How Jack Innanen’s Intrusive Thoughts Made Him A Star

Five years ago, Jack Innanen made a promise to himself. It was September 2019, and he’d been playing around making “cringey videos” on a new platform called TikTok. “I gave myself a goal to post every single day,” the 25-year-old says. “I was in Toronto in a sh*tty little apartment, and I’d go to school, come home, and write videos and film.” By Halloween, he planned to go from zero followers to 1 million.

The formula? Absurdist comedy sketches, where he alternates between playing two characters having a nonsensical conversation. In one, Innanen “wakes up” from a coma to find out he was married to a man who gave him a penis transplant. In another, he plays a 20-year-old “substitute student” who gets paid $500 by a third-grader to show up to his class. His consistency paid off. The videos started performing, and a few weeks after his target date, Innanen crossed the 1 million follower mark.

What he couldn’t have foreseen, even after those two months of explosive growth, was how much he still had in store. Since moving to New York a year ago, Innanen has transformed from an Internet funny guy to a legitimate star on the rise. He’s worked with luxury brands like Ralph Lauren, Louis Vuitton, and Thom Browne. He’s gone to Paris Fashion Week and the Vanity Fair Oscars pre-party. He shot a pilot and returns to production this fall for his TV debut in Snowflakes, a comedy series about a Gen Z friend group. It’s been a big year, and he can’t quite believe it, even though it’s the very thing he’s been working for.

I’ll be in an elevator with someone and think, ‘What’s the worst thing I could say or do right now?’

Innanen has always dreamed of making a career out of being funny. He grew up watching YouTubers like the comedy duo Jake and Amir. As a teenager, he played around with posting lyric videos, Minecraft videos, stand-up comedy, and dating advice like “what guys look for in girls” — most of which is now wiped from the Internet because, in his words, “it’s so bad.”

He landed on his style of irreverent comedy sketches in college, when he was studying astrophysics at the University of Toronto. He’d post skits on Snapchat for his close friends when he was procrastinating on homework, and when TikTok started gaining traction in 2019, he knew it was the right time to make a go of it. “I had tried Vine, but I was too young to be a conscious, funny person on there,” he says of the now-defunct video app that was popular in 2015. “But I thought, ‘If Vine happens again, I’m going to take advantage.’”

Fast forward to today, Innanen has 3.3 million followers on TikTok and over 400,000 on Instagram. In person, his earnestness is a far cry from his unserious vibe online. In true Canadian fashion, the Toronto native smiles and says “thank you so much” anytime I mention a career highlight or accomplishment. And for the fans out there searching “jack innanen height” — a term that auto-populates with his name — I can confirm he’s comfortably over 6 feet tall, with curly hair and bone structure that feels a little unfair.

Naturally, he’s no stranger to thirsty messages (“DMs definitely go crazy”), but he receives backhanded compliments, too. After one person commented, “he looks like he’s supposed to be attractive,” Innanen reposted it, and that video got almost 300,000 likes. “One really upsetting thing about being online is having millions of people resonate with something that’s hurtful,” he jokes.

He’s still making those off-the-wall comedy sketches his followers know him for. His inspo? Taking note of intrusive thoughts. “I’ll be in an elevator with someone and think ‘What’s the worst thing I could say or do right now?’” Another favorite: making his characters kiss out of nowhere. “I’ll be having a serious meeting with a lawyer or something, and I’m like, ‘What if I just kissed him right now?’ That would f*ck up the whole vibe, but it’s really funny.”

Right now, he’s most interested in making content about the weirdness of being a person. “I think that speaks to a lot of this generation, especially becoming adults,” he says. “We’re all faking it. We’re all still kind of kids.”

I always think these great moments aren’t going to happen. They’re going to realize I’m not supposed to be there, and it’s all going to get pulled.

When he got the call to audition for Snowflakes — his second-ever audition, after a teen fanfic where he was supposed to play a “troubled rich jock” and bailed after getting a callback — Innanen fell in love with the material immediately. “It was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen, and the character was just so me,” he says. “I didn’t even have to act.”

He became fast friends with the cast, including fellow TikTok comedian Owen Thiele. “All the cast is like the characters, but three years older, so we have a bit of retrospect,” Innanen says. “So I get to play 22-year-old Jack.”

Innanen hopes to keep acting, but he’s particular about doing projects he’s genuinely invested in. Next on the wish list, though, is writing a movie (which he and Thiele have discussed doing together) and doing stand-up comedy. “I feel like if you can go up there and bomb and truly not care, you’re like God.”

When the Snowflakes cast reunites in Toronto, they’ll be shooting near that college apartment where Innanen started posting his TikToks five years ago. It’s a reminder of how far he’s come, but it’s not without a dose of impostor syndrome. “I always think these great moments aren't going to happen,” Innanen says. “They’re going to realize I’m not supposed to be there, and it’s all going to get pulled.” Every time his agent calls, he has the intrusive thought that he’s getting dropped and this will all fall apart.

But even if the worst-case scenario happened, he’d find something funny to say about it.