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

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.”