Jordan Fisher Is Not Your Average Nice Guy

Gabe Bergado

Updated February 24, 2020 at 10:30 AM·8 min read

In Up Next, Teen Vogue talks to up-and-coming talent about their journey to fame and the influences that have informed their extraordinary work.

Name: Jordan Fisher

Hometown: Birmingham, Alabama

Big break: Playing Holden Dippledorf on Disney Channel's Liv and Maddie

Jordan Fisher considers himself a nice guy. He plays the quintessential one in Netflix’s To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You; the piano-playing, thousand-watts-smile-having John Ambrose McClaren, whose return into Lara Jean Covey’s life figuratively and quite literally has her losing balance.

“I was the nice guy growing up, still am, and nice guys do win eventually. I've got a beautiful fiancé that I'm looking forward to marrying,” Jordan tells Teen Vogue. He proposed to his partner Ellie Woods in 2019, who he’s known since he was 13, after reconnecting in a romantic capacity a few years ago when she came to see him in Hamilton. “We have a very similar kind of love story to John Ambrose and Lara Jean in terms of knowing each other for such a long time. I fall with the belief that John Ambrose and Lara Jean actually end up together, like longterm.”

But Jordan is so much more than just the nice guy. He’s the wickedly talented musical theater virtuoso, who took on the role of John Laurens/Philip Hamilton in the Broadway production of Hamilton, starred as Mark Cohen in Rent: Live, and currently brings to life Dear Evan Hansen’s titular character multiple nights a week at New York City’s Music Box Theatre. He’s an artist and producer with impeccable pop culture taste, putting on Nelly’s iconic slow jam “Dilemma” featuring Kelly Rowland during his photoshoot with us, and grasping my shoulder in shock when he found out that the cast from Netflix’s Cheer had dropped by a few weeks prior. He’s an enterprising businessman, whose mother taught him how to navigate contacts and lead meetings from a young age, and has a hand in the lucrative world of gaming and eSports.

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The 25-year-old has been working in entertainment for over a decade, so it makes sense that he’d take on a variety of different projects. Throughout that journey, the relationships he’s been able to keep and foster over the years has been one of the most rewarding aspects. He points to his friendship with fellow actor Olivia Holt, who were each other’s first friends in Los Angeles, back when he was 13 and she was 10. She recently stopped by to watch him dazzle in Dear Evan Hansen. Another longtime friend has been P.S. I Still Love You’s Noah Centineo, his on-screen nemesis in the battle for Lara Jean’s heart that has sparked the great debacle of #TeamPeter or #TeamJohnAmbrose. When Jordan arrived in Vancouver for filming, he and Peter went on a little date to catch up, even giving Lana Condor a FaceTime call to show that her two movie boyfriends were having a blast hanging out.

“There was something so special about the filming process. There are very few projects I feel like you get to be a part of where everybody cares so deeply about their characters and there's just so much care, so much good that went into the actual creation of the film itself,” he says. “It's been nothing but love and that's all you can really ask for, especially as the new guy going into it, to know that people really resonate and can relate to all of our characters.”

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Along with the movie, Jordan has also been juggling his Dear Evan Hansen responsibilities. When he took over the mantle earlier this year, he made history as the first person of color to play Broadway's Evan full-time. A self-described “Heinz 57,” (“my family, I mean it's Italian, it's Greek, it's Scandinavian, it's Cameroonian, it's Cape Verdean, it's South African, it's Cambodian, it's Native American, it's Greek, it’s Tahitian. It's all sorts of things.”) he’s thankful for the opportunities he’s had to re-imagine characters that were originally white to better reflect today’s world and bring representation to the forefront.

“Black culture doesn't really talk about mental health on a regular basis. For me to be able to be a person of color that is an advocate for mental health, that loves and praises therapy, I'm very proud of it. I have my own experiences with depression and anxiety,” he says about the musical that delves into social anxiety. “I have so much love for all of the cultures that my blood carries, and that to me is a tool belt. It gives me a beautiful opportunity to allow for representation to be what it is by just being whatever character I am.”

He adds that it was incredible to play Mark in Rent, showing that Jewish men of color exist. Another layer to these roles has been the power to simply be somebody that is the lead, showing younger generations that they can aspire to do so as well. When Jordan was a kid, High School Musical’s Corbin Bleu, who also played Usnavi for a period of time in Broadway’s In the Heights, was that for him. It’s all rather meta considering both of their connections to productions by Lin-Manuel Miranda.

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As for future projects, Jordan already has some ideas. A huge fan of Will Smith, he’d love to turn Hitch into a musical for Broadway. Anime has been a foundational inspiration, so he’d like to see and be in a live-action version of My Hero Academia. Jordan notes that there’s been a number of films based on manga or anime that studios have botched. One exception has been Detective Pikachu, which he thinks is because they found a way to balance the fantastical elements of the source material with a story about humanity and family. Additionally, he’s excited about showing the world that gaming goes beyond just another form of entertainment: it’s an art form. He sees the parallels between the industry thriving around video games to what the NBA did for the sport of basketball.

“The NBA is now a full-on entertainment medium of its own. That's gaming. The professional and eSports side of things has existed since the late '90s, but over the course of the last couple of years, really probably mostly thanks to Fortnite, the gaps are being bridged,” Jordan observes. “Like Ninja playing with Drake and all sorts of people from different mediums coming together to play the game, there’s entertainment that's cultivated around that. That's the thing that's so exciting to me, especially being somebody that is from the more quote-unquote traditional side of entertainment. Bringing all of these things together is my mission.”

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Somehow, Jordan has also been working on new music. His new track, “Contact,” dropped last Friday (February 22). He describes the single as “simply a vibe,” and from the top-down, it’s about “ that moment you feel enamored by someone’s energy simply by being around them.” He worked with songwriters Trey Campbell, Leah Haywood, and Daniel James, along with producer, Jarrad Rogers, and was amped about how the team brought everything together to distill those emotions of infatuation.

Between Broadway, teen rom-coms, music, and his Twitch channel, Jordan keeps himself extremely busy. He wouldn’t have it any other way.

“The community that I've built for myself and have surrounded myself with, that's been the best and most lovely surprise in the grand scheme of things,” he says. “That and just my overall joy for doing what I do every day. My excitement to continue to learn new things and have my hands all over a whole bunch of different things within the entertainment industry. That's been the best.”

Whoever said nice guys finish last has clearly never met Jordan Fisher.