Lukas Gage is calling in from an empty home in Los Angeles. The actor and writer is surrounded by boxes, all set to go to the Spanish-style home he gutted and designed. In October, his memoir, I Wrote This For Attention, will be released—maybe it’s divine timing that he’s moving and semi-resetting. Gage, who has been lying relatively low since his thrust into the tabloids (when he had a whirlwind marriage to—and quick divorce from—celebrity hairstylist Chris Appleton) will soon be a topic of online chatter again. 

“I think there’s something really sexy and attractive about owning your own shit,” says Gage, smiling. He wrote the book during the SAG strike. In that quiet period, he came up with the memoir’s glimmering title, inspiring him to put pen to paper. He has understandable trepidation, though, about publishing a memoir, given his youth and the implied gravity of the genre. “This book is not about what I achieved. It’s more of where I can look back with humility,” Gage shares. 

To write the book, he read through his more than 30 journals from his childhood, leafing through the stories to help make sense of a dizzying childhood in border-town San Diego. There was one hiccup, though. “I lied so much in my journal as a kid,” he laughs. When asked why he would lie to an audience of only himself, he reflects: “I was bored by hearing the ways other people relayed their life. I was like, ‘Fuck, I want mine to be interesting. I want to have a story that’s worth being told.’”

His wish came true. To most, Gage has led a life that is ripped straight from a 2020s Hollywood fever dream. He moved to Los Angeles and entered the typical grind of rejection and dejection. Eventually, through trial and tribulation, he landed small, but important roles on era-defining shows. He was on Euphoria, alongside adolescent Tumblr star, Barbie Ferreira. “I was obsessed with her. That was the most starstruck I’ve ever been,” he shares off-the-record before reversing his discretion with a laugh. And then he was on The White Lotus, where he was a hotel employee who was being lusted after by his manager (played by the eternal daddy, Murray Bartlett). Their on-screen hookup contained one of the few instances of rimming in television history and inspired plenty of online chatter and think pieces. “It wasn’t even in the script,” Gage says of the infamous act. “It was supposed to be that they were having sex, but of course, me being the chaotic provocateur that I am, I said, ‘Let’s up the ante.’” 

The new attention brought questions. It was 2021, and an expanding ideal of masculinity was being complicated by fears that straight artists were using the clout of perceived queerness to buoy their image. At the time, Gage was coy about his preferences, and accusations of “queerbaiting” were beginning to percolate. In 2022, he responded to a Tweet defining him as a “non LGBTQIA” actor by saying, “u dont know my alphabet.” Finally, in 2023, he leaned into his penchant for provocation and answered the questions definitively by marrying Appleton in one of the most flamboyant celebrity weddings in recent memory. The couple married each other in fur coats, with none other than Kim Kardashian officiating the ceremony. Gage has since been self-deprecating about his very public romance, explaining the chaotic love affair as the result of a sustained “manic episode.” He’s also since stepped away from being hyper-online, no longer reading through the conversations surrounding him. 

“Attention is such a strange thing,” Gage reflects. “It starts off feeling like an affirmation, but then you begin to perform a version of yourself that will shock people and change their perception. You have this desire to be seen, but then it becomes a desire to be understood,” he shares. “I don’t know why it became so important for me to be understood by a bunch of strangers online,” he wonders before partially answering his question: “I’m such an attention whore, but I need it in the good ways.” 

Maybe one of those “good ways” is via a good old-fashioned book. The book is not “about” his recent tabloid endeavors, but he admits that he’s still “scared shitless” about the memoir’s reception, and how it could awaken the demon of online reprimand again. He accepts that, though. “I’m at a point where I’ve had a lot of growth,” he says. “There’s so much of my neurosis and insecurities in this book that [explains a lot of my behavior] to the people that I care about.” There’s joy and excitement in clarifying his tornado swirl of a life for his loved ones and the public. And, of course, there’s joy in the sweet taste of attention. As they say: everything in moderation.

Photographed by Ollie Ali

Styled by Christopher Campbell

Written by Tobias Hess 

Grooming: Nathaniel Dezan at Opus Beauty

Flaunt Film: Jonathan Ho

Flaunt Film Music: Lucas Nevada Long 

1st Assistant: Tanner Deutsch

2nd Assistant: Ethan Cheng