Jonathan Daviss Doesn’t Stop Moving

In May 2020, Jonathan Daviss ventured out to Kroger in Los Angeles, a rare excuse to leave his quarantine bubble. He was at self-checkout, wearing a mask, when two girls approached him. “Are you from Outer Banks?” they asked excitedly. It threw Daviss, then 20, for a loop. “I was like, ‘Why are these people coming up to me?’” he recalls. “That was the first time I was ever recognized.”

It had been a weird month for the actor, but not for the same reasons as everyone else. While he was living in lockdown with his family, his first major acting project, Outer Banks, came out on Netflix. The YA adventure series was an instant hit, becoming the streamer’s third most popular series the month it debuted, behind Ozark and Tiger King. Its young cast became overnight celebrities with skyrocketing social media followings.

“Basically, I was isolated and famous. I didn’t see anybody,” says Daviss, whose only real barometer of success was his Instagram, where tens of thousands of people would tune into his grainy Instagram lives with fellow cast members like Chase Stokes and Rudy Pankow. They’d reenact scenes from the show, respond to fan comments, and talk zodiac signs. (He’s a Pisces.) Daviss often played the good-humored straight man to his friends’ chaotic antics.

“I kind of miss doing that stuff. It was more personable; we were just being ourselves,” says Daviss, who’s now 24. “It was a different era.”

More than four years later, I’m speaking with Daviss in the perfumed lobby of a swanky hotel near Madison Square Park. He’s visiting New York City to promote the fourth season of Outer Banks — or “OBX,” to fans — which drops in two parts on Oct. 10 and Nov. 7. He’s been in meetings and interviews since 7:30 a.m., so he’s politely using this time to eat a late lunch of salmon, broccolini, and mashed potatoes. He jokes that he’ll have this kind of schedule all month, but he’s used to it.

OBX has continued as a widely-beloved success, with Season 3 garnering almost 100 million views in its first two weeks. In many ways, Daviss remains the show’s secret weapon — not as well-known as some of his co-stars, but an unshakeable core of their fictional and real-life crew. He can still be a normal person in public, but he gets approached frequently and enthusiastically by fans. While he’s shooting photos outdoors before our interview, a pack of girls stops to take an extended look at him, but no one else pays us much mind. Official fan events are a different story. At a Netflix event for the show in February 2023, which drew more than 4,000 attendees, the cast was followed around by a throng of fans jostling for good phone camera angles. Daviss describes it to me this way: “Think about when you’re public speaking. Now imagine that’s your entire life.”

I had already turned 18, and I was low-key like, ‘Yo, this kind of sucks, doing this life. I could have gone to college.’ Mentally, I’m breaking down. And then I get the audition for Outer Banks.

Even though he’s a member of one of the buzziest young casts on television, Daviss doesn’t carry himself with the same hot dude swagger of co-star Drew Starkey or golden retriever energy of Stokes. He has an earnest, studious vibe — not unlike his character Pope, who’s considered the brains of the fictional friend group — and he actually spent a month this year in Oxford, England, taking Shakespeare classes because he wanted to learn the craft. He reads like a guy who genuinely loves doing creative stuff, and for whom fame is a side plot he’s managing as best he can.

As Daviss tells it, he’s always been “very inquisitive” and a bit of a Renaissance man. Growing up about half an hour’s drive north of Houston in Conroe, Texas, he did theater, was on the debate team, ran track, and played varsity football at his public high school — he got the nickname “JD” from his football coaches, which he still uses to this day. His mom and dad, a recruiter and fraud security leader, respectively, “were always like, ‘If you’re going to do something, you’ve got to do it to the best of your ability. And if you want it to be your career, you should take it seriously.’”

So as a teenager, he got an agent and started auditioning, traveling to LA to shoot commercials or take acting classes. “I think all my dad really wanted was for me to say I was getting paid to do something I genuinely wanted to do, regardless of what level,” Daviss says. “That’s a thing not a lot of people can say. So that was my motivation — just to do it to the point where I could sustain myself as a person.” Some sacrifice was involved. “I didn’t go to prom,” he says. “I had a girlfriend in my junior year, and then I moved to LA and we had to break up.”

Being a public figure changes the way you just do anything, when everybody’s looking at you. It exacerbates a lot of who you are, and that can be kind of scary.

Despite his head start, life in LA brought a whole new set of challenges. He was just 17 and sleeping on a family friend’s couch. “I was auditioning and getting close, but not booking anything. I was broke,” says Daviss. He got a job at the Saks shoe department and made extra cash by charging Bird and Lime scooters at the apartment overnight. “I’d get off of work at like 10 p.m. and close the store. Then I would go around LA, find the scooters, and put them in my truck — as many as I could fit.” He got paid according to how many he found, and returned them to a drop-off point at 4 a.m. Not even a literal car accident could stop his hustle. “I was going across the street, and this lady turned right and hit the scooter and hit me off it,” he says offhandedly. “I went to work anyway.”

After about a year, though, he started considering other options. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, what did I do? I screwed myself. I screwed my family out of a lot of money,’” he says. Maybe he’d go back to Texas and study theater at UT. Maybe he’d try his hand in Atlanta’s acting scene. “I had already turned 18, and I was low-key like, ‘Yo, this kind of sucks, doing this life. I could have gone to college,’” he says. “Mentally, I’m breaking down. And then I get the audition for Outer Banks.”

Daviss connected to the character Pope immediately — a down-on-his-luck high school kid who gives up his chances at a college scholarship to help his friends hunt for treasure. “He had so much pressure on him, and I felt that same weight. I had chosen this career path and I needed to succeed,” says Daviss.

Four seasons later, he’s still just grateful to be part of it, even if the fan attention can be a lot. “Being a public figure changes the way you just do anything, when everybody’s looking at you. It exacerbates a lot of who you are, and that can be kind of scary,” he says. “Your privacy is kind of gone, to [the point] where everybody cares about who you’re with. You’re just like, ‘Man, I’m a person, just like you’re a person.’”

“But on the other side of that, it helped me do so much,” he adds. In 2022, he played a rich jock in the film Do Revenge, starring Camila Mendes and Maya Hawke. He’s executive producing a short film called Toledo with Stokes and working on a forthcoming EP, which he describes as “alternative hip-hop.”

“I don’t think there’s anything I can’t do,” he says, “and I seriously believe that.”