AI Summary
5 min readZach Zucker: The Clown Who Brought Stamptown to Netflix
Zach Zucker cheated on his ACTs to get a 32, earned a letter of intent to play baseball at Harvard, and turned it all down to move to Los Angeles at 18 with no training and no connections. He spent three years street performing on the Santa Monica promenade in corduroys and a fedora, making exactly zero dollars. "I was an unfunny, enthusiastic 19-year-old," he says. That trajectory—from hustling a Scantron to hustling a clown show onto Netflix—is the throughline of his conversation with Tom Papa on Breaking Bread.
What Clown School Actually Teaches
Zucker spent two years at Philippe Gaulier's clown school in Étampes, France. Gaulier, who died in February 2025, was a French master with big hair, red glasses, and a drum he'd hit to start exercises. Students had five to seven seconds to "be alive and full of life" or Gaulier would declare them awful. Of the 48 people who started Zucker's first class, 23 finished.
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What you'll learn
- 1 Timestamped Outline
- 2 (00:04) **Cheating the ACT & Hustler Mentality** - Zach reveals he cheated on his ACT by reading scantron patterns and copying a friend's answers to get a 32, landing a Harvard baseball letter of intent.
- 3 (01:18) **The Clown Community & Breaking Through** - Zach discusses the tension between niche performance communities (clowns, magicians) and mainstream success, noting how insiders often resent those who break out.
- 4 (03:45) **Self-Sabotage & The "Fuck That Guy" Face** - Zach admits he feels misunderstood and often shoots himself in the foot, describing himself as someone who holds the gas can while wondering who lit his house on fire.
- 5 (05:46) **High School Sports to Acting Discovery** - Zach traces his path from baseball/basketball jock to finding theater in senior year after being told acting was an easy A.
- 6 (09:54) **The Athlete-Performer Crossover** - Zach and Tom bond over how sports discipline translated into their performance careers, with Zach identifying as a "two-sport athlete" of performing and producing.
- 7 (13:23) **Finding Philippe Gaulier's Clown School** - Zach lands an unpaid internship at Sacha Baron Cohen's company, then takes a workshop with Cohen's teacher Philippe Gaulier—and by minute five, his entire worldview shifts.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Guests on this episode
Show Notes
Tom sits down with Zach Zucker for a freewheeling conversation about cheating on the ACT, finding his artistic home in French clown school and bringing his creative family to Netflix with Stamptown. Zach also explains the Iams voiceovers keeping the operation alive and the full-circle moment that took him back to Étampes.
Zach's special Stamptown is out now.
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More from this podcast
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