Close your eyes. Can you imagine? Your dream has come true, though your dream was not exactly what you thought it was. KJ Apa had a dream.

At 17 years old, he moved across the world from New Zealand to Los Angeles, aiming to be The Actor, to make his heart’s desires manifest.

Many people have the dream, but the dream does not materialize. For Apa, it did—hence, there seems to be some touch of the miraculous, be it a Touch of God or Touch of Universe.

“When I started to experience things in my life that made it seem like there were no coincidences, I really started to feel like I could be whatever I wanted to be,” says Apa, the erstwhile red-haired supernova star of The CW Network’s runaway success series Riverdale. “I’m a creature of manifestation. If I’m created in the image of God and the Universe then I have the power to create whatever the fuck I want to create for myself. I think...I speak...and then I do...which is literally manifestation. I think we all do it subconsciously, and we all do it consciously, and it’s cause and effect—it’s like thinking about something will make it happen.”

Apa speaks from this new place of awareness very much so because of his journey on Riverdale. It feels as though his sense of Self is ready to evolve out of the show that made him a television icon, but who would we be without honoring our past and the shadows of our dreams?

“That show has given me everything,” Apa admits, “that character and the opportunity to play that character. Every day I wake up and recognize that if it weren’t for Riverdale, I wouldn’t be sleeping in this bed every night, and paying for my son’s pre- school and doing all of this stuff.”

However, the show didn’t hand deliver any of these easy realizations—Riverdale was step after step of growth in darkness and in light. “It was this trial period in life where I was tested and tempted by everything around me at a really young age,” he considers. “I think most people probably go through that in college or they go through it in another kind of job, but I had this experience as a young man on a TV show.” Apa pauses. He brushes his hair back and looks toward the ceiling. “More than anything...the main thing I learned being on that show was: how hard it is to be human.”

Laymen might consider a movie or television star something less than human, couched in dreams only the luckiest get to taste. The taste, however, is not always perfect.

Sometimes we bite, and the bite that we thought was perfect is filled with something painful, dreaded, heavy with the unknown. In truth, the television star or the movie star may actually feel some of the realms of being human even deeper, or, at least they may feel these realms on a more perilous scale, particularly when it comes to desires and their fulfillment.

Apa’s eyes float back. He speaks, his jaw looking like it’s made out of cement, his hairline thicker than fresh moss, “When I started on the show I was so pure. I was this pure-hearted person. I hadn’t really drank. I was a virgin for a long time—even for a few years after beginning the show—and I grew up in a house where I hadn’t really experienced or seen the evil in the world that exists.”

I mean, where do we go when we can’t open our eyes? Where do we find that courage, that wherewithal? Open slowly. See between our fingers. “Boom,” Apa snaps his fingers, “I moved to LA when I was 17, and I started on that show when I was 18, and through the duration of that show, I started to evolve and see things and grow. But I think back to who I was and how pure I was. I had a really strong relationship with God, as a Christian. And over the last 10 years that connection to God has evolved tremendously and into more of a spiritual relationship with myself, and now I know that God is inside me and inside you and inside everything around me and everything that has matter has God in it. I’m the same as all of these things.”

Considering this dive into the darker recesses of the Self, it makes sense that, aside from Apa’s recent string of films like Amazon’s action-drama motorcycle flick, One Fast Move, and the upcoming friendship comedy Let’s Have Kids!, the actor is set to star in a biopic based on the legendary Southern California band Sublime, playing its enigmatic frontman Bradley Nowell.

“I was chasing the role for the Sublime film while I was on Riverdale. Immediately I became connected to Bradley and the story of Sublime. I was always searching for something to fulfill me creatively elsewhere while I was on Riverdale. Because, to be honest, if I had a lot of time while I wasn’t on set, or if I wasn’t doing something creative, I would have probably been doing something self-destructive,” Apa says.

“I dove into the music and made this little video of me in character as Bradley Nowell,” Apa continues, “mimicking a lot of the stuff that I had found on YouTube and various interviews, and I was sending stuff to the producers, and eventually the casting happened officially. I looked at all of this footage of Bradley (and I’ve seen everything), and when you start to observe someone that deeply on a consistent level, you start to peel back certain things, and then you’re dreaming about it. If you think about anything or watch anything over and over again it infiltrates your subconscious, and I feel like I was thinking about him when I was driving or dreaming, and I felt connected to him and felt so similar to him in a way. It seemed like there was this restlessness in him, and I definitely have noticed a similar restlessness in myself where if there’s nothing going on in my life, it feels like all the walls are caving in on me.”

We know our own nightmares. But what about Apa’s? “Self- destructive,” he claims. “The desires for me are sex, drugs, food... speed. Like, going really quickly,” Apa says. “Anything that is going to make me feel amazing and really happy and feel like I’m connecting with other people on a heightened level.”

