Wilmer Valderrama’s behavior is one which his social followers could also be conversant in (#MyHourADay). However it began offline throughout an early morning out in Afghanistan’s arid desert whereas touring with the USO.
“Everything was very quiet. I looked up—you could see every star,” he says “The air of the desert was crisp and cold, and I took a deep breath. In that moment, I found this peace that was so much more energizing than calming.”
He additionally discovered time.
“I [was] running out of hours in the day to get all the stuff that I’m doing done, [but I knew] I should not negotiate with my fitness,” he says. “So what I did was, I said, ‘Well, then I have to wake up earlier. Then I have more hours in the day.’”
Together with his present roster of tasks, he’s going to want all of the hours he can get.
An American Story
He particulars all these tasks in considered one of his newest undertakings, a memoir that got here off Harper Choose’s presses in September 2024. In An American Story: Everybody’s Invited, Valderrama chronicles his personal American dream: a child with an accent—towards many, if not all, odds—turned star, producer, author, podcaster, designer, creator and advocate, amongst many different titles.
“The Kid with an Accent” is the title of chapter three, in addition to an identification that Valderrama explores extensively all through the memoir. Valderrama’s household left his father’s native Venezuela for America when he was simply 13. He arrived in his new house with a ardour for performing, a knack for stirring up amusing and little or no English. Beef jerky, cheeseburgers and Mazdas—the novelties one may discover driving throughout the U.S. from Miami all the best way to Los Angeles within the Nineteen Nineties—have been his introduction to the nation.
Settling into a brand new panorama with new cultures and customs and an unfamiliar language was troublesome. “Very few people understand how scary it is not to be able to speak English in the United States, particularly when you’re a child with brown skin,” Valderrama recounts within the memoir.
An element in a college play, Magnificence and the Beast, acquired him onstage. “It unlocked something…. I didn’t look at my lack of English as a roadblock,” he says. “I just saw that I had to work around it. Then I learned how to speak English. And then I was a weapon. I was onstage doing the most, because at that point, it was just freedom.”
Mentorship and past
Just a few key mentors early on—after which many others alongside the best way, up till in the present day—helped him discover his approach. One such mentor, his performing instructor at Taft Excessive College, urged him to audition for commercials. Not lengthy after, one other teacher seen his potential and offered further teaching, freed from cost. His sophomore 12 months, he landed one line in a regional business, nevertheless it wasn’t till the spring of his junior 12 months—with many rejections in between—that he auditioned for a TV pilot referred to as Teenage Wasteland. At present, you understand it as That ’70s Present.
4 auditions later, Valderrama had the half. He’d play a personality that America would come to know and love as Fez (quick for “foreign exchange student”). Not solely did the chance dramatically change his household’s monetary outlook, nevertheless it additionally launched Valderrama’s profession. His American dream started to unfold.
He particulars the poignancy of the second within the e-book: “I took a breath and looked out the window into the evening Los Angeles sky. An American flag flew in front of our neighbor’s house, and I lingered for a split second in the enormous symbolism of this moment. I knew it now. I knew it without a doubt. Everything was possible in this new country of ours.”
The significance of gratitude
The seed of gratitude had been planted. When he speaks and writes about his profession, Valderrama’s retelling sounds very like the kind of credit one may hear on an awards stage. He recounts the steerage provided by mentors, from highschool academics to Disney executives, Johnny Depp to Tom Hanks —and even Fez, who he credit within the e-book for giving him and his household “a far better life than we had ever imagined.” These alternatives and mentors helped him step into roles in impartial movies, launch TV exhibits and finally provoke his personal tasks and corporations.
“I’m just kind of dreaming out loud…. I don’t have a college education, but I put myself through metaphorical college by trying to learn everyone’s job on set, everyone’s job in the writer’s room and then everyone’s jobs in the production offices…. [If] I don’t understand it, I’m going to submerge myself in it,” he says. “I just continued to, in a way, bully my way into these offices and ask the most unnecessary questions—all because I had access to these incredible individuals who believed in me, who opened the door and said, ‘Hey, if you want to know how this works, I’ll let you know.’”
A few of these questions have been so simple as, “Hey, how do you answer the phone?” or “How do you write a cover letter?”
“Now, being a CEO of multiple entities,” he continues, “I’m very grateful for the curiosity I had very early and that delusional feeling.”
Goals born of laborious work
Entry, mentorship and a little bit of benign delusion apart, Valderrama’s journey additionally took work—laborious work.
Whereas he totally and enthusiastically acknowledges the help he’s obtained alongside the best way, he additionally particulars how he believes that the boots-on-the-ground work he’s put in debunks the position of “luck”—no less than, principally. He believes that it takes work to create alternatives—“the harder you work, the luckier you become,” he says. It’s all a part of his model of the American dream—his American Story.
He sees that very same sense of labor as very important to a unified, welcoming, affluent nation. “The choice to be the United States of America—with emphasis on ‘united’—does take work,” he writes within the memoir. “It does require some adjustments.”
“I think that there’s unity in understanding that we don’t have to pick where we’re from, as long as we fight for where we live. And this is my home,” he explains. “Our beliefs and cultures should never be [lost] in the books of time—they should be kept up because that individuality is the flavor we give this country.”
