Close your eyes and imagine the least prominent Jonas Brother.
No, it’s not Kevin. (You should be ashamed of yourself!) Believe it or not, the eldest Jonas, whose star is often eclipsed by his fellow bandmates, is not the least regarded of the brothers. That distinct honor belongs to the youngest Jonas: Frankie.
Frankie, now 20, was christened “the Bonus Jonas” as a child growing up in the shadow of his famous brothers, Nick, Joe, and Kevin. The youngest Jonas lived primarily out of the spotlight, save for a recurring stint on his brothers’ short-lived television show Jonas and a voice role in Hayao Miyazaki’s animated film Ponyo alongside fellow Disney scion Noah Cyrus. Frankie maintains that while his life eventually got pulled into the orbit of the Disney Channel, things remained normal for a while. “Nick and I shared a bunk bed till I was 8 years old,” he says. Nick, who was around 16 when he finally got his own bed, “made the money, so he got the top one.”
The breakup of the Jonas Brothers in 2013 may not have allowed his superstar brothers to fade into blissful anonymity, but Frankie has had a much easier time reacclimating to normalcy, even attending college at Belmont University and soon transferring to Columbia University. However, the youngest Jonas is still not immune to the attention that comes with the territory of having one’s wagon inextricably hitched to one of the biggest boy bands of the early 2000s. Standing with a foot in each world, Frankie has lived a unique life thus far, which he explores in often excruciating detail on his TikTok account, covering everything from his famous family to watching hentai porn, and even his highly-publicized run-in with the law at the age of 16.
“I actually hated TikTok. I despised the idea of it and I thought I was better than anyone who had a TikTok,” Frankie admits. “I thought of it as a children’s dancing app. And then I would just spend all day on my Instagram Explore feed looking at TikToks that had been posted on Instagram.”
At the behest of friends, Frankie caved and downloaded the app. “And it was pretty immediately that a monster was created,” he says. While he acknowledges that his TikTok self is largely a persona, Frankie counts comedy duo Tim & Eric and YouTuber-turned-singer Joji as influences for his “uncomfortable” brand of humor. This cringe factor is reflected in Frankie’s own algorithm, which he dubs “Creepy Uncles on Boats TikTok,” though he does drift into Harry Potter, astrology, and Golden Retriever TikTok as well.
Landing squarely in TikTok’s primary age demographic, Frankie is finally catering to an audience of his own peers, a departure from the mischievous younger brother trope that he leaned into with gusto on Jonas. But even though he is amongst his own age group, Frankie is still somewhat of a meme. He is such a relic of early 2000s culture, in fact, that the TikTok username @frankiejonas was already taken. For most of his life, Frankie has been seen as a tack-on to his brothers—hence the “bonus” part of his hated nickname.
“I mean, I get it, but at the same time, it definitely has the insinuation of like… I don’t want to be a bonus track. It’s like you bought the deluxe edition of an album to get the track that they didn’t put on the album. And that’s kind of what [people are] saying,” he explains. “But I get it, it’s the name that was given to me. If people want to call me, they call me that. But I hate it so much.”
TikTok fame was never Frankie’s intention when he began making them, but he is pleasantly surprised by the attention he is getting for his own creations. “This is the first time that I’m actually doing something and it feels as though people are appreciating it for me, which feels awesome. My ego is the size of the moon right now,” he says with a laugh.
Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of Frankie’s TikTok (879K followers) is his series of brutally self-aware videos about his lesser level of fame in comparison to his older brothers. One such TikTok with over 13 million views features him commiserating with another user’s experience of being less talented than his siblings, while also good-humouredly accepting himself as the butt of the joke. As user @jackerytabletop explains, “You may be thinking, y’all must be like the Jonas Brothers… Then I must be Kevin cause I’m the third, right? But no. I’m Frankie,” Frankie can be seen climbing into a running shower fully clothed, and sitting with his head bowed in defeat.
The first of his TikToks to crack one million views also cheekily deals with the theme of feeling neglected. Participating in a viral challenge to, “Put [up] a picture of a celebrity that people say you look like, but you don’t look like,” Frankie appears over a background image of his older brothers, accompanied by the hashtags, “#itwouldsucktobefrankiejonas” and “#ifyoueverfeelforgottenjustrememberfrankiejonas.” The video captured the sympathies of many TikTokers, as user @thotzone pointed out, “imagine being frankie and ur brothers form a whole band without u. twice.”
Frankie, who religiously reads the comments on his TikToks, is adamant that he has zero interest in being a popstar. “I would never want to do that in a million years,” he says, recalling the dread he has felt in recent years having to go onstage. Frankie also has no interest in seeing how the sausage is made. An ardent fan of his brothers’ music, “I could never [love it] if my voice or my persona was attached to that. It would lose all its luster for me.”
