Noah Centineo and the rise of the wholesome internet boyfriend, explained

Bad boys are over. Man-children are over. Lovable losers are over. The women of America are too busy being re-traumatized by the discourse of #MeToo over and over again to want to fantasize about doing the enormous emotional labor required to heal troubled men of their wounds and shape them from tortured frogs into perfect Prince Charmings.

No, instead, American pop culture has officially entered into the era of the wholesome bae. Which is to say that this is Noah Centineo’s universe now, and the rest of us are just living in it.

More accurately, it is Peter Kavinsky’s universe. Peter Kavinsky is the character played by Noah Centineo in Netflix’s breakout high school romantic comedy To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. He is the crush object of the summer, and like all great fictional crush objects before him — Jake Ryan, Jordan Catalano — he is known universally by his full name.

In the brief time since To All the Boys premiered, Peter Kavinsky has become iconic for his wholesomeness: his willingness to drive all the way across town to get Lara Jean her yogurt smoothies, his decision to drink kombucha at a house party because he’s driving and also it’s supposed to be good for your digestion, his instinct to keep the popcorn bowl from getting overturned in a middle of an impromptu pillow fight.

Peter Kavinsky is beloved because, unlike his predecessors, he is not actively a bad person, and that is still new and exciting in the world of teen movies. He is not performatively woke or intellectual or tortured or given to especially grand gestures, and that is what makes him appealing: He is most celebrated for reliably doing small things, for showing up, for exuding a sense of honest wholesomeness.

But Peter Kavinsky is fictional, and as such, his ability to spin out endless new content for the internet to sigh over is limited. Noah Centineo, on the other hand, is a real person who can fuel endless new GIFs, one who is taking full advantage of his rise to fame to energetically pursue the mantle of the internet’s most wholesome boyfriend. His media strategy since the premiere of To All the Boys seems to be pointed with military precision toward the archetype of the moment.

Like his most famous character, Centineo is not trying to be especially woke, or especially intellectual, or especially artistic, or especially cool. He’s going for a much more basic appeal, like a Tiger Beat cover star who is not entirely asexual: the emotionally healthy soft jock. The wholesome boyfriend. He is a hot guy who is also reliably nice. That is his whole thing, and it is damn effective.

When To All the Boys came out, Centineo picked up a million Instagram followers overnight. Within a month, he’d gone from 800,000 followers pre-To All the Boys to 9.5 million. Now he’s at 12.8 million. His fan base is so fervent that he had to devote part of an interview with Jimmy Kimmel to politely asking them to stop following him around in real life. “I love your love!” he said. “Just don’t follow me.”

Centineo’s rise to fame is a kind of case study in the appeal of the wholesome internet boyfriend, and why this archetype has taken on a particular urgency here in the draining final months of 2018. Here’s how you become the central crush object of the internet in record time, and where you go next.

The first stage in Centineo’s conquest of the internet’s collective heart was to create a certain slippage between himself and Peter Kavinsky. To All the Boys fans were all reliably swooning over the same three Peter Kavinsky moments — the time he has his hand in Lara Jean’s back pocket and then kind of twirls her around, the whole thing with the popcorn and the pillow fight, the time he bashfully splashes her from the hot tub — and within days of the movie’s release, director Susan Johnson had said in interviews that all three moments were Centineo’s idea. Peter Kavinsky might be fictional, the publicity narrative suggested, but the man behind his best moments was actually alive.

The To All the Boys press team also began to heavily imply that maybe Centineo and his co-star Lana Condor were in love in real life, too. (Lana Condor has been with her boyfriend for years and said so, but that didn’t stop a fun press narrative from building.) The adorable picture of Peter and Lara Jean cuddling that appeared in the movie was actually a behind-the-scenes picture of Centineo and Condor napping between takes, it was revealed. Centineo and Condor referred to each other as “the love of my life” all over social media.

“I love Noah. I think he’s the greatest guy in the world. I mean who wouldn’t?” said the prescient Condor to Elle. “He’s the internet’s boyfriend.”

BuzzFeed’s AM to DM morning show got to the heart of the question: Are people thirsting over Peter Kavinsky or Noah Centineo? “As a genius once said, ‘Why not both?’” responded internet thirst expert Nichole Perkins.

While the line between the Peter Kavinsky character and the Noah Centineo public persona became steadily blurrier, Centineo himself was busy on a press tour, giving interview answers that could have been mathematically calibrated in a lab as the perfect good-girl bait.

