Zachary Levi is tireless.

Last week, with the specter of another thrilling, exhausting whirlwind of a Comic-Con still looming over the world, Levi had flown to Toronto, Chicago, Los Angeles before finally landing in San Diego for the frenzy. When gifted with an extra hour, he filled it with interviews; there is no such thing as an extra hour for the actor turned brand ambassador, who has parlayed his fame and gambled on his passion to create The Nerd Machine, a company dedicated to uniting nerds under one brand, while redefining what “nerd” really means.

Levi burst onto TV with a role in the sitcom Less than Perfect, but it wasn’t until headlining the NBC series Chuck that Levi’s own nerd identity became inseparable with his fans’. Chuck was a series that tackled the fantasy every Con goer has: to go from awkward nerd to high-flying badass super-spy. From there, Levi lent his voice and charms to the roguish Flynn in Tangled, became a supporting player in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Fandral in the Thor franchise, and has a high-profile role in the upcoming Heroes Reborn.

He’s also the face of The Nerd Machine, a company he co-founded with David Coleman in 2010 that has become synonymous with SDCC thanks to NerdHQ, a fan-friendly experience with a litany of video gaming activations, dance parties and intimate panels with Comic-Con legends like Nathan Fillion and William Shatner. Dubbed “Conversations for a Cause,” they sell out in seconds, with all proceeds going to Operation Smile.

Over the course of our interview, it’s clear that Zachary Levi doesn’t do all this for money. He does it because he cares, and to him, that’s the only way.

Brief: Why did you start The Nerd Machine, and subsequently, NerdHQ?

After coming to Comic-Con for many years and looking at the landscape of nerd culture, and having identified with nerd culture my whole life, I was surprised that with such an incredibly powerful demographic of consumers, there was no unifying brand.

I wanted something that we can all wear, regardless of our fandom, where it’s all united. We can all wear shirts that say nerd, and it doesn’t matter what you’re nerdy about. I’m a nerd, and I’m owning it and embracing it.

That’s where the Nerd Machine came from. Bringing those communities, whatever your fandom was, together, and being unified in that, and also just trying to rewrite in people’s minds what it means to be a nerd. Some people are nerdy about the stereotypical things like comic books, video games and technology, like I am, but people are also nerdy about food, about fashion…

About beer.

Dude exactly! Some people are just beer nerds, and that’s awesome. Nerd came from Dr. Seuss; it doesn’t really mean any of that, but what it’s been ascribed to is being passionate about those stereotypical nerdy things. Now those things are pretty mainstream. Everyone uses a computer, everybody plays video games. If you don’t read comic books, you watch comic book movies. So that’s not nerd anymore. So what’s nerdy? Nerdy just means you’re very passionate about something. [We’re] creating a unified brand for nerd culture, trying to reprogram people’s thoughts and also broaden what we all call a nerd.

In building the Nerd Machine, we needed to do something to activate the brand, brand awareness and sell merch. We were going to get a booth at Comic-Con but I was very naive to think that we could just do that. ‘There’s like a ten year waiting list.’ Duh. Of course. But people had started doing pop-ups. We’ll go and rent a bar, I’ll set up a table and I’ll take pictures, set up the merch booth, and then I’ll tweet out to my followers, and hopefully that will drive traffic to this brand, and maybe they’ll buy a shirt or whatever. Then it was, well, I could get some other friends to do that too. I kept going to Dave, my partner, and we went from one day to the entire weekend. ‘Dude, we’re going to do panels, parties, games and tech, activations and photo
booths.’ And he’s like ‘What?’ Fortunately, he [agreed] after some coercion, and because he knows my passion and philosophy.

To me, the best way, if you want to build a brand and brand loyalty and brand awareness, and you want people to actually care about what you do, then you have to show them that you care about them.

I wanted to create a place where we could all hang out and that it was free. The same demographic who couldn’t get into E3 or CES because they’re not exhibitors, but they’re the same people that would be there if they could, let’s bring them a little piece of both those things…and then have dance parties, because nobody had dance parties. How the fuck does nobody have a dance party? You’ve got 200,000 people down here, and there are no really good dance parties. We’re doing it; we’re doing it every night.

I wanted to do panels where it’s really intimate, and there’s no moderator, because I want to just interact with my fans instead of the middle man thing. Forget that. We’ll livestream it to the world, so if you couldn’t get in, you could still watch it, and we’ll make it all for charity, because I don’t want to make money off my friends or other celebrities.