Despite not being a member of his brothers’ band, Frankie still found himself the subject of media scrutiny for his teenage shenanigans. At 16, he was slapped with a citation for possession of marijuana, an incident he poked fun at on TikTok. “Heard were [sic] introducing ourselves as our high school rumors,” he wrote, followed by a screenshot of the articles written about the incident. Frankie, who nonchalantly sips his cup of coffee throughout the video, brazenly added the hashtags “#frankiejonasisgoingtohell,” “#hesamistakeandadevilworshipper,” “#burninhellfrankiejonas,” and “#marijuanaisforsinners,” to the post.
“I think just in the same way, if that happened to someone who was going to like a public or a private or any other form of high school, the rumor would be spread around town. And in my case, unfortunately, the town was the Washington Post.”
Though he admits that the national attention from the incident wasn’t exactly what he had signed up for, he invokes the wise words of Hannah Montana to surmise his feelings: “Everybody makes mistakes. Everybody has those days. Everybody knows what, what I’m talking about, everybody gets that way.” Having gained time and perspective, Frankie’s TikTok reflects the universal nature of getting in trouble as a teen. “I think just in the same way, if that happened to someone who was going to like a public or a private or any other form of high school, the rumor would be spread around town,” he says. “And in my case, unfortunately, the town was the Washington Post.”
In spite of the negatives, Frankie also touches on the more lucrative side of being fame-adjacent in a video which addresses entrepreneur Daniel Aghachi’s tips for success. “If you want to be in the top 1 percent of the world, you have to do what 99 percent of people don’t do,” Aghachi says. “Uh, have famous brothers and get by on nepotism your whole life,” Frankie responds with a Cheshire cat grin. “We love a self-aware king,” Frankie jokes to me over Zoom. “I like to be aware of the fact that I’ve been given a lot right now,” he adds. “I get it, and I’m grateful for it, but also, because of who I am, because of the way that my humor presents itself, I have the ability to poke fun at that and make light of it in a way, and people seem to enjoy it, which is great.”
Many longtime fans of the Jonas Brothers will recall the band’s era of purity rings. Concurrent with their squeaky-clean image, the brothers—sons of a pastor—each donned the highly visible symbol of abstinence. The brothers caught major flack for the decision, with South Park making an especially memorable mockery of them in the season 13 premiere, “The Ring.” Though the brothers were in support of wearing the rings at the time, they soon realized that they did indeed intend to have sex before marriage, with Kevin being the first to remove his ring. The brothers’ burgeoning identities as sexual beings became a sign that they had outgrown their audience, and maintaining the squeaky-clean facade led to a decline in the quality of their music.
Unlike his elder brothers, Frankie Jonas has never been forced to suppress his sexuality in the public arena, and has instead opted to make hilariously honest TikToks about taboo subjects. “Maybe it’s because I’m a Gen Z, I was introduced to hyper-sexual material at a very young age, but I just think it’s funny,” he says of his stigma-breaking humor.
His TikTok content has even taken a turn for the horny, duetting videos about being spanked to the mixed horror and delight of his fans. “frankie i’m begging u. put the phone away,” one wrote, while another added, “I ALWAYS KNEW FRANKIE WAS THE SUPERIOR JONAS.” In another video, labeled, “Me if the first porn I ever watched was hentai,” the Time Warp Scan—a TikTok feature which allows users to distort their features using a panorama-like camera—pans over Frankie’s perfectly still body and then cuts to the title card of said anime porn as he cups his hands over his crotch. In accordance with another TikTok trend in which users blatantly lie only to wink to their audience, Frankie jokingly professes, “I last long.” As user @strawberryavi perhaps put it best, “Guess this one didn’t get a purity ring smh.”
Frankie, however, did wear a ring for a period, which he confesses he destroyed after watching said hentai. “I had a purity ring when I was a kid because I really wanted to be like my brothers and fit in in a lineup. Transparently, after that hentai that I watched, I burned the ring in a fire and watched it melt and did a whole ceremony.”
Having come of age fame-adjacent, Frankie was spared much of the brutality that comes with childhood celebrity, but also faced extra scrutiny by association. Though he may never be able to escape his loathed nickname, “The Bonus Jonas’” TikToks have finally allowed him to control a narrative that he was practically born into, and give him the chance to express the candor that his brothers couldn’t. “I think of myself in comparison to my brothers, for instance, I feel like I could be a more relatable personality to Gen Z specifically. I have Gen Z feelings. I have Gen Z emotions,” he says. “I think when it comes to growing up in the public eye, it’s had its positives and it’s had its negative effects. And I definitely enjoy poking fun at the negatives and the positives.”
Source by www.thedailybeast.com