Jordan Fisher talks Work It, gaming and Verizon 5G Ultra Wideband

Verizon has partnered with Jordan Fisher on a content series to educate prospective users about the super fast 5G Ultra Wideband network technology.

Alright, tech heads, Verizon is set to rock the web with its latest network technology, 5G Ultra Wideband. In order to really hone in on the benefits of 5G and educate prospective users, Verizon has partnered with gamer and actor Jordan Fisher (Work It, To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You) on a content series featuring Indy 500 fan and tech influencer, Sonja  Reid.

5G Ultra Wideband is 10 times faster than 4G. According to Verizon, “5G technology can change the way we experience live events on our devices, powered by low latency, and the bandwidth of the connection.”

Fisher’s partnership with the brand is a natural collaboration. Those who have been following his career from Disney, to Broadway, to Netflix also know that he is a serious tech buff whose work includes content creation and streaming.

Netflix Life had the opportunity to catch up with Fisher to talk about his partnership with Verizon, his gaming life, upcoming projects, and what he’s been doing to reduce stress during the pandemic.

Jordan Fisher interview: Work It star on Verizon, gaming and diversity in dance films

Tell us a little bit more about what’s going on with Verizon and your collaboration.

Pardon me for geeking out a little bit. Pardon me for my excitement. I love technology. If you know me at all, I’m in the tech space. I’m in the gaming space. These things have been a constant for me forever. But I think especially as I’ve grown, and I’ve become more inundated with work, time itself as a currency is something that I yearn for and that I covet daily.

Speed and accessibility has always been a big thing for me, especially as I’m moving around the day. Needing to upload, download content whether it’s a video for something that needs to be approved or a document that I gotta look over, or whatever that is, having to be a prisoner to time and that spinning circle, you’re waiting for something to happen. For it to become instantaneous is 5G. Or at least seemingly instantaneous, that’s 5G.

That’s the excitement that I have where this is concerned. It’s a very literal evolution in network and in coverage and in bandwidth that we’re getting and that Verizon has raised the bar on. They’ve done this multiple times with 3G and with LTE, and they’re doing it yet again. They’re giving us a new standard for speed, and that’s something that I’m excited about.

What we did was put these videos together, basically developed some content that can really help break down what [5G] is and why everyone should be excited about it, and why I’m excited about it, to help educate people in the easiest way possible about what 5G is and what Verizon has in store for us.

You’re a renaissance man. You wear many hats, have many titles. You definitely need everything to go at a quicker pace.

Dude, there aren’t enough hours in the day. There just aren’t. I want that time as well. At the end of the day, I’m not a very complicated guy. I love my work. I’m very grateful that I love my work, but I want time.

That’s what I want more than anything, is time. I want to spend time with my fiancé and our dog. I want to be able to sit down at the end of the day after I’m done with work and binge some TV show. I want to pour a glass of wine and just like chill and hang and be with family and be able to spend time with friends.

I do my best to work throughout the day and develop quality work and do quality work, but at the end of the day I want time. So, [5G] is very helpful in that way.

5G would help you balance everything.

1000 percent.

Especially because you have so many projects. You’re either gaming or now you’re going to be executive producing and starring in Hello Goodbye and Everything in Between. Can you tell us more about what’s going down with that project?

Yeah, yeah. That was just announced. Super excited about that. I’ve wanted to step into the more productorial side of things where artistry is concerned for a while. This is my first [foray] in that space which I’m amped about.

I’ve always had a bit of a knack for production in terms of being helpful on set and helping things go as smoothly as possible. Something I guess I’m known for is that I’m the actor who always just wants to make the day. I don’t want things to go longer than they need to for the sake of production and for the sake of everyone’s time.

Work smarter not harder is kind of my thought process there.

I want to get good work done. Fast turnarounds. Let’s move to the next thing so that everyone keeps up great energy all day and we don’t get to that 15, 16, 17 hour mark in the day where quality of content can sometimes start to fail and get tired.

It’s just so helpful to be able to move efficiently so that all of the content that you create and develop throughout the day is the best that it could possibly be with the most energy possible. You don’t have to expend anything extra that you don’t need to. Work smarter not harder is kind of my thought process there.

That’s very important because people do want to spend time with their families, or their pets, or other projects. You have a lot of side projects going on especially with your gaming life, I’ve seen some of your tweets. You’re demolishing people on Among Us.

[Laughs]

That’s for sure. [Among Us] is definitely a great game for actors as well. If you’ve ever played Mafia that’s Among Us pretty much.

It’s ten people on a ship. Everyone’s trying to do their tasks, and there’s two people trying to sabotage everybody and kill everybody off before they can finish all of their tasks. You have to lie your way around things and come up with alibis and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Initially, people were like, I don’t want to play with Jordan, he’s an actor that’s not fair or whatever. And I’m like people have strategies for this game, you don’t have to be an actor to play that game well.

No, but you’ve lulled them into trusting you.

It’s true.

So, for gamers, or people who just might be interested in getting into gaming, what would you suggest for a game for unwinding and a game for fostering community?

That’s a great question. Oh, man, there’s so much. You know something that I actually talked about when we were putting these videos together — talking about 5G to organically bring us around to that as well — it’s just kind of a great point to make is that everyone has at least one game on their phone, right? So, for anyone to say, “Oh, I’m not a gamer,” is false information. It just is.

