For Jack Henry Robbins, the day begins with stretching and meditation, followed by two to three seconds of tooth brushing. After visiting his favorite neighborhood coffee shop, a Nespresso boutique on the Upper East Side, he returns home to begin work.
“Every day, I like to wake up and I either sell a show to HBO or Netflix based on my mood,” Mr. Robbins tells the camera. “Today, I’m pitching a TV show I thought of yesterday that is basically ‘Star Wars’ set in a sewer system — I sold it!”
Triumphantly closing his laptop, Mr. Robbins adds, “I’m off to visit my famous mom.”
That, anyway, is how Mr. Robbins, the son of the actors Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, portrayed himself in “Day in the Life of a Nepo Baby,” a video he posted to Instagram last November that has been viewed more than three million times.
Since then, Mr. Robbins, 35, has released a series of over-the-top clips on Instagram and TikTok purporting to pull back the curtain on what it’s like to be the child of celebrities.
The phrase nepotism baby — nepo baby for short — has been used to attack people whose professional accomplishments are perceived by some to stem from family connections rather than talent alone. In his videos, Mr. Robbins appears to lampoon the concept of being the pampered, freeloading son of Hollywood royalty, but also embraces it.
As Mr. Robbins put it in a phone interview, he is playing a character that amounts to “the worst version of me that could have ever happened.”
He added of his alter ego: “Here’s this painfully out-of-touch, delusional person, who for all his advantages is the world’s least successful nepo baby. I’m having fun completely satirizing my biggest insecurity.”
Last week, Mr. Robbins added a guest star, posting a video in which he and Sasha Spielberg, the musician daughter of the director Steven Spielberg and the actress Kate Capshaw, try to make a film together.
“Sasha and I are fed up with the lie that nepo babies can’t make art without help from our parents,” Mr. Robbins says. Their brainstorm session, naturally, consists of recycled ideas from their parents’ filmographies. And to avoid comparisons with her famous father, Ms. Spielberg adopts a pen name: S. Spielberg.
Mr. Robbins said the videos were inspired by a 2022 article in New York magazine about the nepo baby phenomenon that generated a wave of discourse about prominent celebrity children.
“When the article came out, I had this complicated emotional response — this insecurity,” said Mr. Robbins, who by then was already trying to make it as a filmmaker and had several shorts and a feature length movie, “VHYes,” under his belt. “I didn’t know how to represent how I felt about the topic,” he added. “I thought, ‘I’m going to lean into it.’”
Like many broad satires, Mr. Robbins’s nepo baby videos contain a grain of truth. They also press on a personal wound. He related a story about attending a fashion show in New York with Ms. Sarandon when he was a child. Backstage, a woman asked why a 10-year-old was there. The young Mr. Robbins pointed to his mother in explanation.
“The woman told me, ‘You’re either going to be incredible at this” — meaning show business — “or let everyone down,’” Mr. Robbins said. “That was something that I’ll never forget.”
Later, while promoting his 2016 short film “Hot Winter: A Film by Dick Pierre” at the Sundance Film Festival, Mr. Robbins discovered what the children of notable people soon learn when their own careers are discussed: “First question I was asked in every interview: ‘How did your parents inspire this film?’”
That seems to have led him to the creation of another clip, in which Mr. Robbins travels in character to Huntington Beach, Calif., (“the epicenter of Hollywood,” as he calls it) to meet with a talent manager.
“I think we need to capitalize on your mom a little more,” the manager says. “What if we put your mom’s name in your name?”
With that, his alter ego took on a new name: Jack Susan Sarandon Robbins.
Helping sell the gag are Mr. Robbins’s famous parents, who appear in his videos from time to time, usually playing exasperated versions of themselves. For Mr. Robbins, collaborating with them has been one of the benefits of the project.
“To have a format where we get to play together as actors was something I never thought we’d get to experience, because I never wanted to be an actor,” he said.
Another positive has been the freedom to control every aspect of a project.
“There’s no holdups,” he said. “There’s no years and years of development to not make a pilot.
“The process of waiting to convince X, Y and Z to make something happen was really taking a toll on me.”
Mr. Robbins said he has not heard from others of his ilk, Ms. Spielberg aside — “There’s no text thread” for nepo babies — but the response on social media has been overwhelmingly positive and has raised his profile.
If some people don’t realize he is playing a monstrous version of himself, that’s OK.
“My favorite thing in life is to make people laugh,” Mr. Robbins said. “If people are laughing, if people are having a great time with it, I don’t care if 25 percent think it’s real. I have no shame.”
