Darren Jason Watkins Jr. (born: January 21, 2005 [age 18]), better known online as IShowSpeed (also known as simply Speed, or Speedy), is an American YouTuber, football athlete, hip-hop musician, occasional vlogger, and variety live-streamer, currently residing in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Darren is known for his extravagant, eccentric, hot-headed, and ostentatious personality on his variety of gaming and entertainment livestreams. He also became notable for gaining over 1 million subscribers in a matter of days in 2021, making him one of the youngest creators with the fastest-growing channel of that year. With all three of his channels combined, Darren has over 25 million subscribers altogether, making him one of the biggest YouTubers of color.
Darren started to achieve widespread fame when his fanbase started publishing clips of him on TikTok, with many of them becoming internet memes. This includes his interactions with Outfit7's Talking Ben, which are considered some of his most popular endeavors, helping revitalize the app's popularity by making the game one of the most downloaded apps at the time he streamed his first gameplay on Talking Ben.
Occasionally, Darren calls his fanbase "Speed Gang." However, most of the time in his livestreams, he refers to them as "chat."
Despite being banned on Twitch, Darren still links his Twitch account in his descriptions.
Darren and many of his fans mention that the reason behind his energetic behavior is because he is autistic. However, he has never been diagnosed.
On every livestream where Darren anticipates a subscriber milestone being reached, his fanbase collectively unsubscribes to annoy him, and to provoke a reaction from him.
While he used to be a fan of Cristiano Ronaldo, after the 2022 World Cup, he has stated that he became a fan of Lionel Messi.
Darren seems to be a big fan of One Piece, even to the point where he has the main character Monkey D. Luffy as his profile picture, and made a rap song titled One Piece in November 2021, where he raps about why One Piece is "the best anime in the world."
In his Shake reaction stream, Darren was singing and dancing along to his song Shake with his father on a livestream. When the lyric "suck that c*ck" came up, he spit in his hands and pretended to give a blowjob with his hands. His father then slapped his hands down and nodded his head disapprovingly.
Darren occasionally censors obscene/vulgar words in his Live Speedy highlights.
Previously, Darren would sometimes say that "Darren Watkins" is not his real name, even though sometimes, in his descriptions and/or thumbnails, he mentioned the name "Darren Watkins," indicating that it is in fact his real name.
He had also made a joke short video in which he said that his real first name is "Juwan."
Darren tried to pronounce almost all the football players' names wrong in FIFA 22.
He also tried to guess the country flags wrong, such as guessing the one for Austria as the one for the Netherlands.
Some of Darren's favorite football players include Cristiano Ronaldo, Son Heung-min and Riyad Mahrez.
Darren posted a video where he visited London in September 2022 to compete in Sidemen's charity match.
Darren is also known for his signature dance, where he repeatedly bounces his feet, accompanied with raising both of his hands up and down.
His third channel's username, Speedy Boykins, is a pun of his nickname "Speedy", and "Boykins" being a portmanteau of "boy" and his last name, "Watkins."
He won the Breakout Streamer Award of the 2022 Streamy Awards, which was hosted by YouTuber Airrack on December 4, 2022.
During a stream, Darren video called Canadian rapper Drake. However, Drake would hang up on him after Darren said that his voice was "so sexy."
Darren's chat has notably annoyed him by spamming "Common sense" ever since his infamous fourth of July fireworks incident, as a simple reminder to not do anything that is obviously too dangerous or risky to do.
He sometimes uses a filter that makes him look bald and has made a few shorts of himself playing with it.
Every year on April Fool's Day, he pranks his audience by telling them he is quitting YouTube and then shouting "April Fool's" at the end.
Darren has traveled to several different countries, including Qatar, Japan, and the United Kingdom.
He has met professional soccer players Cristiano Ronaldo and Neymar, but was blocked by Lionel Messi.
He performed at Rolling Loud 2023.
He met rapper Lil Tjay through a video call on one of his livestreams.
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