He doesn’t wash his hair. He rarely even touches it, except during moments of contemplation, when his fingers will comb the fallen front strands back into an upward swell that maintains an anime level of consistency. He does not “get” haircuts in the way most people get haircuts—by asking for and then paying for them. Haircuts simply happen to him, in the way a belly rub happens to a dog on a walk.
Joe Keery’s most valuable asset isn’t the massively popular Netflix show he is very famous for (Stranger Things) or the Disney movie he is about to be very famous for (Free Guy)—possibly more famous than the 29-year-old has ever been. It’s his gravity-defying head of hair. A viral meme theorized that his curl pattern, the result of two cowlicks on the sides of his forehead, unfolded in a perfect Fibonacci spiral, and maybe that is why the public went absolutely nuts in late 2019, when Keery showed up to a Chanel dinner and was photographed in a limp bowl cut, his sacred geometry violated. “It didn’t go over well,” he says now. (People were threatening to dox the hairstylist.) “I saw some funny photos of it, and apparently I looked like a fucking idiot. But that’s okay. I think it’s good for everybody to look like an idiot at some point.”
He was, of course, approached to endorse a hair-care brand. This is probably obvious just by looking at him on a computer screen and observing how his brunette waves are set off by the abject squareness of his jaw, by the neckline of his Rowing Blazers polo, and the glint of the gold necklace that he rarely takes off. But in any case somebody reached out. They promised a “bunch of money,” but Keery said no thank you. “I think it would just be so lame for the majority of people,” he says. “It would be a sellout move. Don’t you think?”
Keery seems to always be doing this: calculating other people’s expectations of him so he can playfully subvert them. His hair helps by inviting interpretations of the actor beneath it, who in person is as down-to-earth as bedrock and as calm as an aquifer. He constantly threatens to shave his head—a natural fame-response from somebody whose celebrity has ballooned beyond their personhood. He fantasizes about how shocked people would be, which makes it seem like, if Keery is on the precipice of a new level of fame he knows it and is willing to keep things interesting.
Keery grew up in a postcard harborside town north of Boston. His father is an architect and his mother is an English professor, who helped establish a Montessori school in their community. (Montessori education “pretty much set up my whole life, I think, in a lot of ways,” Keery says.) He left Massachusetts to study theater at DePaul University in Chicago; after he graduated, he was waiting tables while shooting commercials and appearing in guest spots on shows like Empire. “My goal pretty much was like, ‘If you could just pay your rent, then you’re doing great and that’s fine.’ ” It was the summer of 2015, and he was working at a burger restaurant when he got a call: He’d booked a part on Netflix’s new horror series and he’d soon be moving to Atlanta to film a little show called Stranger Things.
“I figured I was going to get killed, to be honest with you, because I played the douchey sort of boyfriend, which is the first guy to die,” Keery says. But he failed to play the douchey sort of boyfriend, instead bringing a thoughtfulness to the character of Steve Harrington that made him, if not indispensable to the plot, too main a character for the show’s writers to kill off in season one—which they’d originally intended to do. By season two, Keery was written into the primary cast and became one of the most googled people in the world.
He appears this fall in Free Guy, a film set in a video game that resembles a Grand Theft Auto-like metropolis. The marketing suggests the movie is about a character played by Ryan Reynolds, but it ends up really being about a lightly greased video game programmer played by Keery, who is, surprise, the main character after all. Netflix is one thing, but a Disney film signals Keery’s ascent to a new tier of bankability, somewhere between a cartoon prince and a Hollywood leading gentleman.
Few actors cultivate the kind of intense fascination that he does. His Instagram and Twitter accounts are distended with millions of followers who love him, even though he rarely posts. He receives enough attention that he has to be extremely deliberate about how and where his time is spent. His music career, for example, is about as old as his acting career, but he has gone to great lengths to separate the two. After Stranger Things’ second season, he dropped out of his psych-pop band, Post Animal, citing concerns that his celebrity might pull focus. “It’s important to disassociate Steve from Stranger Things to the band because I think it will eventually hurt the band,” he told Bustle at the time. And now? “I guess I just try not to use the notoriety of one thing to sort of fuel the other thing,” he says. His solo music persona, Djo (pronounced “Joe” with added tongue), was originally intended as an electro-funk alter ego. “I just mostly wanted to confuse people,” he says, “so that they would critique the music without me involved, I guess, or listen to it without me involved. That’s always the most rewarding, honestly, when people are like, ‘What? Oh, I didn’t know that was you.’ ”
His cover was immediately blown by online fans. “It’s fucking obnoxious how talented this dude is,” a Reddit commenter wrote, regarding his 2019 album, Twenty Twenty. (Keery does not agree. Looking back, he is surprised at how “basic” the album was. He does this frequently: minimizing his own accomplishments, as if they can be hidden from public consumption.)
Further inquiry into his personal life reveals that behind Joe Keery the hotshot actor there is also Joe Keery, a boyish 29-year-old who suffers from only the most lawful good of human impulses. This makes him a beloved castmate and a perfect white male love interest, as well as a charmingly uncontroversial interview subject. For example:
What’s your biggest vice? “I’m a sucker for some bread pudding,” he says. (He doesn’t even like taking Advil for headaches.) You’re turning 30 soon—any big plans? “Sailing with my dad.” Do you fear the apocalypse? “I fear an environmental apocalypse greatly, actually, especially after the fires last year and the storms that are destroying the central south of our country. Yeah, we’ve got some issues. So there definitely is a part of me that is like, ‘Where do I want to be when all this stuff goes down?’ I’m not like a bunker guy necessarily. I mean, this is a pretty critical moment in the history of the human race.”
Rather than talk about himself, he’d much prefer to say something glowing about one of his collaborators, which he does constantly. Don’t get him started on his Free Guy costar and onscreen ex-girlfriend Jodie Comer, because he will get started anyway, in response to a totally unrelated question about what it’s like to play a heartthrob on television: “She could not be more down-to-earth! She’s so cool, comes from a great family. She’s amazing. I’m a huge fan of hers,” he gushes. “That doesn’t really answer your question, I guess, at all.” (In a roundabout way, it kind of does!)
In Joe Keery’s real world, Keery’s girlfriend is the actor Maika Monroe—the two met four years ago, at a party in Los Angeles. He doesn’t talk about her a lot, but her presence in Keery’s life is great enough that she pops up in every fourth or fifth anecdote, like a guest star we love to see. “Over quarantine, it was like we spent so much time together, which was rare,” Keery says. “I mean, that’s one of the disadvantages of dating someone else in the industry. There are advantages as well: somebody who kind of understands what’s going on with you in a pretty deep way. But yeah, I think she’s like me. She doesn’t take it all too seriously.”
She is around Keery’s neck at all times: His gold necklace was a gift from her. “I found it while we were traveling, and then it busted,” he says, turning it between his fingers. “For Christmas, she got it remade for me.” The symbol is simple but specific—a blue-white-and-red motif—though Keery doesn’t know the necklace’s exact provenance. He has worried it might be haunted, but he doesn’t exactly feel cursed. “Things have been pretty good for me,” he admits, “so I can’t say.”
Brennan Kilbane is a writer based in Brooklyn.
A version of this story originally appeared in the September 2021 issue with the title “Most Likely to Succeed.”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Marie Tomanova
Styled by Alexander-Julian
Hair by Thom Priano for R+Co. Haircare
Grooming by Claudia Lake for Chanel
Tailoring by Ksenia Golub