Joey Fatone Shares How Living In Orlando And His Daughters Help Keep Him Grounded

At age 13 Joey Fatone moved with his family from New York to Orlando, Florida in 1990. He attended Walker Middle School and Dr. Philips High School and then started working at Disney and Universal, as one does who grows up in Orlando. A friendship he formed in his Universal days would turn out to be monumental in changing the trajectory of his life. 

In 1995, Chris Kirpatrick, Fatone’s buddy from working at Universal, called him to come join the boy band he was forming. Kirkpatrick and Fatone were joined by Justin Timberlake, JC Chasez, and eventually Lance Bass to create a band capable of stunning five-part harmonies. That band? Oh yeah, it was *NSYNC. After a few years performing and finding their rhythm in Germany, the guys came back to America and in 1998 released their self-titled debut album. They catapulted themselves into mega stardom and are a permanent fixture in pop culture history. The five members of *NSYNC became household names. Fame and success followed them even after the group disbanded and they each pursued other projects. 

Other than a few years in Los Angeles, throughout all of the hit songs, world tours, and now acting and hosting gigs, for Fatone, Orlando has remains the place he calls home. “ Living down south and living in Florida, for me, I enjoy it,” Fatone told Southern Living in a recent conversation. “And it’s just a lot easier living. It really is…I’ve lived in New York, I love all four seasons but I don’t want to live in all four seasons. That’s just me, you know. I’ll visit it. I’ll visit the snow. Love the snow. Do I want to live in it and shovel it? Nope. I don’t,” he said with a hearty chuckle. 

Dad of two daughters, Kloey Alexandra and Briahna Joely, Fatone also said,“ it’s a great place and I think it’s a great place to raise a family. It really is.” His parents and siblings are also all still in Florida so while he travels for work often, he finds comfort in returning to Orlando. It’s a calmer place where he can just be Dad, which with the help of his daughters, keeps him grounded. 

“It’s like you’re not cool, you’re my dad. You’re only cool when you have perks,” he joked. Fatone went on to explain that his daughters weren’t around at the height of *NYSNC’s fame. “I think the first time they saw anything about it was when we got the star on the Walk of Fame. My kids were there. My little one loved Ellen Degeneres and getting Ellen up there to talk about us, and to talk about [her] dad when she watched the show every day, it’s weird. To see these two things come together where it’s always been there the whole time, but when I was home, I was dad.”

Now that his girls are older, Briahna is 23 and Kloey is 13, bonding with their dad looks a little different. They are now aware of what Dad does for a living and while they both are still unimpressed, per Fatone, but younger daughter Kloey is interested in following her father’s footsteps into entertainment. Briahna is more interested in pursuing a career in the medical field and Kloey has recently become interested in acting. “She's actually started getting into musical theater and into acting, just recently, which is cool. I brought her to see Beetlejuice a while back and she loved it so much that she started getting into musicals.”

So it just so happened to be perfect timing when Great Clips approached Fatone to partner with them on an ad campaign aimed specifically at bringing parents and their teens closer together. The former boy band star who once graced the pages of all of the teen magazines admitted now that in his forties, he has no idea what the kids are saying these days. 

“There is all this slang that these kids have now that half the stuff, I have no idea and the words are going at such a fast rate of all of these new terminologies that I don’t know what rizz is or glow up… I have no idea. But now I have to kinda think to myself, when I was young and I was saying ‘that’s rad,’ ‘that’s mint,’ and all these other things and my parents were like, ‘what are you talking about?’ So it’s like okay, this is history is repeating itself,” he said with another laugh. 

“So Great Clips came up with this idea of having an actual kind of dictionary on the website so if you need to look at some of the stuff and some of the things the kids are saying you can look at it online.”

Great Clips brought both dad and daughter in to star in their commercial for this back to school initiative. Check it out:

Fatone divulged that Kloey, who can be shy at times, got her braces off right before they filmed this and he could tell she was already feeling more confident. “Doing this and being with her…I felt a little bit like a stage dad and I was trying not to… I wanted to help so bad but it was fun! We had a blast!”