider created The Other Two after their time as head writers on Saturday Night Live. The legend, which they wink at but don’t explicitly confirm, is that one inspiration for the series was Justin Bieber’s outrageous behavior the week that he hosted the sketch show. The pop star apparently missed a pitch meeting with the cast and writers, and his manager was sent in his place—and explained that Bieber had been fed raw eggs in order to bulk up, but instead ended up puking his guts out.
You better believe that Segarra has asked them about this. “I have a million Saturday Night Live questions every time I see them,” he says. About that anecdote specifically, Segarra miraculously negotiates both entertaining the question while not actually engaging in celebrity gossip—and, of course, remaining irresistibly charming. “I’m a Belieber, OK?!” he says. “I friggin’ love Justin. That’s my guy. There’s nobody who writes a hook better than J.”
Kelly and Schneider tell me that they originally had conceived Lance as a different kind of character. Rather than be attractive and suave, if a bit goofy and embarrassing in Brooke’s eyes, he was supposed to be bookish and work at a Medieval Times-style restaurant. That changed after Segarra auditioned.
“There’s no real explanation other than some people have ‘it,’ and he just has it,” Kelly says. “We experienced that at SNL, too, where you’re just, like, them. They have it.”
“We reworked the character and even stole some of his catchphrases, which I’m sure you’ve noticed in casual conversation with him,” Schneider says. Kelly adds: “We’d be like, ‘Should there be a “Hell yeah” here?’ And he’d be like, ‘Hell yeah.’ We actually had to edit out some of the hell yeahs.”
A similar talking point comes up when Segarra and I discuss Scream VI, in which his character, the boyfriend of Melissa Barrera’s Samantha, gets to shout at Ghostface, “Hey, what’s up bitch?” That, he says, was improvised, inspired by how he thinks an annoyed New Yorker would react to a confrontation with a killer, based on his experience living in the city. “I popped open that window and the first thing that came out of my mouth was, ‘What’s up, bitch?’ You know? Like, ‘I see you, motherfucker.’ Let’s go! His girl’s getting attacked. Let’s go!”
When he was sent the audition sides for Scream VI, he was thrilled to see that the scene included his character, Danny, confessing to being the murderer. Only later did he find out that every actor auditioning for key characters in the movie were given that same monologue. His dream for the movie was to either be the killer or have an epic death scene. While (spoiler alert) neither happened, he did achieve something else that many actors would be excited about: He became a meme.
In the weeks after Scream VI, a screenshot of Segarra in the film drinking a beer, shirtless, and ironing his T-shirt went viral, with people a) thirsting over how good Segarra looked and b) that combination of activities representing a platonic ideal for manhood for certain people.
“Right before that, I was in the other room doing push-ups,” he says. “I had some weights back there, just trying to get my pump on, getting ready to drink that beer and iron that shirt. I remember [directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett] asked me what I should be ironing, and I said his T-shirt.”
He explodes with laughter again. “Little-known fact: Danny cares deeply about wrinkles.”
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