Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty
Josh Segarra just really loves things. He loves his work. He loves his wife and three children. He loves Nickelodeon, musical theater, and Justin Bieber. When he speaks about them, his speeches aren’t just tributes. They aren’t even odes. They are arias of earnestness, sincere praise from a person whose unrelenting enthusiasm shouldn’t seem real—except for the fact that, when you experience it in person, it is so touching and so infectious that it is actually the most tangible thing you could encounter in this cynical, superficial age.
Segarra plays a character who echoes that perspective, Lance Arroyo on the HBO Max series The Other Two. The comedy is a biting showbiz satire that’s also about thirty-something existentialism, while also probing the question of whether pure happiness is attainable in these post-COVID, chaotic, everyday-seems-like-a-new-doomsday times. Lance is the kind of person who looks at every moment and processes it through a filter consisting of rainbows, butterflies, and sprinkles on an ice cream sundae
He is genuine. He is nice. And those attributes are—and he is—extremely attractive. On social media, Lance, thanks to Segarra’s brilliant performance, has been praised as the king of what’s become known as the pop culture phenomenon of “hot idiots”: characters who delight in simple pleasures to a buffoonish extent, whose lives are unbothered, because their attractiveness is a privilege. But spend some time chatting with Segarra and getting to the root of Lance’s perspective on life, and you come away realizing that Lance is not an “idiot” at all. He may actually be the most enlightened among us. (The “hot” part, though, is inarguable.)