We’ll bring celebrities and fans together in a way that they don’t normally get to. As a celebrity, I give an hour of my time and I get to hang out with my biggest fans, they get to ask me questions, they feel loved, I feel loved, and simultaneously we’re raising $4-5,000 to help kids live a better life. I’m in. That’s why Joss Whedon has come back year after year, why Nathan Fillion comes back and does multiple panels for us, why William Shatner is doing it this year. I’m out of my mind. People believed. And hopefully they’ll keep believing.

Every year is a battle. Every year is difficult; it’s a million dollar event. You need sponsors that really get it and believe in you, and go, ‘We love what you’re about, we love what you do, we think that’s good for our brand, let’s all do it together.’

In many ways, SDCC has become more about the film and TV industries and product, than fandom. How important is it to provide fans nerds counter-programming?

Certainly, it was never intended to be counter-programming, but complementary programming. Look, I’m an idealist, and I know that people have very strong idealistic thoughts about this. But you also have to be rational.

This convention has shifted, based mainly on public demand. So you can’t fault them, because people want to see all this. I don’t know what or when the breaking point was originally, but once the fans got a taste of, ‘Oh wait a minute, this giant star was in this comic-y sci-fi movie and they came and did a panel at Comic-Con…We want more of that.’ Then Comic-Con goes, ‘OK, we’ll try and bring you more of that.’ Which means it gets bigger and bigger, which gives it a bigger price-tag, and means you need corporate help. You need sponsors. You need Warner Bros. coming in and saying ‘We’re going to buy a giant space and we’re going to spend a lot of money.’ That’s how you pay for things.

We do the same thing; we just do it in a smaller way. What we try to do is, to the best of our ability, curate the experience so it feels as organic and as interactive as possible.

Everyone’s allowed to do that in whatever way they want. Do I hope that everyone finds that balance best? Sure. Can they find a better balance? That’s up for everyone else to decide. All I want to do is make sure that we’re never selling out, but we’re also not selling ourselves out. Because we’re not like, ‘Oh, we’re not going to have a big corporate sponsorship.’ Then how are we going to pay for it? We can’t. This is year five, and finally, are we not just barely squeaking by.

I’ve lost a lot of money trying to make this thing happen, but it’s because I believed in it. Because every year I know the connections that have been made. People have made best friends here, and celebrities and fans have interacted in ways that just means the world to them. I want to keep doing that. But if we get to a point where people just don’t believe it anymore, then I can’t. Unless somehow I just make so much money where I don’t care.

Fandral the Movie?

Yeah, right?

How do you choose what sponsors to bring into NerdHQ?

We’re very picky about certain things. There have been a lot of sponsors who come up to us and say, ‘We wanna do this.’ And we go, I don’t think that’s very cool. I don’t think that’s helping your brand and it’s certainly not helping ours. Or we don’t have the space for it, or they don’t want to pay anything.

What’s the future of NerdHQ?

I don’t know. I never want this to get too big. But if there’s a way to maintain intimacy while expanding the intimacy, then that’s what I’d like to do. But that’s a difficult thing to do.

If we can find a venue somewhere, even if we did it in LA or a different city, or basically make NerdHQ its own kind of convention, but always making sure it’s intimately, organically, interactively curated. And never feeling oppressive, too big, and disconnected, [while] always being in tune with your audience, your talent, and providing the coolest, most fun, most awesome idealistic experience that you can give them, then I’d love to do that. But I have no idea what that looks like, or if, or when, or how, you know?

I basically just asked you to tell the future.

It’s a valid question. A lot of people have asked us, can you bring NerdHQ to Convention X, and I’d love to, but one of the reasons that this has been as special as it is, is because of our panels. That’s what people respond to, because it’s one of the coolest things we offer. Fans don’t often get 45 minutes to an hour to ask whatever they want.

But, the reason we can do it here, is because there is so much A-list talent down here. Even at the next biggest Con, you’ve got maybe like 10 A-lister’s, then a lot of celebrities [who are] lovely talented people, but I don’t know that I can sell out those panels. It’s a tricky dance. I’d love to expand; I just don’t know exactly how to do that. Maybe it’s just a matter of making this more substantiated, and then once it’s dialed and locked, we can have the conversation of, how do we import it?

..

As long as The Nerd Machine and NerdHQ imports Zachary Levi’s enthusiasm, it’s clear that they will be a brand to watch.

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