A mountain annoyed Taylor Zakhar Perez. The irritant was not just any mountain—to his credit, that mountain was Mount Kilimanjaro, the tallest mountain in Africa. Perhaps the actor and mountaineer’s frustration was warranted.

“You had to [climb] so slowly, because the altitude sickness got realer and realer the higher you went. I just wanted to run up this damn mountain. It was like walking in sand,” he laughs, flashing a charming white smile. He’s recounting a trek he made up Kilimanjaro in 2019 as he Zooms from his Los Angeles home, a cobalt blue bandana swathing his head and a grey dri-fit workout tee on his chest, a few days short of the actor’s 33rd birthday.

“It felt like [I was] going crazy, and then, one morning, I woke up, and I saw Kilimanjaro. The fog came in, and then the moon came out after seven hours of hiking,” he continues, spreading his hands before him. “And you’re like, ‘Oh, there it is again.’” His annoyance fizzled away with the fog. Atop that mountain, there was peace, and all it took was a little patience.

For Zakhar Perez, rhythm is not as much a dance as it is an uphill climb. The young actor—who has graced the screen in major titles including Prime Video’s Red, White & Royal Blue, HBO Max’s Minx and Netflix’s The Kissing Booth 2 and 3—knows what it’s like to overcome life’s metaphoric mountains. He’s since learned how to keep his pace, but it took some training to find it.

Lately, stepping into his groove also includes a visit to Paris with Lacoste last fall as part of his ongoing ambassadorship with the brand, where he embarked on a fitting, a campaign, a front-row seat at the Spring/Summer 2025 show, and a selfie with Venus Williams. With his sister as his plus one, he says, “It completely turned me upside down... Seeing [Lacoste] at that high level of fashion and seeing that level of design that I didn’t grow up with, it was a whole new experience.” 

Luckily for Zakhar Perez, discipline and diligence run in the family. Born in South Side, Chicago and raised in Indiana alongside his seven siblings, Zakhar Perez comes from a line of salt-of-the-earth entrepreneurs. His grandparents owned a Dunkin’ Donuts location and his parents ran an auto body shop, both bustling spaces where character was forged, not served on a silver platter. “They didn’t sugarcoat the grind,” he remembers. “All of us had to go work at the family business to see how hard it was to make a dollar. It’s like trading calloused hands and long hours for a high-paying, stable job.”

Zakhar Perez packed that cut-your-teeth mentality out of the Midwest and carried it with him when he moved to LA for college at the University of California, Los Angeles. During his collegiate years, Zakhar Perez was on track to become a dermatologist, but he couldn’t help but feel out of place. A linear path shone through the clearing before him—his education was undeviating, inelastic and sequential, and it had a rather straightforward ending.

But, Zakhar Perez—being the self-prescribed “cautious optimist” he is—chose the ascent. “I think I just learned to make my own path for myself. No one can make the decision for you, right?” he says inquisitively. Soon enough, his eyes shifted upwards, and a young Zakhar Perez found himself wondering what was beyond that peak: could there be a luminous moon behind that clouded sky, the place where haze shimmers and falls, and he finds himself on top? He was determined to find out.

“Before I knew it, I was riding the bus to school by day and catering at night. It was like living in the tension between the life my parents envisioned for me and the one I was determined to create,” he muses. 

The bus was the vessel that took him between the line and the climb, with morning rides dedicated to doing homework, afternoon rides allotted to practicing for auditions, and somewhere-in-between rides devoted to building sets at an art department job. His pace, more or less, was meteoric and voracious, the tempo his Midwestern family had taught him.

“You have to bring yourself back to center and remind yourself what you want, why you’re doing this and how you’re going to get it... Keeping that very clear picture in your mind keeps the rhythm going,” he says. Resilience and integrity—those are the values that make a man. His dad taught him that.

Although, “Honestly, sometimes the rhythm is just your heart beating and remembering that you’re alive,” he adds. Reverence for life and its blessings—those are the values that keep a man going. His sister taught him that.

Kristy was his eldest sibling. She was a teacher and a softball player, but she was also Zakhar Perez’s biggest supporter. “She always wanted us to do what we loved and not sacrifice what we loved for what we think we should be doing. That will stick with me,” he says, speaking earnestly about his late sister, who died from colorectal cancer in June 2023.

Those moments after class or on the bus weren’t complete without a late night call from Kristy. He remembers her curiosity, firing inquiries into what he learned, what his professors said, and what it took to secure the life he desired. “I remember I told her [that] my coach said, ‘I need your acting to be great, dependable and effortless while driving 100 miles per hour in the opposite direction, on the 101, avoiding oncoming traffic.’ That’s how prepared you need to be to work in this business,” he says. And Kristy affirmed him, always quick to say, “‘Just keep fighting for it, Taylor James.’”

