Parsa Lotfi – Photo Editor
Campus Activities Board (CAB) hosted a Q&A with Josh Peck this past Thursday, Feb. 26, bringing the UR community back to their grade school days of watching “Drake and Josh” and “The Amanda Show.” Although times are changing, and we only see the remnants of Josh Nichols in Peck’s Vines, Snapchat and action movies with Chris Hemsworth, everyone attending the show immediately got a good taste of their childhood when someone asked Peck if he was calling her a liar, and he immediately responded with the quote that any true fan would know: “I ain’t callin’ you a truther.”
Peck was incredibly friendly and entertaining, immediately jumping into a stand-up routine. (Literally jumping to stand up, in fact. He’s a wonderfully hyperactive dude.)
It was hard to know what to expect of his personality before seeing him, because Josh Peck as Josh Nichols and Josh Peck for a few seconds on social media do not translate to Josh Peck on stage at a university for an hour.
“I’m just trying to get frost bite and a garbage plate, basically,” he said of Rochester. Peck was such a bro/mock gangster the entire time, harkening back to and joking about his days growing up in New York City. This was surprisingly fitting when thinking of him in terms of his outrageous Josh Nichols persona who repeated things for emphasis, and tried to act tough even though he was the furthest thing from it when compared to his hot-shot brother, Drake. The fact that Peck talked like he wasn’t just some white Jewish dude, but instead used the lingo of “Ghetto News,” one of his recurring Snapchat bits.
Two members of CAB interviewed Peck. He had fun messing with them, especially Isabelle Schloss, whom he would call attention to when he did weird things (“Isabelle be like…”).
When they introduced the show by telling the audience not to ask him for selfies, Peck happily called out a guy in the crowd who had tweeted a photo of the empty stage beforehand with the caption, “My body is ready.”
The interviewers began with a question about his time on “The Amanda Show” and as a child star. He responded that nowadays, he’ll meet a child actor, and they aren’t “normal humans,” the way he and Drake Bell were able to be.
“This isn’t a scene, bro! Be a kid!” he said of his experiences with today’s performing youth.
He elaborated, saying that he is really grateful to have been a part of so many people’s childhoods and that he gets to watch his “awkward teenage years” on TV. Peck had a genuine way about talking about things he appreciates, which was a nice break from his outrageous joke-telling. He would go from being funny and acting ridiculous to making a serious point about what he was feeling. At times, it seemed like he was trying too hard to be funny, but it really seemed like his personality is such that he will always be hyperactively telling jokes and making people feel comfortable.
The best parts of the show were the anecdotes. Peck, after humbly excusing himself from sounding like a jerk for mentioning celebrities, proceeded to tell stories about Al Pacino, Taylor Swift and Tom Cruise. Peck did a hilarious and impressive impression of Pacino telling him he’d seen every episode of “Drake and Josh” and that his kids were big fans.
Peck also met Tom Cruise on the set of “Red Dawn.” He described an awkward interaction involving eating some ice cream alone in his car after work. Cruise saw him sitting alone in a parking lot outside a Dairy Queen and invited him to come eat ice cream with his family, but Peck rejected this to spent some quality time with “chubby Josh.”
Peck made many references to his chubbier self, refusing to dance around the fact that
he used to be overweight and now looks nothing like the boy we all watched grow up on TV. At other events, Peck has apparently told that ice cream story, based on what I’ve found online, which makes me wonder what other stories he recycles…regardless, the story was a direct response to being asked what his strangest celebrity encounter was, so it fit.
Speaking of celebrities, Peck had a Twitter interaction with Taylor Swift which went something like the following:
T: Your Vines are lol
J: Oh yeah Taylor Swift, well you’re cheer captain and I’m on the bleachers.
Things got weird during the last question of the night. One guy went up to Peck and asked what he would have wanted to say to people in his life if he walked out of Strong that night and “just instantly passed away.” Peck edged around that question, for obvious reasons. Instead of offering up some serious story, he said there were a lot of girls he should have said something to, which, as an answer to that question, definitely suggested something deeper, but it would have been unpleasant to end with any further explanation.
Peck is currently working on a TV show where he plays John Stamos’ son, which is fitting, what with the facial hair and dreamy eyes. Who would have thought watching “Full House” and “Drake and Josh” as a kid that Uncle Jesse would become the new Mr. Nichols.
McAdams is a member of the class of 2017.
