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Jordan Fisher Is All Booked Up: How the Actor Became BookTok’s King of Romance
The most natural adjective for describing Jordan Fisher is multi-talented. He can act. He can dance. He’s currently starring as Orpheus in Hadestown on Broadway. While we could talk to him about many aspects of his career, we invited Fisher to the Swooon offices in New York to talk about one very specific thing: books.
While audiences know Fisher from movies like Work It and To All the Boys: P.S. I Love You or that one Disney Channel rendition of “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?” that continues to go viral every few months for his outstanding vocals, the actor has been building a new stable of fans on BookTok. Fisher found a community of devoted fans after posting his thoughts about the emotional trauma of the last 100 pages of every Sarah J. Maas book during a video filmed during the middle of a Hadestown show.
“I just posted it haphazardly,” Fisher explained. His wife, Ellie, who currently runs his social media accounts, had encouraged lyhim to just start sharing his opinions on books as he read them. “This just happened to be a random thought of mine at intermission. I posted it blind and didn’t think twice about it. I finished the show, checked my phone, and was like, ‘What? That’s crazy. People care. People care what I read.’”
@jordan_fisher PSA #booktok #throneofglass #sarahjmaas ♬ original sound – Jordan Fisher
Months later, thousands of people tune in to Fisher’s TikTok to find out what he’s reading next – he’s currently working through Maas’ Crescent City trilogy and the sci-fi epic Red Rising by Pierce Brown – and it’s been an eye-opening experience for the actor. In our deep dive interview, he revealed that his love of reading started long before he knew about BookTok or the romantasy genre.
“I think that what I’ve been able to whittle in my career as an actor, especially on Broadway, is just my love for storytelling and being able to make a clear representation of what a character is going through and experiencing,” he said. “I give all of that credit not to the 10,000 hours that I’ve spent in class and training as an actor, but the hundreds of thousands of hours that I’ve spent reading and understanding what it takes to build a throughline that is authentic and real.”
The Boy Who Loves to Read
Fisher was an avid reader from a very early age. He loved all genres outside of literary fiction – “I like for things to be all tied up at the end” – but his first book obsession was the Harry Potter series. That naturally led him to J.R.R. Tolkien, and he’s been obsessed with fantasy books ever since. He’s never been shy about romance, either.
“I think that I have always been a romantic, even as a little kid. I’ve always loved love and romance. I’ve always found it to be very purposeful and meaningful in our day to day,” he said. “I was a hopeless romantic when I was younger, for sure. Now I’m just a married father who just happens to still love that development within the text. I’ve always found that to be very fun, very sweet. Romantasy, again, furthered the gateway drug into finding my footing at The Ripped Bodice.”
The Ripped Bodice is a romance bookstore with locations in Brooklyn and Los Angeles. Fisher knows everyone who works at the New York location. He also revealed that one of the staff members is part of one of his multiple book clubs. Apparently, the actor and his Hadestown dresser have gotten almost the entire building invested in swapping books with each other.
“It’s ushers. It’s security. It’s some of our tech people, a bunch of our cast, my dresser. He’s also an avid reader. We started it together. We’ve just been passing books back and forth with each other for forever now,” Fisher told Swooon. “All of a sudden, the entire building has read ACOTAR and Fourth Wing. A handful of them are in Throne of Glass right now. One of them is starting Crescent City. I’ve really kind of rubbed my romantasy love off on everybody.”
Part of Fisher’s lifelong love affair with books comes from how they can be memory holders for key moments in your life. It takes such investment to finish a book, and that investment makes you remember exactly where you are and what you are feeling when you get to important moments in a book that mean a lot to you.
“You remember where you are when really significant things happen in these stories. I read Throne of Glass, the whole series, in a month and some change. For those five weeks-ish, I was just devouring these books. I fell in love with these people. It’s like 60 characters in Throne of Glass… I will love them forever,” he gushed. “They are in my heart, and I spent thousands of pages going through a journey that is sacred to a specific time in my life because for that month and a half, there were certain things happening in my life, and I can put that mile marker there.”
While BookTok only recently discovered how much of an avid reader Fisher is, the actor has been working on making reading a lifestyle. He dreams of a future where he can just read all day and bring these amazing stories to viewers. He wants his adventures with these books to be his every day, and he’s further along in the process than anyone may have guessed.
Making Fantasy a Reality
Fisher is known for his charismatic characters in front of the screen, but he’s also building his producer credentials behind the scenes. He executive produced the Netflix film Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between, based on Jennifer E. Smith’s novel of the same name, which he says is the project he’s most proud of on his resume.
