With 13.5 million fans, Keemokazi talks life as an Arab TikTok star
“It first started when I just decided to prank my mom,” Kareem Hesri told Arab News from his family’s beautiful southern California home. “I threw it on TikTok. She didn’t care. 10 million overnight. It blew up.”
Hesri is a Syrian-American teenager and the only boy among his five siblings. He is also an online celebrity known to most as Keemokazi, most famous for his videos on the social media app, TikTok.
Every day, millions of viewers watch Keemokazi and his family in skits and prank videos such as the one that launched Hesri’s career in what is one of the newest entertainment jobs: Influencer. “My passion always led me to entertainment. It was either music or acting,” he said.
His family was supportive of his entertainment aspirations but recognized the challenges of breaking into the industry.
Hesri started with acting and went on to launch a rapping career in 2017, around the same time, the short-form video content app TikTok became a social media sensation.
Hesri watched as entertainers his age went from unknowns to receiving millions of daily views. “I never wanted to be the rapper or the music artist that did silly videos. I wanted to be taken seriously,” he said, but after seeing the kind of success that other young people where finding on the platform he created his Keemokazi profile and debuted the prank video that launched him and his family into the spotlight.
For Hesri the work begins with research. He spends hours before going to bed each night on TikTok’s For You page looking through popular videos as “if you want to be on TikTok, and you want to be viral on this app, you have to see the trends.”
From there he writes, directs, films, and edits multiple 15 to 30-second videos each day.
Hesri is not alone in this work. His family members have gone from being supportive of his dream to having supporting roles in his dream.
“We hit the Middle East, a very loyal fanbase, because my mom was cursing and yelling in Arabic. People loved it. We have to stay loyal to that because we are Middle Eastern as well as from Syria. So, we connect to them very well. It’s a different kind of connection. I don’t consider them fans or supporters, I consider them family,” he said.