Logan Lerman Knows How to Play the Game
The actor is well aware of his cult online following. He mostly ignores the noise—but he’ll wield it if it means movies like ‘Oh, Hi!’ can get made.
In Marie Claire's Meet Cute, we have a chance encounter with pop culture's latest man crush.
Logan Lerman is pulling his phone out of his pocket, preparing to dial his fiancée to ask if he’s a “soft boy.” (Read: a man with a sensitive exterior that may or may not be used to manipulate others.) Running on only a few hours of sleep (he’s doing the rounds during the Tribeca Film Festival) and a freshly downed espresso, the actor is more insistent that he has several glaring asshole qualities that disqualify him from soft boy status.
He’s aware, of course, that his appearance this hot June afternoon at a downtown hotel café—casual gray T-shirt, tousled brown hair, sheepish grin—betrays his argument. After all, he’s built an impressive fan base and resumé off being the quintessential nice guy.
Still, Lerman maintains (somewhat unconvincingly), “There’s a major jerk in me at times." He continues, "We all have that, and it’s either that we recognize it or we don’t.”
Perhaps the 33-year-old is quick to highlight his unpleasant traits because he's spent the past few days promoting Oh, Hi!, in which he plays a character incapable of clocking his shitty behavior—at least until it's too late. In the new comedy, written and directed by Sophie Brooks, Lerman’s Isaac is a classic bad communicator, leading to an uncomfortable confrontation with Molly Gordon’s Iris when he admits, on a romantic weekend away, that he didn’t realize they were in a relationship. Iris finds herself in a “situationship” horror story while Isaac winds up in something of a modern-day Misery.
The anti-rom-com (out July 25) is a different kind of project for the typically dramatic actor, who spent the past few years leading “heavy” shows about familial trauma like Hunters and We Were the Lucky Ones. He’s still best recognized as Charlie from the 2012 adaptation of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which, in addition to putting him on the map as an actor-to-watch (garnering a Best Young Actor nod at the 2013 Critics' Choice Awards), earned him the banner of “White Boy of the Century” by a certain subset of very online Millennial/Gen Z cusps.
But long before GIFs of his performance in Perks were reblogged across Tumblr, Lerman had his sights set on Hollywood. Born and raised in Beverly Hills (he's not a nepo baby: his father works in medicine and his mother became his manager), he began appearing in commercials at the age of four and went on to land supporting roles in dramas like The Butterfly Effect and 3:10 to Yuma.
Movies were a large part of his childhood even outside of his career. He recalls paging through the local newspaper for the showtimes of major releases—or what he calls “special movies,” ones that feel original and get audiences into theater seats. “I have a bit of an issue where I really romanticized what movies were and long for that feeling and that approach to come back.” He and his best friend were also early adopters of YouTube, creating comedy videos and uploading their shorts to a channel called @monkeynuts1069—he’s quick to clarify that the name was the sole genius of his friend. (“I would love to have that name,” Lerman jokes. “My email [addresses] were so bad. My dad made my emails for me because I didn't even know how to do that.”)
Eventually, he nabbed the titular role in the Percy Jackson franchise, becoming something of an endearing teen heartthrob—only amplified when he played opposite Emma Watson in The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which remains the gold standard of a coming-of-age film a decade later.
Oh, Hi! marks Lerman’s first leading film role in five years in what feels like a calculated move that perfectly plays into and against his off-screen heartthrob persona. But he’s genuinely surprised when I ask if that was intentional; if he saw the movie as a way to wink at the many horny fan cams and fawning tweets about him. (If his fiancée, artist Analuisa Corrigan, posts something of him, Stan Twitter will find it.)
“Every actor is trying to break out of whatever box they're in,” he says, explaining that his plan to star in Oh, Hi! was “so not thought out” but rather that he wanted to try something new. “That's always the hardest thing: The industry and the audience see you as one thing. And then they want to keep seeing you as that in a way.”
Still, he adds with a smile, “If it means that we get to make more movies, I’ll take the [White Boy of the Century] title.”
Though Brooks and Gordon began writing Oh, Hi! in 2020, it wasn’t until Lerman came on board in early 2024 that the film was able to gain enough funding to move into production.
He explains that, much to his confusion, several actors had passed on the role of Isaac before he was offered the part. When he got to read the script, he was “immediately excited by the opportunity,” accepting and shooting just six months later.
“It didn't really resonate with me as being something to be fearful of,” Lerman says. “Maybe [the reason others passed] was that the character’s a dick or something. I like that about him. I like the conflict.”
“I’m guided by what I want to see,” he continues. “That was the main factor in why I ended up doing Oh, Hi!. It was like, This is a movie I want to see in theaters. That's the bar.”
The only thing that did intimidate Lerman about Oh, Hi! was that he would be tied to a bed for what ended up being “easily 100 hours.” Not because of how exposed it would leave him (he is shirtless nearly the entire runtime), but because it would confine the “movement” of his performance. He was concerned how the cinematography would stay interesting in such a small space.