Katie Yu / NETFLIX
“From inception to actually distributing the piece, that was one of the most stimulating experiences that I’ve had in my career,” he said. “Being able to have a relationship with an author and see their eyes light up when they see the world that they have written out come together and in real life, it’s so special to me.”
Fisher has started his own production company and is constantly on the hunt for potential adaptations. He has a few in the pipeline that he couldn’t disclose just yet, but is excited to talk about it soon. The actor loves the experience of reading a book, but he is always looking for how he can get more deeply involved in a story.
“If I love the book, I am connecting with that author, period. I am going to reach out to that author. I am going to develop a relationship with that author. Yeah, I’m a fan, and I want to know the work. I want the manuscripts before the arcs even get sent out,” he revealed.
Building the production company and looking for adaptations is how Fisher is hoping to define his career and, ultimately, a legacy for his son.
“My goal and the bedrock that I want to create myself is to be able to read all day, get rights to books, and adapt them. That’s what I’m working to do right now. I’m working on a couple that I’m really excited about. If that is the world that I can live in as a dad, where I get to be an actor in things that I’m really excited to be in. But other than that, ensuring really crafty, beautiful, authentic storytelling, especially if it is told from a diverse angle.”
Telling those stories is helping Fisher build real connections with the audience, which is what he finds to be the most valuable at all.
Meeting Face-to-Face
Fisher is the first to admit that he’s become jaded by the internet culture around meeting celebrities. He’s stopped doing stage door appearances because it was weighing too much on his spirit to take photos but not actually connect with people. However, he does love that his BookTok videos are helping him connect on a different level with his fans, especially when he sees them out in the real world.
“The other day, I did the Broadway flea market and people were bringing up copies of ACOTAR for me to sign. That is so cool that you would pull my interest into a common interest of yours, and take this opportunity to meet here based another platform of mine, based on Broadway and theater and loving theater,” he regaled.
To put it bluntly, Fisher is over doom-scrolling. In fact, he’s only trying to watch things that people specifically recommend for him or else risk ending up down a rabbit hole of forgettable content.
He’s found that he’s happier with a book. It’s healthier, and it’s astounding because books and reading have been around for millennia. “You won’t see me scrolling anymore. I’d rather build all of these neuropathways in my head, which is one of the benefits of reading a physical book, sitting down, and being intentional about this thing,” he continued.
He doesn’t think he’s alone in being fed up with the overstimulation provided by our phones. He’s noticing more and more kindred spirits during his commutes around the city, and it’s helped him realize a new goal that will bring him and his book reader fans even closer together.
“It’s another thing that crystalizes books and why I want a library, why I want a bookshop one day in Brooklyn. It’s something that’s like archaic, but I feel like people are picking up books way more now. I see more people reading onto train. That’s because everyone is tired of the same sh*t. We’re all tired of sitting on the train and scrolling.”
‘What Are You Reading?’ Is the New ‘Can We Take a Selfie?’
It’s safe to say that Fisher doesn’t consider his time in the romantasy and romance world a passing fascination. Fisher is focused on his roles as a producer and an actor and spreading his wings that way. “There are a handful of things that I would love to adapt. One is not a romance; it is romance adjacent. It’s this history lit mystery called The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. That was the most beautiful book I’ve read this year,” he revealed. “I could cry just thinking about it right now, actually.”
And he wants to know what books make you cry. Fisher readily admits that he’d much rather you ask him for a book recommendation than a selfie if you see him out and about.
“If I’m walking down the street and someone was like, ’Hey, I saw that you’re reading blah, blah, blah,’ I’ll be like, ‘Wait, are you busy? Can we talk?’ If someone stops me for a selfie, it’s a blur. I’m not going to lie. It’s one of thousands, and in those interactions it is very one sided. It just begins and ends right there. If someone’s like, ‘Hey, I love your work. You’re reading a book that I love right now,'” he added. “That, to me, is some of the most exciting sh*t. We can talk about that for hours.”
We asked what are his dream adaptations and, of course, his favorite SJM series, Throne of Glass, is at the top of the of the list. “I am an Aelin Galathynius stan,” he declared, but Fisher is also cognizant of his role within this world. “I have to say, cis-straight men writing romance, for me, I want a man written by a woman, I just do… To me, it’s just better romance. To me, it’s just so thoughtful. I think that there’s a stigma against cis-men writing in this space. I think it’s simply because there are going to be elements of love that will be overlooked. I don’t know if there are better words to articulate that.”
As the actor continues to dive into the kingdoms his favorite authors have created in the pages of their books, he’s slowly building a kingdom of his own in the real world.
With reporting by Katie Song
