Why Marco From The Kissing Booth 2 Looks So Familiar

If you go way back toward the very beginning of Taylor Zakhar Perez's career — long before he was Marco from The Kissing Booth 2, you'll see that he had a super brief appearance on a popular Nickelodeon show — iCarly. He appeared as the character Keith on the 2012 episode "iGet Banned." However, it didn't end up being what he thought it would be at the outset. "I was good enough to book a guest star on iCarly, which was then cut to a co-star, which was then cut to a one line, and that's the history," he explained in an interview with Kahnversations. Oof, that had to sting!

As to why things played out like that, Perez had a few ideas. "My theory is — because they offered it to me as a co-star but I went in for it as a guest star... my theory is that the person they wanted as a guest star couldn't do it," he continued. He added that it also could have been that his role was reduced because parts of the script wound up on the cutting room floor, which isn't an uncommon occurrence in the entertainment business.

If you could choose one word to describe your adolescent experience in high school, what would it be? If you said awkward, you're definitely not alone. In fact, from 2011 through 2016, MTV aired the teen drama Awkward., which starred Ashley Rickards as a girl named Jenna dealing with the aftermath of a freak accident. She wasn't trying to take her own life like most people thought, but Jenna had to contend with the fallout nonetheless.

While Taylor Zakhar Perez didn't have a recurring role on the series, though he would have fit right in with the rest of the cast, he did get the chance to flex his acting muscles in the 2014 episode "Auld Lang Party." In it, he plays an attractive stranger that Jenna meets at a New Year's Eve party, who asks for her name... before he's interrupted by Jenna's romantic interest. We bet that guy wouldn't have interrupted Marco from The Kissing Booth 2!

ER. Grey's Anatomy. House. These are just a few of the medical dramas that have captivated viewers over the years, proving that the hospital is the perfect setting for non-stop emotional action. It's also a place where you can make people laugh, as is evidenced by the success of the medical sitcom Scrubs. 

One of the more recent additions to the growing family of these sorts of programs is the CBS series Code Black, which not only tugs at your heart strings, but also keeps your ticker pounding as well. If you're already a fan of the show, which stars Rob Lowe and Marcia Gay Harden, among others, you probably know that Taylor Zakhar Perez appeared on the episode "The Fifth Stage" back in 2016. Specifically, he stepped into the role of Ari Stricks. We wonder how Perez, who'd go on to be known as Marco from The Kissing Booth 2, enjoyed working on a medical drama.

When Taylor Zakhar Perez was booked for the pilot episode of Cruel Intentions, a reboot of the 1999 cult film of the same name, he was sure that he had finally landed his big break. "That was the one where you go, 'Oh, this is it. This is it,'" he told Kahnversations. He added, "This is an IP that everyone knows." Plus the cast was super impressive, as it included Sarah Michelle Gellar, Peter Gallagher, and Nathalie Kelley, to name just a few of the show's stars. Perez's character was even slated to be recurring down the road!

However, despite the fact that everything seemed to be going swimmingly, NBC declined to pick up the show in the end, as noted by Deadline in December 2016. That meant that the project was pretty much dead, something that took a long time to finally play out. "We called it 'cruel contention,' cause it was in contention for nine months," Perez continued to Kahnversations. That had to be super heartbreaking.

Still, despite the series never making it to air, people looking forward to the Cruel Intentions project may have seen Perez's face in casting announcements before he'd be Marco from The Kissing Booth 2.

Taylor Zakhar Perez was lucky enough to land a major role in the 2017 journalism-focused comedy Embeds. On the show, he played reporter Noah Torres, who — along with four other recent college grads — is an embedded reporter on the presidential campaign trail. And as Perez tells it, shooting the series wasn't unlike being on the campaign trail. "We're all staying in the same hotel, we have call times at 5 a.m., we're working until 7 p.m., then we're learning our six scenes for the next day," he told The New York Times. He continued, "So we're sort of living our versions of the embed life."

During that time, Perez — aka Marco from The Kissing Booth 2 — was feeling great. He was booking job after job, and he found his optimism building about the future of his career. In addition to that, Perez was starting to establish real connections and bonds in Los Angeles, including on the Embeds set. "It was where I made one of my really close friends, Chloe [Brooks] ... who just booked Hawaii Five-0," he recalled in a chat with Kahnversations. He added, "When friends work, you're like, 'I love that my friend is working.'" Amen to that!

One of the first things you notice when you lay eyes on Taylor Zakhar Perez is that he's a total stud. He's literally the archetypal tall, dark, and handsome man, so it's no wonder he was cast in The Kissing Booth 2. It can't be easy to walk in Jacob Elordi's footsteps (Noah from The Kissing Booth), but if anyone can, it's Perez.

It's not surprising, then, that Perez has found some success in modeling. Most notably, he was the face of Dockers in a campaign he shared on his Instagram page in March 2020. "Felt cute, might delete later," he quipped in the caption. 

In the ad, the man behind Marco from The Kissing Booth 2 looks totally dashing, sporting a dark suit jacket over a plaid shirt paired with gray pants and white shoes. He's flanked on either side by equally dapper gents, with a quintessential Los Angeles background — palm trees and a food truck — to round out the look.