The brief life and sudden death of Zyzz: why did the bodybuilding influencer die at just 22?

Then Aziz made headlines in Australia when he suddenly and unexpectedly died in 2011, at the age of 22. By that point he’d attracted more than 60,000 Facebook followers who either loved him or loved to hate him. His global audience grew even more rapidly after his death as speculation grew about its cause. Fraudulent attempts to access the coroner’s report were made by people impersonating his family. Influencers made videos claiming he had faked his death. Zyzz “sightings” were posted for years.

Now finally, in a new documentary being released on the 15th anniversary of his death, the truth is being revealed.

Revealed – Poster Boy: Becoming Zyzz is a Stan documentary directed by film-maker Selina Miles, whose post-#MeToo documentary Silenced opened the Sydney film festival this year. But Poster Boy shares more DNA with her 2020 doco Harley & Katya, about two figure skaters who skidded into tragedy. “They both have vulnerable, impressionable young people that are willing to take risks and aren’t maybe informed about the extent of those risks,” Miles tells Guardian Australia.

Poster Boy starts where the Zyzz phenomenon began: in a modest brick home in Carlingford, near Sydney’s Parramatta. The documentary includes a recreation of Aziz’s childhood bedroom, right down to the clothes strewn all over the floor; you can practically smell the hair gel and fake tan.

Aziz and his older brother Said were born in Russia to Kurdish parents who then migrated to Australia where they worked long hours. In the film, the boys’ friends – many of them first-generation Australians – describe struggling to fit in, but finding community in bodybuilding. “We were a mixed bag,” one says in the documentary. “We aligned our values not on our ethnic background but on the camaraderie of training together.”

There was a community online too, within the massive forums of bodybuilding.com. Under the username Zyzz, Aziz commiserated with other young men about not being able to get girls and posted progress pictures of his physique. In 2007, when bedroom rants like Leave Britney Alone! started going viral, Aziz unleashed his persona on YouTube. Not everyone was a fan; as Said remembers, there were some who wanted to beat them up, particularly when Aziz and his “aesthetics crew” stripped down to tiny shorts and flexed at music festivals.

“I had the mindset of, ‘These guys are all just brutes,” Said tells Guardian Australia. “‘They don’t even look after their damn skin or have nice hair.’”

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These days, Said is a fitness coach with 440,000 Instagram followers, who still goes under his forum name Chestbrah. He says he and his brother were “two nerds who built a simulation around these characters we invented”.

But Aziz was also a born salesman. He had been dux of his high school, then enrolled in a marketing and commerce degree. His tactics to build and influence his audience, with stunts like the Facebook page, are common practice now, but in 2010 it was hard to monetise these new dark arts. So Aziz worked mundane jobs while he figured it out. Sometimes, as one friend recalls, he sold photographs of himself “to gross old men on the internet”.

Aziz needed money to maintain his appearance: teeth whitener, tan and performance-enhancing drugs. He began to increasingly experiment with substances untested on humans, and without the recommended cycling on and off. As his fame grew, so did the gains. But the hateful comments from strangers also multiplied.

“As a grown-up man, I look back and think, you bastards,” says Said. “He was one of the most beautiful men to walk the planet, not just physically, but internally. I hate that these people put these thoughts in his head.”

Friends remember Aziz as obsessing over his perceived flaws, and using the benzodiazepine Xanax to soothe his social anxiety. His later videos veered on existential crises. “It’s a fucking act,” he says bleakly in one. “Zyzz is a fucking joke … Zyzz is a person who took over who I am.”

In a rare win, he made $20,000 in two months from selling copy-and-paste training programs. “Literally the first thing he did was take that money and go for a trip to Thailand,” says Said.

One friend worried that Pattaya City had pharmacies “like candy shops”, stocked with steroids and benzodiazepines, that would prove too tempting. Aziz reassured him he just needed to get away for a bit.

The final footage Aziz took shows him wandering around the empty pool area of his hotel, alone. He had secretly booked himself in for nose and cheek reconstruction. When he died shortly after, the internet ignited with theories. The most widely circulated story was that Aziz had had a heart attack in a sauna due to a congenital heart defect; perhaps it was unthinkable that someone preaching fitness could die of anything other than natural causes, exacerbated by extreme heat.

With the help of Aziz’s parents, Miles can reveal the findings of the toxicology report. While Aziz did have an enlarged heart, the cause of death was acute respiratory failure due to the combined use of morphine, cocaine and benzodiazepines. No sauna.

“We don’t know what caused [the enlarged heart], whether it was his steroid use or something else,” says Miles, “and we don’t know what he took when. But it was a drug interaction that caused his death.”

Poster Boy might act as a cautionary tale for a new generation, particularly since looksmaxxing influencer Connor Murphy died in Thailand in July, drowning in a lake amid just as much mystery; or looksmaxxing figurehead Braden Eric Peters AKA Clavicular, who overdosed on a substance mid-livestream in April but was revived.

Miles hopes people will be more curious and kind to young men like Aziz. “What I would give to be able to have a conversation with him,” she says. “But he lives on through his friends. They’re empathetic, self-aware men who have done a lot of self-reflection. They loved Aziz and he loved them. That speaks volumes as to who he might have been behind the scenes.”

Said is certain that his brother would have pursued a more positive path than the looksmaxxing and manosphere influencers who followed in his wake.

“Az was split between a rock and a hard place,” he says. “He loved the attention, but he was a good kid. With great power comes great responsibility and I think he started to feel that. We always just wanted to help everyone be the hero of their own story and to see the potential that they have.”

Revealed – Poster Boy: Becoming Zyzz is available to stream in Australia on Stan now