That's always the hardest thing: The industry and the audience see you as one thing. And then they want to keep seeing you as that in a way.
There was no doubt in filmmaker Brooks’s mind that Lerman could manage. “I’d seen Logan in many of his roles and had always been impressed by how natural and effortless his performances feel—never a moment of dishonesty or strain,” she tells Marie Claire via email. “He is also, in the truest sense of the word, a gentleman. I wanted Isaac to have that quality.”
The star enjoyed the challenge of playing into Isaac’s moral ambiguity, while also finding sympathy for him. A lesser script and performance could have made him a one-dimensional trope, but Lerman firmly establishes him as complicated, caught in the throes of dating just as much as Iris.
“Logan found the humanity and complexity in a man wanting something and being scared to have it,” Brooks adds. “That understanding bleeds through in every scene. In moments of absurdity, he brought a realism to Isaac’s circumstance that grounded the comedy in a way that feels essential for the stakes of the film.”
To Lerman’s surprise, playing the part was also healing on a personal level. “I'm much more of an Iris than I am an Isaac, as a person and in my dating experiences. [It was] a really cathartic experience for me to get into the mind of Isaac, who is much more like some people I've dated in the past.”
The Oh, Hi! actor is now happily engaged to Corrigan, with whom he’s been publicly linked to since January 2020, but he was no stranger to the taxing New York dating scene before they met. “Dating in your 20s is fucking horrible,” he says. “No one's ready. Everyone's working through shit. A lot of the experiences I've blamed on things not working out probably have to do with age and maturity, and understanding oneself.”
Though he agrees Iris makes “a really bad choice” in Oh, Hi!, he sympathizes with how it’s ultimately in the pursuit of love. Lerman declines to share what the craziest thing he has done for love but admits to being a “romantic,” flying across the globe spontaneously just to see someone.
“Life can be summed up as a series of embarrassments in those moments that impact you so much when you felt so deeply, and you shot your shot and you missed. I look back at those things very fondly and laugh at the intensity of it all—when you're smitten with somebody and you do something bold and it goes wrong. It was sweet.”
One shot he certainly didn’t miss was when he proposed to Corrigan (in a Central Park rowboat, no less) last year. Her being a December-Capricorn and he being a January-Capricorn, the star explains she’s a bit more extroverted than he is. Two years ago, she threw him a big birthday and surprised him with a cake—plastered with, yes, images of himself, crowning him the White Boy of the Century. (Inevitably, images from the party also went viral.) He was “humiliated” by being presented with the cake in front of a large group of his friends. “I pushed that away into some closet in my mind.”
His modesty is perhaps why he has become so synonymous with his outcast character, Charlie, in The Perks of Being a Wallflower. It’s not been lost on him that the film has contributed to his reputation, that fans still bring it up. He’s also always searching for projects that resonate with him as much as the film did: “It was one of those special experiences where I read the script and I was like, I have to do this. I love this. I read so many scripts, and I'm like, That's what I'm chasing.”
Looking ahead, Lerman hopes to continue exploring comedy—which he will do as a guest star in the forthcoming season 5 of Only Murders in the Building. He remains tight-lipped about any plot or character details, but he does know who the season’s culprit is.
In the long term, Lerman also aims to produce more (and potentially direct) after previously receiving production credits on the 2022 sci-fi film Press Play and the acclaimed 2024 thriller Skincare. He wants to do so now more than ever, particularly after something he worked on for nearly four years fell through, due to a “bad partner.” (He declined to say what it was, but confirms he didn’t write it.)
He’s aware that much of his career thus far has been defined by the work he did as a teenager and in his early 20s, and has just one criterion for how he hopes to see his next one. “The pursuit is just to continue making movies. Hopefully, the movie can be special, but I want them to be released in a special way.” He means completely independent productions that find distribution, are properly promoted, and make their way into theaters for enough time for fans to see them—“movies that connect with that feeling I had as a kid…That’s the goal.”
He could easily keep yapping about his earnest love for cinema and where he likes to see movies on the big screen in his hometown of L.A. He goes on at length about the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures’s programming; what a great job Quentin Tarantino has done reopening New Beverly Cinema and The Vista; his love for The Arrow, The Egyptian, and even AMCs (though he’ll go 30 minutes late to skip the ads). He could go on and on about the beauty of seeing something with a collective audience.
We must wrap up, though, so he has time for a photo shoot. “That’s the worst part. I hate modeling and shit!” But he’s okay hamming it up for the camera, playing up the projected image of his internet boyfriend status if it’s for the good of the film’s lifeblood.
“I try to grapple with, 'What do I do now?' versus 'What should I be doing now?' versus what I normally would do for my career and for myself, selfishly, but also, more importantly, for the projects I want to work on. I want to be a tool to get them made, as well as seen and distributed properly.”
Photographer: Ruben Chamorro | Grooming: Eddie Cook | Location: Fouquet's New York
