Aziz ‘Zyzz’ Shavershian, an Australia bodybuilder and YouTube influencer from western Sydney who died in Thailand 15 years ago. The exact circumstances of Zyzz’s death have never been revealed – until now. Photograph: Stan View image in fullscreen Aziz ‘Zyzz’ Shavershian, an Australia bodybuilder and YouTube influencer from western Sydney who died in Thailand 15 years ago. The exact circumstances of Zyzz’s death have never been revealed – until now. Photograph: Stan Australian film The brief life and sudden death of Zyzz: why did the bodybuilding influencer die at just 22? Long before looksmaxxers, Aziz ‘Zyzz’ Shavershian was famous online for posting workouts and rage-bait – until he died in Thailand in 2011. A new documentary reveals what really happened
Prefer the Guardian on Google D ecades before the extreme aesthetic trend of looksmaxxing, there was Zyzz. Aziz Shavershian was an Australian teenager who became a fitness influencer in the 2000s, filming his workouts and thoughts about the world on his Nokia and posting them to YouTube.
Zyzz was big in all senses of the word: many of his videos would see him flexing into unabashedly vain bodybuilding poses, hair feathered like an anime character, as he mocked his audience’s envy with slang straight out of bodybuilding forums: “U mirin’, brah?” He was skilled in rage-bait long before anyone had heard of it, creating accounts to troll himself in case the haters ever forgot to hate. He started an anonymous Facebook page, titled “10,000 likes and I’ll bash Zyzz” and, when the goal was reached, switched the page to one advertising his protein brand.
Read more Then Aziz made headlines in Australia when he suddenly and unexpectedly died in 2011, at the age of 22. By that point he’d attracted more than 60,000 Facebook followers who either loved him or loved to hate him. His global audience grew even more rapidly after his death as speculation grew about its cause. Fraudulent attempts to access the coroner’s report were made by people impersonating his family. Influencers made videos claiming he had faked his death. Zyzz “sightings” were posted for years.
Now finally, in a new documentary being released on the 15th anniversary of his death, the truth is being revealed.
Revealed – Poster Boy: Becoming Zyzz is a Stan documentary directed by film-maker Selina Miles, whose post-#MeToo documentary Silenced opened the Sydney film festival this year. But Poster Boy shares more DNA with her 2020 doco Harley & Katya, about two figure skaters who skidded into tragedy. “They both have vulnerable, impressionable young people that are willing to take risks and aren’t maybe informed about the extent of those risks,” Miles tells Guardian Australia.
Poster Boy starts where the Zyzz phenomenon began: in a modest brick home in Carlingford, near Sydney’s Parramatta. The documentary includes a recreation of Aziz’s childhood bedroom, right down to the clothes strewn all over the floor; you can practically smell the hair gel and fake tan.
Aziz and his older brother Said were born in Russia to Kurdish parents who then migrated to Australia where they worked long hours. In the film, the boys’ friends – many of them first-generation Australians – describe struggling to fit in, but finding community in bodybuilding. “We were a mixed bag,” one says in the documentary. “We aligned our values not on our ethnic background but on the camaraderie of training together.”
View image in fullscreen ‘We were a mixed bag’…