Poster Boy review: the life and death of Australian bodybuilder Zyzz

If you missed out on the online fame of Aziz ‘Zyzz’ Shavershian, the Australian bodybuilding influencer who died in Thailand in 2011, don’t worry. More than a decade after his death, his clones and followers have colonised the internet. Today’s looksmaxxing trend is just the latest version of his online persona; preening, flexing and rage-bait never go out of style.

Poster Boy: Becoming Zyzz is a thoughtful look at his rise and abrupt fall. It’s both the inside story of one of the earliest online superstar influencers, and a look at the creation of an online archetype that’s constantly being reborn. Even if you know nothing about Zyzz, there’s a lot here that’s familiar. What he tapped into remains a vital, if at times somewhat toxic, online presence.

Negging, flexing and ‘cracking the code’

Narrated by his older brother Said, aka Chestbrah (‘Naz was always honest … I want to do the same’) and directed by documentary filmmaker Selina Miles (Silenced), it opens with a barrage of Zyzz clips seemingly designed to both encourage and insult his viewers.

When he’s not praising his own looks or dropping into shirtless bodybuilding poses, he’s informing us that the path to success is, unsurprisingly, looking good, working out and having lots of sex. Random quote: ‘Come at me, bruh.’

Behind the façade was a Sydney suburban boy, born in Russia to Kurdish parents who migrated to Australia. There they worked hard, learned English, pulled a lot of overtime and expected their kids to become doctors. The family home is still the centre of a thriving business based on Zyzz merch. (Said sends off a T-shirt with a personal note: ‘Stay shredded.’)

We’re told that high school was where Aziz ‘cracked the code’, but you wouldn’t know it from some of the photos and clips here. They start in 2005, when he was 15 and just a skinny, pale-skinned, slightly dorky high school kid. As the caption says, it was 6 years, 5 months and 28 days until Thailand.

Style-conscious, focused on video games, shy and unhappy with the way he looked, as a first generation Australian he’d taken on board a lot of ideas about beauty and attractiveness that didn’t include him. Enter the internet, which by 2006 was seeing an explosion of user-generated content on sites like YouTube. Remember Star Wars Kid? You will after watching this.

The online echo chamber

‘Online, we could get away with anything,’ says one of his friends. For Zyzz it was an escape from restrictive school days and a confined home life. As he moved beyond high school, he started posting clips on a bodybuilding site. He was making friends dancing at raves, but finding girls was a different matter. Shock twist: asking for advice on how to pick up women on male-dominated forums does not lead to a well-adjusted approach.

For a story that played out 15 years ago, a big part of what makes this documentary so compelling is how contemporary it all feels. Zyzz was a trailblazer, forging a path that these days is widely condemned, yet still draws in thousands of young men each year. His friends and family say that Zyzz largely meant well, but online that’s not what counts.

Back then there was no real social media. His real skill, we’re told, wasn’t in sculpting his body, but in sculpting an online persona that drew people in. But the most affecting clips here aren’t where he’s posturing and posing. They’re the ones where, despite a body shaped by a year of constantly working out, he’s too shy to pull off a shirtless prank on a train, sitting down and covering himself up with a slightly embarrassed smile.

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One of the first influencers

Like a lot of people who achieved fame in a new field, he wasn’t prepared for what was to come. When the followers came with pressure, and the fans crowded out his friends, he didn’t have a support network – and wouldn’t have been interested in talking about his feelings if he did. His marketing skills brought in attention he couldn’t deal with; his need to constantly push himself (and his own anxieties) led him to substances he also couldn’t handle.

There are other themes here. Said is still deep in the world that claimed his brother, avoiding his mistakes while promoting his values, and the wild world of online fame’s early days also comes under the microscope. But it all comes back to Zyzz, whose online persona shows little sign of fading 15 years after his demise.

What led to his death has been shrouded in mystery, the most persistent rumour involving a sauna and a heart defect. This reveals the post-mortem toxicology report, and after the events detailed here it won’t come as any surprise.

Today, his face and his fame live on and this doco does a solid job of stressing both the positive side of his message and the heavy toll it took on him.

Zyzz’s public face may have thrived in an online world that was only just being born, but the story behind it is an old one. He wanted to change who he was and he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams – then his creation became a cage he couldn’t escape.

Poster Boy: Becoming Zyzz streams on Stan from 5 August.

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