You have to understand that at the moment Noah Centineo swung open the door, mask dangling from his ear, his goofy smile catching some sunlight, I hadn't embraced, let alone touched, a human adult male for the entire seven months of my quarantine. So when he stretched his arms out in the gesture known from the Time Before as “come on in here for a hug,” I admit I allowed my brain to entertain the various disease-denier talking points—COVID-19 is a hoax, it's really no deadlier than a flu, the mental health ramifications of not embracing Noah Centineo could in fact be more harmful than the virus itself, etc., etc.—before, and not without some heartbreak, extending my elbow for the signature pandemic knob bump instead.
“Oh, right!” Centineo said, dropping his arms and knobbing my elbow back. “It's so hard to remember not to hug.”
I got the sense, pandemic or no, that Centineo, the 24-year-old star of Netflix's hit To All the Boys I've Loved Before rom-com trilogy, is a big hug guy. Love language? I'm guessing physical touch. (Evidence: He does a bro-handshake-into-hug thing with almost everyone who walks into the room.) Later on during our visit, when I drop that I'm a single mother, he told me I'm a superhero and almost pulled me into a hug again, and then corrected to a fist bump.
The day we met happened to be exactly a week before Election Day and, as you may or may not recall, everyone everywhere had been sleeplessly grinding their teeth into a fine powder—except for Centineo, who was just downright pumped about his personal contribution toward fixing our democracy. He cradled a pillow like a newborn as we sat on velvet couches at Fuck This I'm Voting, a voter-outreach pop-up in West Hollywood that he created with his nonprofit, Favored Nations. The idea behind the space is to get influencers to come and snap selfies in front of a giant flickering “GIVE A SHIT” sign, thereby signaling to their Gen Z followers that they should, in fact, give a shit. The problem with nonprofits, Centineo suggested, is that they act like nonprofits. They're kind of a snooze. He said he wants to make doing good simply feel “cool and fucking dope. That's why we use expletives in our marketing.” Still, he was surprised to hear the upcoming election was giving me regular panic attacks. “Really?” he said, fingering one of his long forehead curls. “I'm fairly confident.” Then softly, kindly: “What are you scared of?”
He had a point. I mean, how could things not go Noah Centineo's way when that's the only way things have been going for him? He grew up in South Florida prior to moving to Los Angeles for high school to try acting. Seven years later the first To All the Boys was released, and the guy went from 300,000 Instagram followers to 11 million in seven days. Seven days! (He's currently sitting pretty at 18.3 million.) Peter Kavinsky, his character from the movie, became a trending hashtag, with very online girls proclaiming #TeamPeter in a way they hadn't since the first teen-girl world war of vampire versus werewolf with Twilight more than a decade ago.
I posit a theory to explain his Champagne-bottle burst of popularity, you know, besides for his face and hair and eyes and six-foot-plus frame. It's simply that Centineo is hot and nice. Obvious, maybe, but if To All the Boys had been made 10 years ago, he would have played the hot jock the leading lady falls for only to get her heart broken. But in To All the Boys, Centineo plays the hot jock who turns out to have a heart of gold, who turns out to be the one.(“You're right,” Centineo said when my theory is posed to him. “Usually I would have been the asshole.”) And his competitor in the sequel, played by Jordan Fisher? Well, he's hot and nice too. And after a long four years of men-are-bad news (#MeToo), a hot-and-nice buffet is a welcome fantasy. Like, maybe women can have it all. Or rather, please just let us have this?
Centineo is clearly still in the fun, unjaded phase of fame, where you love attention and embrace reporters. Where you're unfazed by the 400 fangirls who write “I love you” or “Marry me” or “I had a sex dream about you last night ha ha” on basically every Instagram post. “I have an ego,” he joked when I asked him how he felt about being the object of all these crushes. Now he's batting in the big leagues, getting ready to play Atom Smasher on the big screen in Black Adam and sharing shirtless photos of his bulked-up torso on social media. Those inspire more X-rated comments, obviously.
Things can go too far, however. Centineo recalled the time, shortly after the first To All the Boys was released, when he was waiting for his luggage at the baggage carousel at JFK Airport, headphones on, and he started to sense a guy standing incredibly close to him. Breathing down his neck almost. “It scared the shit out of me!” he said. So Centineo asked the guy invading his personal space how his flight was, to which the dude responded, “Oh, no, we didn't fly. We came here for you.” Turns out this gaggle of fans—two guys and three girls—had somehow tracked his flight and decided to meet him at the airport. At this point, nothing like this had ever happened to Centineo, so it was a little strange, but not exactly threatening—until the group decided to try to follow him to his house. Fortunately, Centineo's driver had experience shaking tails. “He goes, ‘Don't worry, I've driven Angelina Jolie. I know how to do this,’ ” Centineo recalled. “I got lucky.”
This should be the harrowing experience that showed Centineo the dark side of fame, the thing that might make him see the wisdom in being slightly more cautious about posting his whereabouts or see the value of social distance except…it didn't. He's friends with the JFK fans now. And he's got other fans who show up everywhere—they even came to the voter pop-up, and Centineo took them in and gave them a little tour. “We're all good,” he said. “I hug them when I see them.”
Of course he does.
Lauren Bans is a writer living in Los Angeles.
A version of this story originally appears in the February 2021 issue with the title "Noah Centineo Wants to Give You a Hug."
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PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Ryan Pfluger
Styled by Mobolaji Dawodu
Grooming by Sydney Sollod using Sydney Sollod Skincare at The Wall Group
Tailoring by Yelena Travinka
Produced by Annee Elliot
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