We cannot wait to see what naughty things Nick Jonas gets into on the new season of Kingdom.
The season one finale ended with Nick's character, a mixed martial arts fighter, struggling with his sexuality. After being turned away from a gay bar for being too intoxicated, he's shown in a dark alley with another young man slowly bending down in front of him.
"It's all happening," Nick told me the other day while promoting his new single, "Levels." "He has a lot of layers to him and he's trying to figure out exactly who he is.
"It's tough because he's living and working in a really macho world and I think he's just trying to figure out where he fits in in being who he is," he continued . "So it is a struggle and I'm trying to tell the story as honestly as possible with as much depth as possible."
Just how far will his guy-on-guy action go? Nick won't say, but did reveal that "it's less about romance than it is about human needs.
"That's the best way to describe it," he added with a laugh.
Nick won't be as beefy this season. "Last year, I tried to put on 15 pounds of muscle from where I was. But the storyline for the character this year is he goes down a weight class," said Nick, who also appears on Ryan Murphy's new Fox series, Scream Queens. "I actually had to lean up—keep muscle, but keep it lean and more explosive, more athletic muscle than size. I'm not eating as much as I was. I was probably eating 5,600 calories a day. Now, it's probably closer to 2,000 calories a day."
He also has to be in shape for his upcoming tour, kicking off Sept. 6 in Hershey, Penn.
"As a performer, I've really been trying to push the dance side of things and grow in that way," Nick said.
His inspirations include Kanye West, Bruno Mars, James Brown, Michael Jackson, Prince and Lenny Kravitz. Nick recently posted some videos of his impressive moves on Instagram.
He's set to perform "Levels" live for the first time during the MTV Video Music Awards pre-show on Aug. 30. "I've got something really special planned for that," he said. "I did some funny promos on the MTV Snapchat with the Moon Babes. So there may or may not be some Moon Babe situations incorporated into my performance."