NEED TO KNOW
- Pablo Velez Jr., one of the seven cast members from 1999’s Zoom, opens up to PEOPLE about why he’s using social media to connect with fans
- Velez says that being on Zoom changed the course of his life, and things came full circle when he worked in public media again as an adult
- Velez remembers what it was like to make the show, how the producers empowered the cast and his kids’ reactions to it now
Pablo Velez Jr. was growing up in Lowell, Mass., with a dream to be a performer one day.
“I’m very fortunate that my parents supported me despite that really being such an outlandish thing to pursue,” he tells PEOPLE exclusively. His family was “very poor,” and neither parent had graduated from high school. “They just were just working hard, working-class people,” he said.
But they signed him up for acting classes and he soon started to book “little gigs.” Then there was a big open audition for Zoom, the live-action PBS series that featured a group of kids demonstrating different types of content, from science experiments to cooking segments, and from games to math problems. It was a reboot of the original 1972 version of Zoom, which had made new episodes until 1978.
Both the new and original Zoom were made at Boston’s public media station, WGBH, but Velez, now 40, had no idea what the series was. “I had no real, at that point, appreciation for, and even a sense of what it would mean to be on a nationally televised show for a program that was iconic and was so innovative for the time,” he says.
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Pabo Velez Jr. with some of the ‘Zoom’ set.
Pablo Velez Jr.
Instead, 12-year-old Velez went to a massive casting call, and lucked out when they let him audition even though he’d arrived a few minutes late. “I was number 850 or something,” he remembers.
He ended up going through four callbacks before his mom got the call that he had been cast. “I think I was just excited that I was done with the audition,” Velez admits, but in retrospect he thinks his lack of expectations was helpful. He was paid around $28,000 for his work on the show, which, he says, “to a kid, it was a lot.”
Velez was one of seven kids cast for that first season, which aired beginning in 1999. They ranged in ages from 10 to 14, and did all their work during school breaks. During February break, they attended a team bonding camp in Concord, Mass., and then they started shooting during the April break. Then once school was out, they spent the whole summer filming, Monday through Friday in Boston.
“It was like our summer camp,” he remembers. They filmed no full episodes, but tons of segments, which were then mixed and matched into episodes. “The first season was 40 episodes, but from what I heard, we did enough to do many, many more episodes,” he says.
Zoom’s innovations included having no adult hosts and featuring a diverse array of kids, and Velez says he and the other castmates always felt empowered by the producers. “The producers really wanted genuine reactions, authenticity,” he says. They might tell them what project they’d be working on during a segment, but they’d otherwise tell them they’d have to figure it out themselves — and remind them to explain their thought process to the camera.
“We were just our true selves,” he said, noting that they had everyone use their real names on camera. “I really think that’s what kids really connected with, is just they saw themselves in some of the cast members.”
And while it was work, Velez and his castmates had a lot on fun on set. They had a “Zoom Zone” where the kids could all hang out and play when they weren’t in front of the camera, and Velez was particularly good friends with Jared Nathan, who died in 2006 at the age of 21. “We would actually carpool in, and we were huge WWE fans,” he remembers.
Looking back at why fans still love Zoom all these years later, Velez says there’s an “inncence and “authenticity” that they still connect with. “They felt really connected to the show and to us.” he says. Velez says it also helped open his own world: He never considered going to college until he heard his castmates talking about their future plans.
Pablo Velez Jr. with the ‘Zoom’ letters.
Pablo Velez Jr.
After Zoom, Velez continued to pursue acting (including a local commercial with Pedro Martinez from the Boston Red Sox) but after a short stint in Los Angeles with his mom, ultimately returned to the East Coast, where he realized his passion was for working behind the scenes. After college, he ended up back in Los Angeles, where he worked as a producer, and his time on Zoom never came up except as an icebreaker.
After ten years in L.A., Velez moved back to Boston and got a new job at WGBH, where he worked on finding funding for the station’s programs. It also gave him a chance to reconnect with his Zoom past — including some of the literal sets. “It was full circle for me,” he says.
But he only decided to start sharing his Zoom past on TikTok this summer when he was laid off. “That was a tough loss for me, for many, many reasons,” he says.
Applying to jobs has been an “isolating experience,” he explains, so “I said, ‘Okay, maybe with this time I step out and try to finally embrace Zoom and me being on the show and connect with people.’ ”By the time his season of Zoom aired, they were done filming, and though the cast received some fan mail, they never had an engaged with viewers directly before.
He’s been overwhelmed by the response so far. People have told him “how it was the show that they went to after school, it was where they felt seen, it was where they felt they saw themselves,” he says. “It’s just beautiful and I want to keep engaging.”
So far, he’s hosted other Zoom alums on his channel, and plans to talk to even more to continue the show’s legacy.
He’s also been able to share it with the next generation: his kids. Velez shared a video he made with his wife of his now-six-year-old daughter watching Zoom for the first time, and the first time she realized “Pablo” on the sceen was really her dad.
His four-year-old son, however, found out accidentally when he was at his grandma’s house. “He had this smile on his face,” Velez said of the moment his son realized it was him. “Those two moments, his smile, and then my daughter’s, it was just so special.”
Velez is grateful for public media. “Being able to provide quality programming that is educational, inspiring, educational, is representative of various communities, I think it’s just so important to have that,” he says. “And I was directly impacted by it.”
“At one point, my mom was raising us by ourselves. We lived in a shelter,” he says. “Zoom was just so life-changing for me. While I hear a lot of how much the show impacted them, they don’t know how much the show impacted us [in the cast]. . . . I think being able to share our respective stories can bring us closer together.”