Apa pauses, remembering. He’s clearly living with a strong true north—it’s in the way he speaks, the way he recounts. “My mentality with all of the desires is that those things aren’t bad and the Universe (which is my God), wants me to love all of these things, because God and the Universe have created all of these things. As long as I can moderate it and do it in a way that works for me—the only desire that the Universe has for me is for me to enjoy my life. And if doing these things excessively means I’m not enjoying my life, then that’s probably something that I shouldn’t do.”

It may be worth noting that Bradley Nowell, lead singer of Sublime, died of a heroin overdose at the age of 28. An opportunity for Apa to, maybe, reinvigorate the legendary beauty of someone like Nowell is a serendipitous one. “Short-term happiness and long-term happiness,” Apa says. “I have been in the unhealthy cycle for a long time of short-term happiness. At its core, what I realized is that I am the creator of my own destiny. I can either fold to the desires and temporary satisfactions that I know are going to make me happy in the moment, or I can sacrifice those things to be happy long term. Having a child kind of forced me into this new mindset of, ‘Well if I’m not going to sacrifice short- term happiness, then I can’t keep this ship going, especially with my son.’ It’s like there’s not really any option, and that being said, it’s really difficult because I’m the kind of person that just wants to have a good time in the moment. I’m very impulsive.”

But the child is here now, standing. The son behind the father, beside the father. Someone is the teacher out of the two of them. Maybe their roles are intertwined and ever-shifting back and forth. Because, “I know that having my son is the biggest gift that I have from the Universe or God or whatever you want to call it. If it weren’t for my son, I wouldn’t have that routine that is the backbone of everything that I do now—it keeps me going to bed early, it keeps me waking up every morning, and it slows me down.”

Apa takes a deep breath. “Being with my son slows everything down. Having a three-year-old, he’s like walking through life in slow motion, everything is amazing to him, every little crack in the wall becomes the most beautiful thing. I catch myself when I’m like, ‘Come on, we gotta go!’ And I stop and go, ‘What’s the fucking rush?’ I’m rushing him through life and he just wants to do things slowly. I know that’s a lesson for me to also stop and appreciate the cracks in the wall on the sidewalk and the ants that are crawling out of them or the spiders that are on the wall. I think it’s that contrast between having a kid and studying a character like Bradley from Sublime who is this ‘GO-GO-GO’ person, although he also had a child too, but he passed away before he could get to see him grow up. Either way, the thing for me is like, ‘Wow, I get to be here for this, for my son.’ And I don’t just get to be here for it, I get to be the one to show my son how to do this thing.”

We go deeper. I think of Sublime’s iconic “Badfish” lyrics: “I dive deep. When it’s 10 feet overhead. Grab the reef underneath my bed.” What is underneath Apa’s bed? What reef of hope is he holding onto? His child; his work; his love of the search.

“Religions ask you to learn from another’s experience,” Apa says, swimming through the garden of his heart, “and the more spiritual experience urges you to find your own experience by trial by fire. There is the Buddhist approach called the Middle Way, which I love, because it basically says that when I’m in the Middle Way, my left shoulder is feeling the heat from the darkness in my life, and my right shoulder is feeling the sunshine and the light from the light side of my life. If I’m too much in the lightness, I’m imbalanced, and if I’m too much in the darkness, I’m imbalanced.”

Where is the sweet spot? “The perfect spot is when I feel the pulls and the temptations from the things that come with both sides and not falling in. That, to me, is being human. Growing up Christian, I had to always be in the light and I couldn’t even look at the darkness or dip my toes in it, because I’m a bad person if I do. Then being on Riverdale, I realized that the darkness is the very thing that’s given me the essence and the vulnerability and the humanity to relate to others and show that in my work.”

Alas, without the light how can we see the dark? Do we even know it’s there? “I used to look at musicians and think they’re so tortured, and I thought that I also have to be that way if I want to be amazing,” Apa shares. “I think I always manifested and romanticized the fact that I have to suffer to be great, but without realizing that life is going to do that to all of us anyway. I don’t particularly like being in the darkness, but when I’m in the light, I wanna be in the dark, and when I’m in the dark I wanna be in the light, but that’s where the Middle Way comes in.”

The shore is there. How did we get here? Sun is setting. Sun is rising. Apa is ready to roll again. Feet walking. Opening up.

 “It is the pain and the suffering that makes me human,” Apa stops, his eyes wide, as if he has just awoken, “We’re the only species that is able to use our suffering and turn it into joy in the things that we create...”

He mutters something more and the audio kind of fades out. We get the picture. It’s getting late. Would you mind turning that light out really quick? 

Never mind. Leave it on. 

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Photographed by Doug Inglish

Styled by Gorge Villalpando

Written by Augustus Britton 

Grooming: Anna Bernabe at Kalpana

Digi Tech/Retoucher: Maxfield Hegedus

Flaunt Film: Jacinto Astiazaran

Production Assistant: Denise Solis

Stylist Assistant: Tim Grupp

Location: Wolford House

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