So, What Does Justin Timberlake Do Now?

With his first No. 1 single in a decade — not to mention his first Oscar nomination — for that inescapable Trolls tune, the former boy wonder is now 36, a dad, starring in a Woody Allen movie and grappling with ‘faint’ memories from his childhood. All while saying, with (seriously) no arrogance: ‘I’m not gifted at anything else’

- Benjamin Svetkey

Justin Timberlake is remembering the very first time he got chased by a mob of shrieking teenage girls.

“I was about 15 or 16 years old,” he says. “We’d just given a concert in Germany at a festival on this huge field. And we were in the tour bus afterward, driving on a dirt road, and I looked out the window and saw all these young, impressionable females running after the bus.” He shrugs his shoulders and gets to the point of the story: “I think we can all agree that I did not have a normal childhood.”

Twenty years later, at age 36, Timberlake is having an unusual adulthood as well. At the moment, he’s lounging at a corner table at the bar in the Chateau Marmont, his still-babyish face half hidden behind a scruffy beard and a black wool cap. Timberlake has been so famous for so long — as the youngest member of the wildly successful 1990s boy band NSYNC, as a multi platinum Grammy winning solo artist (26 million albums sold) and, increasingly, as an accomplished screen actor (he’ll be co-starring with Kate Winslet in Woody Allen’s next movie) — that he’s learned to wear his celebrity like a pair of comfy old hammer pants. Indeed, he only can barely recall a time when he wasn’t dodging paparazzi and making headlines for things like dating Britney Spears (and making a music video about their breakup) and accidentally setting off Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” at Super Bowl XXXVIII (even today, not a topic he’s eager to talk about).

“I have some faint images from my childhood,” he says matter-of-factly, sipping a beer, “but no, I can’t really remember not being famous.”