From actor to USO International Ambassador
This sense of gratitude and patriotism launched him into his service as a USO International Ambassador. Over the span of 20 years, Valderrama has traveled to dozens of bases, from Afghanistan to South Korea, Bahrain to Poland and Germany to Greenland. Throughout his 10 excursions, he’s placed on greater than 50 exhibits for troops.
“I’m addicted to it, and I’m passionate about that exchange of love and mutual respect,” Valderrama says. “It offers me a perspective of the person who places on that uniform and says, ‘I’m going to go on the market and safe the freedoms we now have on the planet and, most significantly, maintain our nation free.’
“Many of these individuals will never be known, and not everyone will get a medal,” he continues. “But their stories are something that really, really impacted me and changed everything about how I saw this country. To see individuals so selflessly wear that uniform and go out there… [and] physically [answer] the call, something bigger than themselves, made me love this country even more.”
Impressed by the symbolism of the uniform, Valderrama has ventured into a brand new inventive discipline: activewear. In 2024, he based E.P.U., a model that not solely channels the ethos of American service members but additionally offers again to them. The title is an abbreviation for “e pluribus unum,” which is Latin for “out of many, one.” A portion of each sale is donated again to USO causes.
“It felt like, in this moment, in our country, we have to remember what we do have in common,” Valderrama says. “The military and the individuals wearing these uniforms are nonpartisan. They literally obey the highest call of our country. And I thought, ‘Wow, in that uniform, you could be any color you want. You could be any preference you want—whatever you want to be. But when you wear that uniform, you’re one.’”
He remembers considered one of his first activations in the summertime of 2024, during which E.P.U. was in a position to present grants to the Veterans of Overseas Wars in Compton, California, to repair up its property.
“The VFWs are just critical aspects of these neighborhoods,” he says. “They help all the veterans have a place of community, so that was really important to us…. The legacy of E.P.U. should be one of service [for] the people [who] serve our country and their families. So as we continue to grow the brand and the company, it’ll eventually turn into programs that help our future men and women of uniform process, understand and recognize trauma. We really want to help [with] mental strength and give them that better shot when they come home.”
Present tasks
At present, in between tapings for NCIS (which is in its twenty second season, his eighth) Valderrama has quite a lot of behind-the-camera tasks within the works. He based an audio manufacturing firm, WV Sound, and is a stakeholder in iHeartMedia’s My Cultura Podcast Community. He’s additionally established his personal movie and tv manufacturing firm, WV Leisure, which makes all the things from documentaries—like 2024’s hit three-part documentary collection, Dancing for the Satan: The 7M TikTok Cult—to youngsters’s exhibits.
“Our [Latino] stories are your stories, and I want to get to a point where we don’t have to say ‘Latino’ content because it just isn’t—our stories are non-Latino stories,” he explains. “They arrive from our Latino hearts, however our tales are for everybody. For our firm, that’s primary.
“How do we… create a new wave of content that is for everyone but that continues to elevate my culture to a place where people say, ‘Oh, I didn’t think I could relate that much to that character because that character is brown. I didn’t think that hearing this podcast was going to actually give me so much perspective considering that it felt like it was culturally from a different place.’ I think that’s the type of recipe our company is going to be known for,” he provides.
Take, for instance, Helpful Manny, which ran for 113 episodes and landed as considered one of Disney’s largest preschool exhibits in historical past. In his memoir, Valderrama displays on the chance to introduce youngsters to a personality who’s a hardworking businessman, proudly Latino and—along with having the ability to repair something—seamlessly speaks English and Spanish. “Disney and I built something we could be proud of,” he says, “that my nephew and other kids of his generation could love.”
Whereas he now finds himself behind a desk or microphone in addition to in entrance of the digital camera, Valderrama remains to be dreaming simply as large as the child on the audition all these years in the past was.
“As an actor, I never thought I’d be in a position to empower myself to play some of the things that I dreamed of playing, not waiting for somebody to have a script and me having to wait in line to actually try out,” Valderrama says. “Now, to be at a place where I can say, ‘I’m going to make that, and then I’m going to portray it [in a] way that I am excited to show audiences’—that’s a really empowering place to be.”
Valderrama’s largest position but
Valderrama is now tackling his largest position but: father. In February 2021, Valderrama and his companion Amanda welcomed their daughter, Nakano, into the world. In his e-book, he chronicles her auspicious arrival and the brand new that means she dropped at their lives, declaring that no success may examine to listening to his baby’s heartbeat for the primary time.
At present, she’s the viewers he has in thoughts. On the finish of his memoir, he guarantees to “do everything I can to leave you a better world” and affords her a shot of her personal on the American dream.
Within the meantime, he hopes to maintain her as a fan.
“It’s a really exciting time, and I just hope that halfway through all of this, my daughter still thinks I’m cool,” he says with amusing. “She cares because, right now, she’s like, ‘I want to see daddy’s show because I want to see daddy kick butt….’ But at some point, that becomes my biggest aspiration: make sure my daughter thinks I’m cool until I’m way, way older.”
This text seems within the January/February 2025 subject of SUCCESS Journal. Photograph courtesy of Nick Onken
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