Jasmeet Raina was a star on YouTube, then he went silent

Q53:59Jasmeet Raina

For most of the 2010s, Jasmeet Raina was a successful YouTube comedian. He racked up tens of millions of views using the handle Jus Reign, putting out sketches that found humour in the tension of being a turbaned Sikh child of Punjabi parents, while also growing up in Southern Ontario's vast suburbia.

It was a brand of comedy that landed not just with Punjabi Canadians, but also with children of immigrants more broadly. Raina started to find crossover success. In 2016, he was both the red carpet correspondent for the MuchMusic Video Awards and presented at the Giller Prize, as well as being featured on ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live!

And then, at the end of 2018, he disappeared, taking an indefinite hiatus from social media, including YouTube. In an interview with Q's Tom Power, Raina says he started to feel like "me as a person" was being forced to take a back seat to "this person I created, the internet personality Jus Reign."

"I spent my whole 20s being this internet sensation, [after] being a nobody in high school," he says. "That shift is pretty drastic. I was very successful [as a YouTuber], but on a personal level, I was kind of hindered.… I hadn't done much growth or introspection or taking a look at myself, because your whole life is the internet. You're posting every day. You've got to engage every day. You've just got to be this caricature all the time, and you can kind of get lost in that."

Raina didn't lose his creative drive, though. Instead, he began work on his first scripted television series, the semi-autobiographical dramedy Late Bloomer, which debuts this month on Crave. In it, Raina plays Jasmeet Dutta, a YouTuber living in the Toronto suburbs with his sister and traditional Punjabi Sikh parents.

"There's a lot of similarities, but it isn't necessarily wholly my life," he says. "There's a lot of inspiration that I drew from [other] people my age, and seeing the journeys and the struggles that they go through … there's a lot of elements that I take from my personal life, but I also think it's a collective South Asian experience."

While Late Bloomer does cover some of the same territory as Raina's old YouTube work — the clashes between immigrant parents and their Canadian kids, balancing both an immigrant and a Canadian identity — it does so through a darker, more mature lens. But it also casts a critical eye on the weird, frantic nature of internet fame. That's something Raina has spent a lot of time thinking about.

WATCH | Official trailer for Late Bloomer:

"In the mid 2010s … everyone was just trying to get a piece, and capitalize and make money," he says. "No one really paid attention to the repercussions [that] this machine and this fast-paced living can have on people, especially young people. I was 19 when I started … I never really saw myself as an internet creator or an influencer. I just always really wanted to make sketch comedy… but you're thrown into this industry where you're kind of labelled as an influencer or a creator and you're exposed to this weird world.

Ultimately, Raina says the thing he's proudest of is that he was able to step away from the "weird world" in order to make a project that really means something to him. He hopes that he can encourage other creators caught in the sausage factory of viral internet fame to do something similar.

"It's a place where a lot of people are scared that they're just going to become irrelevant," he says. "But I mean, I took five years [off], and I would like to think that things are going to be going well for me, especially with the show coming out. I'll still be able to do what I love to do. Don't be scared.… if you want to take some time out, and just keep working on something else.… You don't always have to be online."

The full interview with Jasmeet Raina is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Jasmeet Raina produced by Cora Nijhawan.