He’s All That has arrived to Netflix, and it pairs two up-and-coming stars Addison Rae and Tanner Buchanan as high schoolers with different ideas about plugging into social media. Rae’s Padgett is all about followers and updating them on her daily world, whereas Buchanan’s Cameron actively avoids the internet world by looking behind a film camera for inspiration. Amidst playing these roles, both leads have been grappling with going viral in their own ways.
CinemaBlend spoke to He’s All That stars Addison Rae and Tanner Buchanan during the Netflix film’s virtual press junket. Each of them have some recent breakthroughs into huge internet followings, and last year’s sitting around due to COVID-19 mandates has a lot to do with how they found their rising popularity. As Buchanan shared:
Funny enough, mine was through quarantine. I mean Cobra Kai, we’d been working on it for three years and then it just hit Netflix and everyone seemed to watch it. Overnight I went from like less than 100,000 followers to like 1.5 million and I was like, ‘This is a lot. I’m not used to this?’ So I think mine was through quarantine and it was just a big surprise that everyone was following the show and my life now. It was a very interesting feeling.
Cobra Kai became huge last summer when Seasons 1 and 2 hit Netflix for the first time, leading a ton of people to experience the nostalgic Karate Kid spinoff for the first time. It was an odd experience for Tanner Buchanan because he’d been making the show for years, with the show’s first home being on YouTube Premium. All of a sudden, it was as if Cobra Kai was airing for the first time in 2020, and the 22-year-old actor’s life changed a lot that day.
As Tanner Buchanan shared, his following increased by a lot just overnight amidst him spending a lot more time at home and not fully getting the chance to grasp the change with not much more than a growing number online. His co-star Addison Rae found herself sharing a similar journey, though her viral story had everything to do with becoming a famous TikToker, on a much larger scale social media-wise, considering she is the third most-followed user on the popular app. In her words to CinemaBlend:
I feel the same. Over quarantine that’s when social media became something people were very into and spent a lot of time on and that’s when I was kind of realizing the change as well. And now more than ever I feel like people are really excited to get back into the world, but also still wanting to be a part of social media and very involved in that. It’s been a crazy past year and a half for everyone, but how exciting to see the world opening back up again.
Addison Rae currently has 82.9 million followers, after starting on the app in summer of 2019 by uploading dance videos to the social media app. She joined the TikTok collaborative group “Hype House” in late 2019 and grew even further from there, reaching peak attention and being named the highest-earning TikToker by Forbes in summer of 2020. She is 20 years old.
@addisonre
Their film together He’s All That reimagines the classic 1999 movie She’s All That and speaks to their generation, who are dealing with the influence of social media in their daily lives as well. You can check it out right now on Netflix, along with tons more August streaming releases.
