If you’ve been online at all within the last few years, you are probably familiar with the work of Evan Ross Katz. The very online TV and pop culture fan made the transition to online personality via posting relatable screenshots and jokes on his social media platforms — in large part due to his comments on “The White Lotus.” With this large following, he’s become an important voice in pop culture discourse, sharing his thoughts in his newsletter and podcast, both titled “Shut Up Evan.”
Here are 18 things to know about this Jewish cultural commentator.
1. Evan was born on April 10, 1989 to a Jewish family and grew up in Pittsburgh.
2. He’s an Aries!
3. His paternal grandfather escaped Germany during the Holocaust.
4. He attended Temple Emmanuel in Pittsburgh for the majority of his life, going to Hebrew school, Sunday school and regularly attending Kabbalat Shabbat services.
5. He came out as gay to his mom at the age of 16.
6. Evan studied drama at NYU, and was a weed dealer during his time in school.
7. Evan came into his Jewish identity in his late 20s. “I started to realize that being Jewish was a lot more than just my religious belief or my religious practice,” he said on a podcast in 2020.
8. He was a writer for Netflix’s “The Most” channel and has had other writing published in Paper, Teen Vogue and The Cut.
9. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, a journalist asked Evan when he felt like he made the transition from fan to influencer. Here’s his response:
“It’s a hard question to answer because it’s not so much a ‘before’ and ‘after’ in my mind. I still am a mega fan. And proudly so. I’ll always be. What’s changed is my proximity to that which I fan out over, or, as I like to say, that which causes me heart palpitations. And I’m grateful that the transition has happened at a pace that’s felt gradual. I’m lucky that the access and opportunities I’ve been afforded haven’t tainted the purity of my fan-coded brain.”
10. Mike White, creator of “The White Lotus,” has called Evan the “most valuable hype man in the history of television.”
11. He’ll simply never recover from meeting Nicole Kidman.
12. His fan-posting of “The White Lotus” led him to become real-life friends with Jennifer Coolidge.
“She sent me a very sweet message in 2021 thanking me for my devoted support of season one of ‘The White Lotus,'” Evan explained to The Hollywood Reporter. “Never one to not shoot my shot, I took the opportunity to invite her on my podcast. We kept in touch and formed this beautiful friendship. On a professional level, her coming on the pod brought in so many new listeners, many of whom stuck around.”
13. His book “Into Every Generation a Slayer is Born: How Buffy Staked Our Hearts,” an ultimate fandom book on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” came out in 2022.
14. Evan and his husband Billy were married on April 20, 2024 in a “Big Goose Wedding.” “We call each other goose out of reverence for each other’s oddities, of which there are many,” Evan said in his wedding vows.
The ceremony was officiated by Rabbi James Feder of Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield, New Jersey. The party, which was weed-themed, included the hora and a performance by Mandy Moore.
15. Evan and Billy met in 2018 on Grindr! Evan then proposed to Billy in 2022 during a beach picnic in the Hamptons. Adorable.
16. He’s had numerous A-list talent on his podcast like Ariana Grande, Hannah Einbinder, Sydney Sweeney and more.
17. Evan switched things up and was the podcast guest on the Grindr podcast “Who’s the A**hole?” with Katya.
18. Evan has become known for hosting “Chaos Dinner” parties, where he invites a cohort of celebrities to sit down together for dinner and chat about pop culture. Some guests have included Sarah Michelle Gellar, Trixie Mattel, Morgan Spector, Nicola Coughlan and more.
“‘What exactly is this?’ That’s pretty much what everyone would ask when I’d slide into their DMs or voice text an invitation to my ‘Chaos Dinner,’ as we were calling it. We were building a bridge to a land unfamiliar. Each RSVP was another brick cemented. What was on the other side? I guess we’d find out,” Evan wrote in his newsletter about the first Chaos Dinner.
