How a 30-Year-Old Mastermind Fooled an Entire High School Into Thinking He Was a Teen—And What It Means for Trust in the Digital Age
Below, McLeod discusses the surreality of reverting to his teenage mindset while making My Old School, why he has a weird admiration for what Brandon pulled off and how it feels (as he puts it) to have “a success that’s tied to someone else’s failure.”
When Brandon first showed up at school, your classmates thought he looked weird and old, nicknaming him “Thirtysomething.” But My Old School demonstrates that he eventually got pretty popular — did that transformation happen quickly?
I wouldn’t say it was super-quick. I would say the point at which he’d connected [at] school was when he took that lead role in the school musical. To be honest with you, I didn’t do the high school musical — probably because I was terrified that people would identify me as the gay kid of the class — so I stayed well away. But I should have done [it], because we all know that doing musical theater and stuff really helps kids connect with each other. And I think that’s what worked for him — a lot of the key friendships he developed were through doing that. That was the turning point.
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