Australian rapper/singer The Kid LAROI is just at the beginning of his music career. However, he’s already setting himself up for iconic status with Kids Are Growing Up: A Story About a Kid Named Laroi, a documentary about his fast rise to stardom.
LAROI and director Michael D. Ratner talked with Shadow and Act Managing Editor about the new Prime Video documentary and what fans can expect.
LAROI acknowledged that the documentary is coming in early in his career, saying, “I think the way that I see it is kind of like, this isn’t the triumphant…come-up story of someone who’s been doing this for 10-15 years. It’s a recap of the past couple of years.”
“The goal of the film is hopefully to inspire the people who are watching and the people who support me…It’s cool for people who want to get a little bit of an idea of seeing some of the stuff that happens behind the scenes,” he continued.
Ratner added that the film compacts LAROI’s rise to fame during the pandemic into less than two hours.
“This has been such a whirlwind few years and there’s been such success and there’s a very small group of artists who have broken through a pandemic. It’s a very unique circumstance,” he said. “We weren’t trying to tell 20 years of a story, we were trying to tell a few years of a story…I think we really tried to go deep on certain stuff.”
Watch the full interview below. Here’s more about Kids Are Growing Up:
The documentary explores his rapid rise from a young kid with a dream in Australia to a full-fledged global star, topping charts and selling out shows. The film features never-before-seen footage of Laroi’s early days as an artist, including clips of him in the lab with the late Juicewrld, who served as an early mentor for Laroi and adopter of his music. We also get a chance to see Laroi share his experiences of working with Justin Bieber, who is interviewed in the film about their 2021 mega-hit “STAY,” which took the world by storm, and even features his big homie Post Malone waxing poetic about Laroi’s talent and reminiscing about giving each other tattoos. Throughout the film, though, we get to see what makes Laroi tick as an artist and a person, cut with footage and interviews of his family and friends who have stuck by him through it all.