“Yeah, I was developing a show with NBC for a little while,” J.J. Totah tells me casually as we chat about how he landed the role of Michael, the immaculately coiffed imp at the center of NBC’s new sitcom Champions, Mindy Kaling’s follow-up to The Mindy Project. When Totah’s proposed series—a comedy based on his relationship with his real-life aunt, on which he would have served as a producer—hit a dead end, he was instead offered an audition for Champions. After the audition came the chemistry read with his future co-star Anders Holm, and soon enough, the part was his. All of this would be a perfectly ordinary actor anecdote, were it not for the fact that Totah is only 16 years old.
Spend some time talking to Totah, though, and his impressive trajectory makes more sense. He’s remarkably articulate and self-possessed, even for a member of a generation known to cultivate personal brands practically from birth. And even at this young age, Totah’s breakout has been gestating for a while. He had a small role in Spider-Man Homecoming, and also played Myron Muskovitz, the youngest member of Glee’s fictional music group New Directions. In Champions, he plays Michael, a gay, Indian teenager with a single mother (Mindy Kaling) and a deep, abiding love for sweater vests. His one and only dream is to get the hell out of Cleveland and make it into a performing-arts school in New York. Through a series of only-in-a-sitcom events, he winds up living with his biological father—a man he’s never met, who owns the gym from which the show derives its title. As Michael, Totah is simultaneously sassy and fragile; for every sharp-tongued one-liner, viewers get a whiff of insecurity. That mask of bravado, Totah says, is something he and his character have in common.
“I think we’re both a little overconfident to hide our insecurities and our nervousness, but so different in the sense that Michael is very, very over the top,” Totah said. “He’s always doing the most. And I just can’t try that hard. Like, I love a good pair of sweatpants and a sweatshirt on my day-to-day. I have to be forced to put on like, a jean or a slack because I’m so lazy.” And while he has eclectic TV tastes—he likes Hawaii Five-0,Black Mirror, and NBC’s new series Good Girls—he’s never seen an episode of Real Housewives. “Michael,” he said, “would be very mad.”
When Totah first paged through Champions scripts after getting the part, he was struck by how singular his character is. Michael is of a piece with the other young, gay, theater-obsessed types who have appeared on television since the mid-aughts—Ugly Betty’s Justin Suarez, Glee’s Kurt Hummel—but he also has unexpected dimensions. And Champions on the whole is more subversive than an apparent riff on Two and a Half Men might at first seem: Michael’s father, Vince (Mindy Project alum Anders Holm), is a ladies man and a bachelor, but he’s also a neat freak who insists on eating dinner with his family at the table. Michael, though perfectly coiffed, is also a total slob. Even his age is something of a novelty; barring Glee, it’s still pretty rare to see queer teenagers on TV who already have a strong sense of who they are and how they identify. As Totah says, “Not everybody comes out when they’re in their twenties, you know? Like, we love Will and Grace, but not everyone’s Sean Hayes. . . . We love him, though.”
Totah is an outspoken advocate for L.G.B.T.Q. pride. He wrote an essay for PopSugar last year, in which he recalled his experiences being bullied as a young child and urges queer youth to embrace who they are—even when it’s difficult. But what made him decide to start working so young? In part, it was a touch of jealousy. His sister was very into theater as a kid, he said, and when she did a Broadway production of Whistle Down the Wind, he was both envious and intrigued. When she got into U.C.L.A., he and the family came with her for orientation. He took an acting class, “and it really started from there. And then, you know, everything took off.”
With Champions, Totah hopes to offer other kids a feeling of solidarity; the actor emphasized the importance of representation, noting how he didn’t a have a lot of role models who resembled him on TV when he was younger. (Well, even younger than he is now.) “If I were to have seen more people that looked like me—because I’m Palestinian and Lebanese—and talked like me and acted like me, I probably would have had a lot more hope knowing that I wasn’t alone,” Totah said. “I really hope that this show, Champions, gives that to people.”
Get Vanity Fair’s HWD NewsletterSign up for essential industry and award news from Hollywood.Full ScreenPhotos:The Must-See Moments from Inside the 2018 OscarsLaura BradleyLaura Bradley is a Hollywood writer for VanityFair.com. She was formerly an editorial assistant at Slate and lives in Brooklyn.
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