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.”