When they first met, Nesha Harris noticed one thing about her future roommate and best friend, Jasmine “Jaz” Wallace: She seemed to “mother hen” everyone around her.
“I started wanting to beat up people, you know what I mean?” Harris told Yahoo Entertainment with a laugh, ahead of the debut of the pair’s new TLC show, 1000-lb Roomies. “Like, to defend her.”
Nobody was taking advantage of Wallace per se, but as Harris remembers it, everything seemed to descend into chaos on the rare occasions when she needed time to herself. Now that they live together as best friends, Harris says, “I’ll tell [Jaz’s] daughter all the time: ‘Your mom’s the real adult.’”
1000-lb Roomies, which premiered on June 3, follows Wallace and Harris’s lives in Riverside, Calif., where they live with Wallace’s 10-year-old daughter, Nana. The friends first connected thanks to Instagram during the pandemic, after Harris decided to make a personal page separate from her own businesses as a makeup artist and home baker. She’d met a few women through social media, and one of them invited her to Wallace’s Zoom group chat. It didn’t take long before they found themselves chatting every single day, all day, Wallace says.
“While she was at work, she would literally have her headphones in, and we’re just on the phone, talking the whole time,” Wallace says. As they got to know each other, they realized how much they had in common, right down to their birthdays, which are only one day apart.
“We’ve been through a lot of similar things in life,” Wallace says. “She was who I spoke to when I felt down, when I felt happy. Every feeling that I had, I spoke to Nesha.”
Taking things to the next level
After about a year of online friendship, the duo met in real life when Harris’s mother went out of town. “She was like, ‘I’m coming to get you,’” Wallace recalls. “‘We’re gonna hang out at my mom’s.’” During the visit, she enjoyed the best sleep she’d ever had because she felt unburdened by stress.
Soon after, when Wallace, who is a social media model, needed help with a shoot, she naturally called Harris — who, in addition to working as a makeup artist, is an experienced photographer.
They started spending more time together in person, including a weekend in a palatial Airbnb in Temecula, Calif., with all of their friends. About a year later, the two decided to take things to the next level and move in together. Coincidentally, it was right around that time that Harris heard from TLC about starring in a reality show.
Jaz Wallace on finding a forever friend in Nesha Harris. (Photo illustration: Quinn Lemmers for Yahoo News)
At first, Harris wondered if the producers who reached out to her were running some sort of scam. She was still new to what she calls “fat girl modeling,” and Wallace was still showing her the ropes — including how to spot the difference between legitimate job opportunities and spam.
Looking at the TLC outreach, Harris thought, “This can’t be real.” But Wallace encouraged her to pursue it with a fair question: What’s the worst that can happen?
As it turns out, the team loved them both. When Harris and Wallace shared with producers that they were moving in together, moving forward with a show was basically a done deal.
“After that,” Harris says, “the roomies were born.”
‘It’s emotional’
Both women are major fans of the network. Harris says she’s watched the bulk of TLC’s programming, from 90 Day Fiancé to Jon & Kate Plus 8, while Wallace still has fond memories of watching My 600-lb Life with her mother.
In preparing for their own show, which would show off their friendship while following their health journeys, they wanted to shine a light on their community as well.
“We wanted to showcase where we’re from,” Wallace says, including the “beautiful, strong Black women [who are] in our lives. Black businesses.”
Equally important to both Wallace and Harris was making sure that their joy came through onscreen as well.
“Just because we’re big don’t mean we can’t be happy,” Wallace says. “Just because we’re big don’t mean that we can’t dress up and get beautiful. It doesn’t mean that we can’t take care of ourselves. It doesn’t mean that we can’t keep a clean house.”
The producers of 1000-lb Roomies fully supported its stars’ requests, and the two have since come to think of the show’s team as family.
“I definitely have a new respect for anybody that ever showed their face on camera,” Harris says, “because when you’re at home watching, you have no clue [about] all the work.”
As positive as the experience of bringing their lives and weight loss journeys to television has been, it’s also been as intense. As Harris points out, they’ve embarked on an emotional journey that can be difficult even behind closed doors — let alone in front of an audience.
“You have to touch subjects that we probably haven’t talked about since we were little kids, and to bring up childhood traumas, and why we got to this point and this size in the first place,” she says. “It’s emotional.”
The show’s premiere offers viewers a preview of what’s to come, as Wallace struggles with mobility issues during a family trip to the pool. When Harris coaxes her friend into a trip to the beach, she fears how people might look at and treat her and decides to stay in the car. And when a friend shows Wallace a life expectancy calculator that suggests she might only have a few years to live if she does not change her lifestyle, she becomes terrified of what the loss would do to Nana. It’s then that she decides to look into weight loss surgery — a journey Harris supports but, at least at the start of the series, does not want for herself.
Wallace likens the entire TV journey to ripping off a Band-Aid.
“You basically have to heal on camera,” she says. The good news? She and Harris are both strong by nature. When they finish a scene and notice crew members crying, she says, they’ll often be the ones pushing production to keep going.
Nesha Harris talks about her close bond with Jaz Wallace. (Photo illustration: Quinn Lemmers for Yahoo News)
In talking with these best friends, it’s easy to see the strength and comfort they’ve found in one another — and not just because they’re both Scorpios. For both women, this friendship has offered a new level of understanding and support. They can see and hold one another in ways each of them had not experienced before.
“I have siblings, but I lost a sibling young, and my other siblings, I don’t talk to at all, so it’s really cool,” Harris says. “I’ve never experienced having a sister, and we can share clothes.”
For Wallace, the friendship feels like the first time she’s been truly supported. Although Harris had made sure earlier in the interview to avoid putting words in her friend’s mouth, Wallace, the perpetual mother hen, went ahead and said it: Harris became “one of the first friends I ever had that made me feel like she wasn’t using me. Everything just felt so genuine with her.”
At the end of the day, Wallace says, she appreciates what she and Harris have, “just being able to vibe with each other, laugh with each other, cry with each other, be there for each other, defend each other.”
Like any roommates, they “do get on each other’s nerves,” Wallace admits. But at the same time, she says, they know each other well enough to know when one of them is having a bad day and needs a little extra empathy. Each of them has bonded with the other’s family, and most importantly, Nana loves and adores Harris — which is crucial because “I don’t let anybody around my child,” Wallace says.
The pair share what Wallace calls an “unbreakable bond.” We should all be so lucky to find that kind of friendship.