When Red, White & Royal Blue director Matthew López put “For Kristy,” at the end of the film’s credits, Zakhar Perez knew he had found a clearing. Perhaps it wasn’t the top of his mountain, at least not yet, but he saw his mission with clarity. “For Kristy, I would just keep going, continuing to learn about myself and learning to be adaptable. Every scene, every director, every set is a new dynamic, and being resilient keeps me going when things don’t click the right way,” he says. If his journey has taught him anything, it’s that good things come to those who wait.

“[Kristy] had even more fun envisioning the career that I would have, and have now, than I even knew,” he ruminates. She saw something, and now the whole world is watching that something come true.

At 28, Zakhar Perez made his blockbuster debut opposite Joey King and Jacob Elordi in The Kissing Booth 2 as Marco Valentin Peña, an artsy heartthrob who gives Elordi’s Harvard-bound hot-shot a run for his money. He filmed in South Africa, taking guitar and dancing lessons for the role. His first major project, Zakhar Perez gained 30,000 followers on Instagram from the Netflix trailer release alone.

Then, at 31, Zakhar Perez scaled into the spotlight once again, this time for his role in Amazon’s Red, White & Royal Blue. Zakhar Perez assumed the role of Alex Claremont-Diaz, first son to the United States president, played by Hollywood- veteran Uma Thurman. The magnetic Nicholas Galitzine personifies the British Prince Henry, and the two characters descend into a rivalry-turned-romance. Based on the Casey McQuiston book of the same name, Claremont-Diaz and Prince Henry are pitted against their inherited destinies and secret longings.

With Red, White & Royal Blue’s Creative Arts Emmy nomination for Outstanding Television Movie and its recognition by GLAAD as the year’s Queer Fan Favorite, alongside Zakhar Perez’s 2024 SAG-AFTRA ambassadorship, the actor credits the film for helping him cross the threshold. “Red, White was such a gift. Matthew López [and I] really connected over what the film was about, what the film had on its mind and how best to tell that story in an entertaining, meaningful way,” he says.

The movie changed lives. How does he feel about the impending sequel? “I’m holding on to where I am right now. If we start shooting tomorrow, I’d be game. If we start shooting in the fall? Game,” he resolves. 

Here returns that learned patience. Zakhar Perez has his eyes fixed on his mission and his finger on the pulse. He doesn’t measure his value by the number of followers on his social media (which is, by the way, now a little under five million). Rather, he’s more concerned with the bio he has written below it: “Protecting my peace.”

What does protecting one’s peace look like for an actor with multiple successful projects to his name and a cult following? It looks like the quieter moments, the prosaic breaths found between the huffing and puffing of an upward battle. “I have to keep something for myself,” he says. “People don’t realize that you can choose to be away. You can choose to enjoy a private life and not put everything online.”

Evidently, for Zakhar Perez to make the climb, he believes in the value of saving energy before exerting it. “I think you can throw up emotions all over a giant canvas and call it art, because that’s your expression... There has to be discipline to being able to control your emotions or express them in a certain way,” he says.

It’s self-preservation in the most disciplined manner, a return to the order and structure of his childhood. For the Red, White star, setting the pace comes with surrounding himself with his “chosen L.A. family,” spending time with his actual family and getting involved in sustainable justice efforts such as Woolmark and Eco-Age.

It’s obvious. Zakhar Perez is constantly running up that hill. “When you stop learning, you die,” he explains. “The biggest lesson I’ve learned is [to] stop worrying about when the project will come out. Instead, I try to be focused on being present. Pure, full stop. Time flies when your mind is stuck in the future, and I found that grounding myself in the now makes the entire journey a lot more rewarding.”

It’s tempting to feel thwarted by the conquest, and the air gets thinner at the top, but Zakhar Perez knows what lies on the other side. With the breath in his lungs and an iron work ethic, the Midwesterner is confident he can surmount the crest. But, just like any mountain, there’s a taller one that inevitably stands behind it. And he’ll dominate that one, too, so long as he keeps his cadence.

“These battles take weeks, months and countless sessions,” he concludes. “[I keep] telling myself, if they hit hard, I have to hit harder... I know the best is yet to come.” 

Photographed by Nino Muñoz at Copious Management
Styled by: Jason Bolden
Written by Julia Zara
Grooming: Rachel Burney at The Wall Group
Flaunt Film: Isaac Dektor
Production: Alejandro Restrepo
Set Design: Isaac Russell
Photo Assistant: Kurt Mangum

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