A few weeks ago, I decided to make a major change in my life. I was tired of being told “No,” and fed up with the one I held nearest and dearest saying that I couldn’t be who I am. It was that day that I took a stand against my oppressor: The 128gb iPhone XR I have had since late 2018, which has been pushing max capacity for years, due to an unending and inexorable collection of screenshotted male celebrities.
The person to ultimately push my poor phone over the edge was the internet’s latest quirked-up white boy of the week, Logan Lerman. Past contenders for this title have included . For that film, O’Brien bleached his buzzcut to capture the smug, dopey charms of a TikTok huckster—sending a ripple through the internet’s collective libido. Yes, I am sorry for how disgusting that sentence sounds. But I was there, and I saw cities turn to rubble in seconds.
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Logan Lerman, however, is different. He’s not everywhere, and that’s what makes him the ideal candidate for cultural courtship. Lerman has the mystique of a real movie star, combined with the charms reserved for the Chalamets of the world, and good looks befitting an architect in a supermarket romance novel. This is a man that harkens back to 2012, when Tumblr made us believe that the hottest thing you could be was someone who dared to wear a peacoat.
Lerman is the rare, actually enigmatic celebrity white boy. He’s not on paparazzi walks in skin-tight workout shirts or doing photoshoots in leather pants. He’s never shirtless. (You can’t swing an 8-foot iPhone charger without hitting a photo of Noah Centineo half-naked. He doesn’t find his way onto our phones like that. When Lerman scored the lead role in the Percy Jackson franchise in 2010, he was smart. He parlayed the YA series’ flop into an iconic role in The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and the rest was history, preserved in gif form on the internet like fossils in amber.
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Here is the rare actor who doesn’t so obviously crave attention and stardom that it becomes exhausting for the rest of us to witness. His roles are rare; Lerman acts when he wants to and posts just as sporadically to social media. So, when he blessed us all with the video of himself dancing to promote the second season of Hunters, it felt like a gift.
This was proof that, in addition to being endlessly charismatic, he’s also keenly self-aware. This man two-stepping to “Milkshake” was arguably a sign that it’s okay to be a little thirsty. It’s who we are! It’s alright for Logan Lerman—and all the others we cycle between from month to month—to dance into our hearts. And, into our camera rolls.
