There’s a specific moment when a working actor stops talking about the grind and starts talking about momentum. Not in a victory-lap way. More like someone glancing over their shoulder, half-expecting the floor to drop out, while quietly admitting: yeah, something’s happening.
That’s where Pierson Fodé landed this year.
Four movies out. One more waiting on distribution. And somewhere in the middle of Netflix Christmas chaos, he’s also shooting for Robert Zemeckis, casually dropping, “I’m pinching myself on set every day.” The math checks out. Fifteen years to become an overnight success.
“I pushed my team and I pushed myself really, really hard,” Fodé said. “Coming out of the pandemic and the strikes, I was like, let’s not go back. Let’s move forward with an absolute conquering mindset.”
That push lands squarely in A Merry Little Ex-Mas, a holiday movie that knows exactly what it is—and isn’t shy about winking at the audience. Recently divorced parents. A perfectly doomed Christmas. A younger, more successful new partner arriving like a grenade wrapped in tinsel. Enter Fodé as Chad, the golden-retriever boyfriend whose optimism borders on reckless.
“Puppy dog energy is correct,” he laughed. “He’s just happy everywhere he goes. Even when the worst thing is happening, he’s like, ‘This is great. We’ll figure it out.’”
That looseness wasn’t fully baked into the script at first. Chad began life as something smoother, more traditionally suave. Then rewrites happened. The character softened. The improv crept in.
“The more we found it, the more I was able to play,” Fodé said. “Steve let me run wild, and Netflix was really happy with what was coming back.”
It’s the kind of role that thrives on self-awareness, which is almost mandatory in the modern Christmas-movie ecosystem. Titles are a sport now. Rules are codified. Endings must be happy. No upsetting the children. No R-rated detours. Somewhere between the cocoa and the crisis, everything will be okay.
“You sort of know what you’re signing up for,” he said. “You’re aware of the playground you’re playing inside of. And then you try to expand it without taking yourself too seriously.”
That attitude extends to the part of Fodé’s career that the internet has already labeled for him: shirtless slow-motion guy.
“I think that’s my title from here on out,” he joked. “Shirtless slow-mo guy.”
But there’s calculation underneath the humor. Fodé has modeled most of his life, and he’s frank about how body image becomes part of character design. Lean versus bulk. Too beefed versus not enough. Audience perception versus casting reality.
“I use my body as a template for how I want the character to be perceived,” he said. “Especially if I’m shirtless. Hopefully in a slow-mo rewind moment that goes viral.”
It’s funny because it’s honest. And because it’s not the whole story.
That’s where the Zemeckis project comes in—The Last Mrs. Parish, starring Jennifer Lopez, a very different lane from Christmas hijinks. Fodé can’t say much, but he doesn’t have to.
“It’s very, very different,” he said. “And that’s important. You build an audience one way, then surprise them with something new.”
Offscreen, the grounding comes from less glamorous places. A family farm in Washington State. Bucking hay during the strike. Delivering bales to equestrian farms—some of them, improbably, the same locations where The Wrong Paris filmed. Horses that trace back to his hometown. A life that doesn’t fully belong to Hollywood.
That sense of responsibility spills into activism, too. Military families. Veterans. A coming trip to Washington, D.C. to honor surviving World War II vets.
“These people put their lives on the line,” Fodé said. “Perfect or imperfect, they set up the country we live in. I think it’s important to remember that.”
For someone whose public image skews glossy, there’s a lot of earnestness here. Maybe that’s why the Christmas thing works. Or why Chad doesn’t tip into parody. Or why, when asked about music, the answers zigzag from DC Talk and Newsboys to Hans Zimmer live—“the pinnacle of my concert-going experience”—to catching Twenty One Pilots in L.A.
“Josh and Tyler are just good humans,” he said. “They make good music, and that matters.”
So does timing. So does patience. So does knowing when to lean into the joke—and when to step sideways out of it.
“It takes 15 years to become an overnight success,” Fodé said.
This year just happened to be the night everyone noticed.
Watch the full interview above and then check out the trailer below.
