Gabriel Iglesias really is the next Kevin Hart: After Hart’s “Let Me Explain” became the fourth-highest-grossing comedy concert film ever last summer, the film company behind it was hungry to repeat the magic.
Enter Iglesias, the comedian with 6 million Facebook likes and more than 260 million views of his YouTube videos. Better known as “Fluffy” — as in “I’m not fat, I’m fluffy!” — the 38-year-old Mexican-American comic brings his funny business to the big screen this Friday in “The Fluffy Movie.”
In his act, Iglesias muses on world travels, raising a kid and losing a massive amount of weight. Fluffy isn’t nearly as fluffy as he used to be — he once topped out at 437 pounds, and is now down to about 330.
“It was a health issue,” he says of the diabetes diagnosis that inspired him to shed the pounds. “I’ve got no problem being a big guy. They got big-and-tall stores now. Big cars.”
Born in San Diego, Iglesias got his comedy start at age 10 in a talent show. “I wanted to do voices and impressions,” he says. “I was expecting I’d do an impression, and get applause. And then do another and get more applause — kind of like a magician. But people started laughing [all the way through] and everybody was like, ‘You’re so funny!’ In my head, I was like, ‘But were the impressions good?!’ ”
With 17 years of stand-up under his belt, he’s increasingly showing up in movies. He’ll soon reprise his drug-dealer role from “Magic Mike” in the sequel, and he voices characters in the upcoming animated flick “The Book of Life.”
Still, he’s happy to be treated normally by the “people who don’t care” about his fame: his stepson and his girlfriend of 11 years, whom he lives with but has yet to marry. “Some stereotypes are true,” he jokes.