‘Zombieland: Double Tap’ Star Avan Jogia Reveals ‘Fun’ but Grueling Shoot, Jokes His Character Is Just ‘Trying to get Laid’ (Exclusive)

A decade after Zombieland smashed into theaters and left a trail of Twinkies and zombie guts in its wake, the adventures of Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), Wichita (Emma Stone), and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin) continue in Zombieland: Double Tap — and this time they have some new friends along for the ride. One of those people is former Victorious star Avan Jogia, who plays Berkeley, a character he describes as “sort of hippie dippy.” Speaking exclusively to PopCulture.com, Jogia shares how Berkeley is meant to be an “exaggeration” of a new-age enlightened guy who is “basically trying to get laid.”

Berkeley “does cover songs, but there’s no Google,” so he essentially lies and says that he wrote songs he didn’t actually write to make himself look cooler. “He’s like, ‘I wrote this stuff.’ So yeah, it’s fun,” Jogia said, adding how the role was a lot of “fun” because it isn’t “very serious.”

Filming for Zombieland: Double Tap was also a lot of “fun” for Jogia, but it still took a lot out of him. He recalls one three-day period where they repeatedly shot a scene featuring he “and Jesse Eisenberg holding a bit of fence while a bunch of zombies just ran past.” To make matters worse, Jogia noted that this particular scene had to be shot for “three nights in a row in January” when “it was just so cold,” and added that when you’ve been filming all night until “five o’clock in the morning…you’re no longer yourself. You’re an insane person.”

He jokes that “it’s funny [because] you read a script and all the things” related to dialogue and action “just flies by,” but it’s the less crucial moments that seem to “take forever.”

In addition to his role in Zombieland: Double Tap, Jogia has also been busy with another project lately, as he recently put out a poetry book titled Mixed Feelings — a collection of poems and thoughts on living as a mixed-race person struggling in finding identity in a world that often makes one feel as if they have to choose a side.

“Which one are you? Which side are you on? So, we’re going to need to know where you stand in all this,” he says, describing how mixed race children and teens feel when expected to follow a path aligned with only one side of their heritage. “For me it was just like about sort of cultivating the idea that like not stripping mixed people of their mixed identity, which is their mixed-ness, regardless of what mixed it is, that’s the thing I want to concentrate on.”

Mixed Feelings is currently out, on Andrews McMeel Universal publishing, and Zombieland: Double Tap opens in theaters today.