I can be a good person... I'm just wired differently'

Lukas Gage speaks to Adam White about internet villainy, coming out as gay, and starring in 'The White Lotus'

- Adam White

Lukas Gage is nothing if not a very modern famous person.

He goes from being a total unknown to viral notoriety when a prissy English director is filmed criticising his tiny apartment on Zoom. Then a man on far too many drugs performs analingus on him in The White Lotus. Then he marries Kim Kardashian’s hairstylist before divorcing him six months later. And now he’s written a memoir at the age of 30, because why not? It's called I Wrote This for Attention. Everyone told him to call it something else.

“It’s too long, very polarising and people will hate me for it,” Gage laughs, from his (slightly bigger now) apartment in New York. “But it also meant I could beat people to the punch a little. Like, ‘Why did this young person who doesn’t really have a career write a memoir?’”

Gage, of course, does have a career. But it’s a strange and winding one that has flirted with prestige and, well, the opposite of prestige. You may have seen him being beaten up by Jacob Elordi on Euphoria, or as a delusional Minnesotan in the fifth season of Fargo, or playing a sweet-natured cyborg in this year’s sci-fi chiller Companion. If, however, you are gay or permanently online – or both – Gage is synonymous with a vociferous internet culture that loves nothing more than to feast on its own. For someone who isn’t (yet) a household name, he has been caught in various tidal waves of often inane digital backlash: he’s been with too many women to be a gay man; he’s behaved too “celeby” to be a real actor; he was too comfortable getting married in an oversized faux fur coat and leather trousers.