I’d say if there’s a room of a hundred people, 98 of them have at least one game on their phone. That’s just that, so we’re all gamers, and we all can connect in some way or another over that thing. Whether it’s Candy Crush or World of Warcraft.

We sit on Discord calls for hours at a time just talking about life and people and family and the game.

World of Warcraft, for me, in terms of answering your question, is probably like the biggest one. I’ve been playing it for 15 years. And that is the most community oriented game because it’s an MMO RPG. It’s more of a lifestyle than it is a game especially if you’re playing it at a higher level. You have a raiding schedule and you’re working with anywhere from 15 to 40 other people to accomplish things and successfully complete raids and what not.

There are guilds all over the place and guilds are like family. We sit on Discord calls for hours at a time just talking about life and people and family and the game. Movies that we’ve just watched and all of that stuff.

So, World of Warcraft is probably — I’ve never been asked that question specifically — but I think that that is a pretty easy answer. World of Warcraft. Wow. If you have any interest at all in playing a game for community and being a part of something and being needed for something, if that’s something you require in your life like I do, that’s a great game for that.

I like that you referred to it as a lifestyle. I feel like usually when you join something that you’re into whether it’s a book fandom or a TV show fandom, community is really important. You share art. In gaming, it’s strategies. You share your life story with people when you get attached to the art.

I think that some people have gotten attached to some of the art that you’ve done. Whether it’s on Netflix with John Ambrose. I really enjoyed To All the Boys I Loved 2. I thought he should have gotten Lara Jean at the end. I might be in the minority. Or Jake Taylor.

It’s been a while since there’s been dance films, right? They were huge in the 2000s and then they kind of went away, so I feel like Work It is one of the ones bringing it back. Do you think there’s a future for more dance films?

Yeah. I think it became really clear to people how much they’d been missed when Work It came out. The thing that really excited me about being a part of the project in the first place was, upon reading the script, it was very clear that it was a dance film.

I grew up with all of them. I grew up with everything from Footloose and Dirty Dancing to You Got Served to Stomp the Yard, Save the Last Dance, Honey. They’ve all be so important to me growing up. They’ve definitely been really definitive for me in terms of things that I’ve wanted to accomplish in my life and in my career.

You can watch a dance film and point at somebody on the screen and go, “Ah! That’s me!” Regardless of skin tone or whatever, just personality, goals, dreams, desires, orientation, whatever it’s always been that way.

So, there’s a nostalgic element to any dance film. We all have memories of where we were when we saw Step Up for the first time. There’s something really beautiful about that. Something that I’ve always loved about dance films, and something I think has made dance films so widely loved, is the innate diversity. I think that dance films have always been incredibly inclusive. And that’s something that — especially as a person of color — I’ve kind of always admired, even subconsciously, even without it being a big part of our social narrative, I’ve always loved the diversity.

The fact that you can watch a dance film and point at somebody on the screen and go, “Ah! That’s me!” Regardless of skin tone or whatever, just personality, goals, dreams, desires, orientation, whatever it’s always been that way. So, yeah, I definitely think there’s a future for more dance films. Frankly, I hope that ends up being the case. They’re just fun and they just feel good, and that’s what we wanted Work It to do.

My favorite sequence is when you and Quinn go to see the dancers who are disabled. It was a surprise. It was nice. It made me want a dance movie where the lead is disabled because they were getting it.

Yeah, they’re incredible. That’s a pretty well known dance crew in Toronto and they’re just wonderful guys. They’re just so great. Talk about not letting anything stop you. They’re incredible.

My last question, since we are in the middle of a pandemic, what have you been doing to get rid of the stress that comes with that?

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Great question. I’m one of the very fortunate ones. I’ve had a lot of work to do during this time. Not everyone is as fortunate, and I count my blessings daily, so grateful for that. Projects to develop and, you know, get up and running and whatnot. Obviously, the gaming industry keeps me very busy, so I’m streaming pretty much every day which is such a joy because I love my community on Twitch.

So, all that’s been really great, but like you said there’s stress involved whether you’re working non-stop or not. There’s just stressed involved especially in this time. We’ve all been very much reminded of our humanity and what we require and desire in our lives.

Frankly, I think that we’ve all been exposed to our lack of appreciation for the little things. Connection. Human connection. Being able to go to the movies whenever we want to, and go to a theater and see a show, or go to a sporting event whether it’s the NFL or if it’s Friday night lights if you live in an area where there’s Friday night lights. It’s the little things that I think we just yearn for more than most things in our life.

I do think there’s an innate amount of stress at some capacity for everybody. Mostly just a yearning for normality again or at least some semblance of that. I have a beautiful fiancé who is my best friend and my partner. She and my dog, they’re my chill pill. For sure.

I just want to be around people that I love and maybe a glass of whiskey in my hand.

That’s beautiful, Jordan.

My family lives 15 minutes from us. We get to see them on a regular basis which is great. We have a couple of friends that are like family to us and they’ve been in my life for a very, very long time. They’re a part of our cell, if you will. We’ll get together and have poker nights and that kind of thing. We look forward to being able to go and do and explore and all of that stuff again eventually, but I really don’t require too much. I just want to be around people that I love and maybe a glass of whiskey in my hand.