Three Years Later, Left Shark Tells All

Three years after Left Shark stumbled through Katy Perry’s Super Bowl halftime show and into our hearts, the bipedal selachimorph tells all.

In a new interview with NPR, Left Shark reveals that he is not, in fact, a shark. He is actually a dancer who wore a shark suit one time back in early 2015 but is otherwise a human dancer named Bryan Gaw. Gaw worked on a bunch of Katy Perry’s tours before leaving the industry to become a hair stylist in West Hollywood, as humans do.

But that’s not even the biggest reveal. Read on!

Left I mean Gaw also revealed that he didn’t mess up his “Teenage Dream” choreo as so many of us believed at the time, leading to one of the most memed and overmemed moments of 2015. It turns out that being “a little goofy” was a character choice Gaw made.

“So, there’s a set choreography. There’s also what’s called freestyle choreography, or, like, you get to move around or play your character as a dancer, right?” Gaw told NPR. “You have flexibility because you are your own character. I’m in a 7-foot blue shark costume. There’s no cool in that. So, what’s the other option? I’m gonna play a different character.”

Meet Left Shark. His real name is Bryan Gaw, and he wants you to know nobody’s perfect. https://t.co/tI2HFiv7f4 pic.twitter.com/8hmjLJgS68

— nprmusic (@nprmusic) January 31, 2018

Gaw goes on to say that this “different character” was that of “the underdogthe everyday person.” He said he wanted viewers to understand that “you don’t have to be perfect” because “nobody has to be perfect in life.

A character within a character. I guess the real Left Shark were the friends we made along the way.