Asked to describe his perfect date, Centineo volunteered a story about a time he swapped books with a girl and just spent three hours reading with her.

Asked how he got so good at flirting by Allison P. Davis for the Cut, he delivered this impromptu monologue on the nature of love:

“Am I flirting?” he laughs and leans and looks down at the floor. “I don’t know — I’m fucking so romantic. Like, such a romantic — it’s not even funny. I can’t help it. I swear to God, like, every day, the majority of my day is sentimental. You know, I’m thinking about past relationships I’ve been in, how I miss them so much or what I would do different, or why I wanna be with them again, or just moments I’d like to go back to or I know why I shouldn’t go back, and then you know, it’s just constantly love, love, love.”

Specific or even all that interesting? Not really. Kind of basic? Extremely. But that, after all, is part of the point: the wholesome boyfriend doesn’t have to rise above basicness. He just has to love love, without cynicism or irony. He’s the hot guy who is also consistently nice, who is aware of his emotions and unashamed of them.

Centineo kept hitting his wholesome boyfriend marks with the relentless force of someone who sees his route to superstardom and will not be stopped. He showed up shirtless to an interview and did it without coming off as a complete douche. He did a puppy interview for BuzzFeed, and a perfect boyfriend video for Elle that also had some puppies because look, why not. He became so relentlessly wholesome that not even a leaked nudes scandal could hold him back.

Currently, Centineo’s gone about as far as Peter Kavinsky can take him, and as with any star on the brink of overexposure, he’s facing a certain amount of backlash. The staff of Jezebel has formally dissolved their relationship with internet boyfriend Centineo — “Whatever we (the staff of Jezebel as a whole) had with Centineo (who has never met any of us, to the best of my knowledge), it’s OVER” — citing in part the extreme basicness of his social media presence (the boy loves an inspirational quote). In a recent New York Times profile, his single-minded push for attention was just on the verge of coming off as desperate rather than endearing.

At Lainey Gossip, Kathleen Newman-Bremang is reading the warning signs. “Internet Boyfriend is a designation you get on the come-up,” she writes, citing the previous examples of Michael B. Jordan and Tom Hiddleston. “You either leverage it in your favour (MBJ) or get so drunk off its power you try too hard and become a caricature of yourself (Hiddleston). Where will Noah Centineo fall?” Being the internet’s flavor of the month is not exactly a recipe for career longevity.

But for the moment, Centineo’s month is not over. He remains on top of the world, at the pinnacle of internet boyfriend-ness. The Cut has proclaimed him “the best thirst architect the internet’s ever seen,” lauding his “Stanislavski dedication” to playing “a simple, suburban-mall kind of crush.” GQ looked into what all the fuss was about and came to a simple conclusion: “America Is Horny for Wholesome.”

One of the side effects of the increasingly public gender struggles of the past few years is that they’ve made a lot of previously attractive romantic archetypes seem a lot less appealing than they used to.

How do you sigh over the Johnny Depp-like wounded bad boy when actual Johnny Depp maybe beat his wife? How do you swoon for the stalwart Mel Gibson-like action hero when actual Mel Gibson is on tape telling the mother of his child she deserves to be raped? How do you root for the sweet shy geek to get the hot girl to notice him when shy geeks are joining the incels because they can’t get hot girls to notice them?

In a time when the world is getting ever scarier, and a little romantic escapism would be a welcome refuge from thinking about whether we’re about to put a second man accused of sexual misconduct on the Supreme Court or we’re going to wake up to find that we are in a nuclear war with North Korea, it’s getting harder and harder to find a romantic fantasy that still feels safe.

That’s part of why To All the Boys, with its relentless tenderness and sincerity, became the kind of movie that people watch over and over again on a loop. (“I never rewatch movies,” people keep telling me, “but I watched it twice.”) Its entire ethos is that of nice, kind people working hard to be nice and kind to each other, and that atmosphere has immense currency in the Trump era; you want to live in it. And that’s the Peter Kavinsky fantasy: a boy who will never, ever do anything cruel and will always tell you that you look really pretty today. The hot guy who is reliably nice.

And that’s the fantasy around which Noah Centineo has relentlessly curated his public image. He has made an exact science out of being the internet’s most wholesome boyfriend, at a time when all people want is someone wholesome. So even if he isn’t able to parlay his current viral fame into career longevity, he’s still managed to be exactly what this moment in time needs.