How Brice Gonzalez Went From TikTok Star to Acting In Flamin’ Hot

Midway through Flamin’ Hot—Eva Longoria’s feature directorial debut—two brothers, Lucky (Hunter Jones) and Steven (Brice Gonzalez) get off the school bus. Lucky is upset: He was beaten up and bullied for being Mexican.

“Let’s just go home,” Lucky tells his dad, Richard (Jesse Garcia). “Can we get some elotes first?” Steven asks.

“No! Why do we always gotta do stupid Mexican stuff?” Lucky asks.

“Don’t look at me. I love elote. I love beans,” Steven replies, ticking the foods off on his fingers. “I love rice. I love tamales.”

Gonzalez, 8, tells TIME that was his favorite moment to film. His family, from Texas, is Mexican American too, and it was “amazing, fun, and surprising,” he says, to see his heritage on the big screen, “to learn new things, and to learn about the environment and culture.” Flamin’ Hot is his first acting role, though the young star has already stolen the hearts of many as one half of the TikTok duo @enkyboys, along with his late father, Randy Gonzalez. As Steven, the younger son of Richard Montañez, the self-proclaimed inventor of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, he is key to the snack’s creation.

In the movie, Richard decides they’re getting elote despite Lucky’s objections. As the three of them sit on a picnic table eating their corn, Steven blurts out, “Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow!” “What is it?” his dad asks.

“It burns!” Steven says. “Well,” his dad replies, “Stop eating it, dummy.” “No! I like it,” Steven says. “It burns good.”

Time slows as Richard looks around him. In the park, a man drizzles chamoy onto a fruit cup and seasons it with tajín. A woman squeezes chamoy onto bags of chips, tostilocos-style. A woman pulls cholula hot sauce out of her purse. A man douses a taco in green salsa.

“I’d been searching for an answer, or a door to open,” Richard narrates. “And there it was, all around me. It had been there the entire time.”

It is Steven’s palate that launches his father’s big idea. (Although the veracity of Montañez’s invention story has been called into question.) Gonzalez says his character is important “because the whole movie is about eating hot stuff, and I believe that Steven loves hot stuff,” he says. “And I have fun in the movie.”

But behind the scenes, Gonzalez isn’t a huge fan of elote’s mayo cream sauce. So on set, “they put the seasoning on the corn so it looked like eating the corn,” he says, “but it really was licking the Hot Cheeto dust off of the corn.”

Later on, in another pivotal scene, Steven becomes the designated taste tester for the new chile slurry that Montañez is designing from scratch with his family. The first time, it’s too spicy. The family tries every chile in town, then watches with bated breath as Steven tries a new batch.

“‘Ow, ow, ow!” he shouts. “It burns!”

“Burns good or burns bad?” the family asks in unison.

“It burns good,” Steven says triumphantly.

Co-writer Linda Yvette Chávez is proud of that scene, she says, “because that’s something that I feel like I grew up with family saying and doing. There’s always that feeling of, like, ‘Oh my God, this is so spicy, but I can’t stop eating it.’ I wanted that to be in the script.”

Flamin’ Hot included the iconic scene in its promotional content, and Gonzalez made a TikTok of it, lip syncing to his lines. It was his first TikTok following a four-month hiatus—after his dad, Randy, died of colon cancer in January.

Randy created the channel in March 2019, and Brice made his first appearance six months later, at age four. Sometimes his sisters or mom would make appearances, but soon, Randy and Brice started filming TikToks together as a father-son duo. One of their most-watched videos features Brice lip syncing along to lines from Rush Hour, his dad playing along.

It was clear how much Randy loved Brice—and how much the internet did, too. In their first year, they hit 190 thousand followers by November, then 500 thousand in December, then one million nine days later. Again and again, people commented on Brice’s uncanny ability to memorize lines, lip sync to them, learn complex choreography, and act with abandon.

His dream to be in a movie came true when he was five, after Flamin’ Hot producer DeVon Franklin reached out to Randy through his Instagram account, as did the real life Richard Montañez. Making Flamin’ Hot “was fun, exciting, and amazing,” he says. “And I just know what to do. I mean, it’s easy.”

Gonzalez also plays Chance Lopez-Van Bryan, the son of Mayan Lopez and grandson of George Lopez, in Lopez vs. Lopez, a sitcom that stars Mayan and George as fictionalized versions of themselves. Up next is PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie as the voice of Tot, a Pomeranian member of the Junior Patrollers.

At age eight, Gonzalez has already met and worked with stars ranging from Eva Longoria to Jesse Garcia to George Lopez. “Hard work pays off,” he says. “My dad always said that.”

It’s hard not to draw the parallels between Brice and Randy’s relationship—tight, loving, goofy—and Richard Montañez’s connection with his sons in the movie. Montañez has said his own father was abusive and distant, and the movie shows him trying to make up for it by drawing his family in close. It’s bittersweet, Brice’s mom, Kimberly Gonzalez, says, but they know that Randy is still watching from above.

“We’re excited, and just hope that things just keep going up, and future roles for him,” she says. “He loves this. He’s a natural, ’cause he’s a true character.”