‘Dave’ Breakout Travis Bennett Is So Much More Than Elz

Travis Bennett didn’t realize just how invested he was in pursuing an acting career until he lost out on a role in Netflix’s The Harder They Fall. Until that point, he had simply been taking the auditions that happened to come his way,  through the  connections he made as an early member of Odd Future. But missing out on Harder, a Jay-Z-produced western whose cast already boasted a who’s-who of leading Black talent, hit him harder than he expected. “I cried,” he recalls over a plate of soul food at his favorite Los Angeles restaurant, My 2 Cents. “And I was frustrated that I was crying like, Why am I mad? Why do I care so much? That really changed my trajectory.”

A few years later, Bennett is exactly where he wants to be, popping up in buzzing films and series with a “Hey, it’s that guy!” regularity. He’s winning the parts alongside A-listers in movies like the Jonah Hill-Eddie Murphy-Julia Louis-Dreyfus romcom You People, Confess, Fletch with Jon Hamm, and Mel Brooks’ (long-overdue) History of the World Part 2. Most crucially, he’s on screens for 10 weeks at a clip with a supporting role on FX’s hit series Dave, which returned for its third season on April 5. The show dramatizes Dave Burd’s real-life rise to stardom as the rapper Lil Dicky, operating in a heightened version of the Hollywood music industry scene. 

It’s a world that Bennett, who grew up with future Grammy-winning artists in his orbit, is all too familiar with. Syd, lead singer of the alternative-R&B group The Internet, is his older sister. Tyler, The Creator is one of his best friends, and his introduction to the industry was via Odd Future, where he served as Tyler’s DJ and hypeman under the name Yung Taco.

Pivoting to acting after a years-long affiliation with one of the most prolific music collectives of the last decade isn’t an unheard of Hollywood trajectory, but when he first decided to pursue acting, Bennett kept it secret from the rest of the crew, especially after one particularly embarrassing day filming their early ‘10s Adult Swim sketch comedy series Loiter Squad. “I remember shooting this Xzibit skit and everybody being like, ‘You are so bad [at] this.’ And it was just, I was 17 and I was nervous.” After the show ended and Odd Future wound down as other members saw their solo careers take off, Bennett discovered there was only so far he could go with DJing. “The next thing is making your own music and going on tours, and I personally was not into that,” he says. “I tried a bunch of other things and failed.”

Enter Burd, who Bennett first connected with at Tyler’s annual Camp Flog Gnaw festival. They kept in touch, and during a friendly basketball game, Burd pitched Bennett a part on the series, but asked him to read for it. Bennett was miffed. “You talking about practice?” he remembers thinking, making a reference to Allen Iverson’s famous rant at a 2002 news conference. It’s an understandable enough reaction—Burd’s satirical series would feature him and even his real-life hypeman GaTa “playing” themselves. Why should Bennett have to read to play, in essence, a version of Yung Taco?

On Dave, Bennett is Elz, show-Dave’s childhood friend from Philadelphia, now a successful producer in LA, where he has embraced music industry cliches like a coke habit and a wry humor masking stunted emotional growth. Bennett plays him with a pitch-perfect disaffected demeanor; he’s the straight man to Burd and GaTa’s wackier characters.

In real life, Bennett is firmly rooted in the county of purple and gold—he lives eight minutes from where he grew up, in Mid-City, far from the wealthy enclaves in the hills where the Dave characters and his real life friends get up to their hijinxs. His mom’s thrift shop, where he came to love vintage clothes as a child, is still open on Pico Boulevard and Sierra Bonita. 

Now that he’s in his thirties, Bennett spends his spare time thrifting, hunting for things ‘70s-era chairs from Antwerp and repurposed light signs to decorate his bachelor apartment. His closet is a force to be reckoned with, especially the thrift shop items. He pulled up for lunch in a brilliant olive green jumpsuit, but admitted that he had already had one outfit change. He gatekeeps the actual spots, but says Utah and Minnesota are the best states for rare finds. He only misses LA’s monthly Rose Bowl Flea Market when he’s on a film shoot, and the Dave team regularly sources costumes out of his closet.

You might still catch Bennett in a Tyler video—he’s got a recurring role as the Carlton cuckolded by Tyler in a series of Call Me If You Get Lost clips—but he’s much more reserved and decidedly turnt down than he was in the rowdy early Odd Future days, where he played a member of the entourage or crowd surfer. He once worried that he would always be known as the goofy Loiter Squad homie. But, he remembers, “Somebody in a meeting once told me, ‘You’re thinking about the one million people that know you. And I’m thinking about however many people that don’t know you exist.’” His perspective shifted: “There’s people who meet me that have no idea about [my] past. It’s almost like a new life.”

The irony that he transcended Yung Taco by playing a funhouse mirror version of that guy isn’t lost on him. “The things that [Elz is] dealing with [this season] are things I dealt with when I was younger—trying to figure out where you fit into a [larger] situation,” Bennett says. “It was easy to find the frustrations that I had when I was younger and experimenting with [who I wanted to be].” (Though he’s quick to clarify that, “The things that are going on with [Elz] and Dave’s relationship”—since season 2, the old hometown friends have grown estranged—never happened to Taco.) He inhabits the character so well that fans on the street assume that he’s actually a popular producer, the same way that Dave is actually Lil Dicky. 

Bennett would like to test his mettle in a true-blue action role, in part because he watched his stern Jamaican dad get choked up during Top Gun: Maverick. (He simulates the throat-clearing sound his father let out during a particularly great scene. “Are you about to let it out, my boy?” he wondered.) His dream role? Kobe Bryant. But not in a chintzy Lifetime movie or even a big-budget biopic, but as “HBO Kobe”—a character with enough heft to cover the Bryant’s myriad gray areas and contradictions.

Playing supporting roles as the even-keeled friend or brother, Bennet has found relatively firm footing in the ever-shifting tectonics of Hollywood—but he’s seen enough to know how quickly things can change. “I worked for a long time from a place of fear as far as maintaining financial stability,” he admits. “I’ve gotten to a place where I feel financially stable, [but] I am still in fear of [losing] that. I’m always scared. I think that’s a good way to be, though.” He’s using that fear to fuel his drive. “I think I get more excited with each project in general because it’s just more stuff to do—it’s just more separation from Taco.” And wherever his career goes, he knows he always be close to home. “I always think, God forbid everything goes to shit, I am still going to be in LA. You know what I mean?”