‘Kissing Booth 2’: Taylor Zakhar Perez Avoided This 1 Thing to Prepare to Play Marco Peña

There is a lot of pressure to be the new face in a popular movie franchise. Taylor Zakhar Perez joined the Kissing Booth cast for the second movie to play Marco Peña. He talked about having to avoid one thing to prepare for the Netflix movie.

Taylor Zakhar Perez is one of the new characters in ‘Kissing Booth 2’

Kissing Booth 2 follows Elle Evans (Joey King) continuing high school with Lee Flynn (Joel Courtney) while Noah (Jacob Elordi) is away at college. Elle enters a competition and teams up with Marco Peña.

This throws a wrench into Noah and Elle’s relationship. King talked about the love triangle and answered if she’s team Noah or team Marco.

“Oh, that is such a good question,” she told Variety. “I don’t want to say what team I’m on, but I just keep dropping hints every now and then on my Instagram, and little Easter eggs in my interviews. I am so excited for those hashtags to be thrown around when the movie comes out. It’s kind of like that Edward-and-Jacob thing in Twilight.”

Jacob Elordi didn’t prepare for the sequel the same way

Elordi opened up about training hard to change his body for the first movie. He told Men’s Health he didn’t do the same thing for the sequel.

“At the time [I shot The Kissing Booth], I was super young and got thrown into a world where everyone wanted to talk about my body … it really f*king bothered me,” he said.

The actor later explained, “I was trying to prove myself and be known as an actor. It was so much working out and I hated every second of it.” Elordi said he won’t do that to his body again because he “wanted to be able to walk and run with my grandkids when I’m eighty-something, you know?”

Perez avoided drinking

Zakhar Perez also talked about the pressure to look a certain way for his role. He told Variety how he prepared for it.

“I didn’t drink the whole time we were in Cape Town,” he said. “I drank one time because I heard the wine country was unbelievable. How do you not drink when you’re in this beautiful wine country? That was probably June or July because when we got there in May, I made a pact with myself, ‘You’re going to workout every day and you’re going to eat right.'”

The actor also said he was too nervous to do certain things with his co-stars. “It was very embarrassing at first, and it was like was getting my sea legs,” he said. “But I was like that nerdy high school student that’s like, ‘We can’t hang out. I need to do my homework.’ The whole cast wanted to go out and go to wine country and go on safari and do everything, but I was like, ‘If I f*ck this up, I’m done. [Producer] Vince [Marcello] will never trust me again. Vince will never trust me again.'”

Fans will see Perez in the third movie. Kissing Booth 3 was already shot and will be released in 2021.