There’s a telling moment in Lukas Gage’s new book where he refers to it as a “premature celebrity memoir”. It’s a self-deprecating joke, of course, but it is also true. Gage is not megawatt famous – at least not yet. Chances are, though, if you have seen him then you won’t have forgotten him. In 2020, he went viral after leaking an audition video in which the director – forgetting that he wasn’t on mute – is caught judging his living arrangements (“These poor people live in these tiny apartments,” he says, before Gage intervenes to let him know he can hear every word). The following year, Gage appeared in the first season of The White Lotus: in one scene, his character Dillon is caught by a hotel guest standing stark naked in the manager’s office, while said manager performs anilingus on him.
“I thought: I don’t have too much to do in the show so I’d better put my mark on it big,” he says with a smile today. “I wanted to give people something to remember me by – and I did!”
Gage specialises in characters whose lives are messy and chaotic – just like his own. That life is all laid on the line in his memoir, which – here comes another self-deprecating joke – is titled I Wrote this Book for Attention. Although comically entertaining, its subject matter is anything but. We start with Gage’s feelings of rejection and abandonment by his father, then move on to drug use, sexual abuse, family dysfunction, addiction, personality disorders, shame, unstable relationships and heartbreak. What we don’t get all that much of is the glitz and glamour of stardom. Gage readily admits he is at the start of his career. He has no great reserves of wisdom to share on success. So what was the purpose of writing a memoir?
“I think it’s cathartic for me to share my story,” he says over a video link from New York. “During the [Hollywood writers’] strike I had the free time to really dig in and go deep, so I just said: screw it.”
Gage, 30, grew up in San Diego, and from an early age he was aware of his constant need for validation. He recalls a party where he appeared, aged four, wearing high heels and Playboy bunny ears; in particular, he recalls being wounded by his dad’s evident disgust at what he was doing. Their relationship never really recovered – Gage’s dad moved out and became increasingly distant with his sons (Gage has two older brothers) before settling down with a new family.
Gage struggled to fit in at school. He was a natural performer, but this meant it was often hard to know who the real Lukas was. “I was constantly trying on different hats and personalities, which I think was quite polarising for people,” he says. It also had its advantages. Gage could effortlessly adopt the persona of a clean-living football player while secretly filling his bag up with booze at the back of the local store. He was sometimes paid by fellow pupils to call up and imitate their parents to get them out of class. “Becoming different people was effortless to me,” he says.
The memoir deals with addiction – predominantly his older brother’s struggles with heroin that turn the cool sibling he idolised into a frail zombie, but also his mother’s obsession with casino slot machines. An early jackpot meant the family could afford to make the down payment on a bigger house, but Gage laughs when I ask if she actually made money from gambling. “Ultimately, how much she spent was definitely a lot more than that.”
It is funny, he says. Until she had read the book, his mum hadn’t really reconciled with this side of her personality. “She talked to my other brothers, like, ‘Do you guys feel this way too?’ And they were all like, ‘Of course, we’ve been saying this since we were kids.’”
Gage has a lot of love for his mum, who clearly brought her children up in difficult circumstances. But she had a hard time reading it. “She felt as if she failed as a mother and I did not want her to feel that way whatsoever. I feel like even though there’s these chaotic things that happened to me, hard things, I actually loved the way that I grew up.”
Gage didn’t begin to locate his true self until he was sent to an acting summer camp as a child, where being loud, flamboyant and attention-seeking was actually encouraged. The experience was life-changing in good ways, but also in a terrible one. One night, he was joined in his tent by a camp counsellor who instructed Gage and a girl camper to kiss, remove their clothes and rub their bodies against each other while he masturbated. For years afterwards, he tried to ignore the guilt and shame it left him with.
“As with a lot of people who experience being molested, I felt like there was a willingness on my part because my body just checked out. I knew it was wrong. I knew that the situation should not be happening. But I just ploughed through it.”
Gage is hard on himself in the book – and still is. He admits to searching out “dark critiques” of himself on the internet. “I dislike that I don’t always hold my acting and writing in the highest esteem,” he says. “I wish I could have more empathy with that part of myself.”
Yet he accepts that this self-criticism drives him forward too. In high school, he appeared in a wart-removal commercial and spent the day on set asking every question possible about mic positioning and the role of grips. Despite his mum’s reservations, he left San Diego for Hollywood at the age of 18, staying in the Alta Cienega Motel where his hero Jim Morrison lived, on and off, between 1968 and 1970 (Tripadvisor reviews – “Stay FAR FAR AWAY from this DUMP!” – suggest it might not have been the most luxurious of lodgings).
Gage’s big break should have come when he landed a small role in Mad Men, as Sally Draper’s crush. He told his whole family about it, but during a costume fitting he was forced to reveal the tattoos he’d had inked on his ribs, back and calf. “I had these agents saying to me: how could you ruin this? How could you mess this up? I don’t think that was the greatest thing for a teenager to hear when they’ve just lost something that big.”
These days, such markings would be covered up in minutes, but back then he was shown the door and back to square one. The relentless rounds of auditions and rejections were brutal, but at least he had been trained well for them. “If I ever got rejected for a job, I would always think: it’s fine, it’s not as bad as my dad rejecting me for another family and kid,” he says.
Gage persevered. The story of how he lied, begged and cheated to get an audition for Assassination Nation, which ultimately led to a role in the hit show Euphoria (as Tyler Clarkson, black-eyed and in a neck brace) and then The White Lotus, could take up a book in itself. Gage recalls the strangeness of shooting The White Lotus in 2020, holed up in a luxury Hawaii hotel while the pandemic and the US election raged on. It was actually Gage, along with co-star Murray Bartlett, who pitched the idea that their sex act should be something a bit extra – and show runner Mike White happily agreed. Gage laughs remembering his mum’s reaction. “She wrote me a message, like, ‘Such a cute bum, but maybe next time give me a heads-up that’s going to happen when I’m watching with my friends.’”
It was while on set that Gage showed fellow cast members the audition video in which his apartment was slated. Their response – shocked, amused, supportive – convinced him to post it online. He wasn’t prepared for the reaction it got: countless news headlines, outpourings of support from fellow actors and strangers alike, and a crusade against the director in question, none of which Gage had any control over. “I felt like people were much more mad about it than I was, which confused me,” he says. “I didn’t want to take this person down for it. I found it more funny than anything. I don’t think it was anything worth cancelling someone for.”
Does he regret posting it?
“I think part of me does,” he says. “There was that feeling of, did I just blow up my life? You know, this is my first big thing that I’m known for and it’s not about my acting.”
You get a good sense of the precariousness of the business – and the fleeting nature of fame – from Gage’s memoir. The highs of Euphoria and The White Lotus are swiftly followed by moments of uncertainty and despair. “It’s such a high to be creating stuff for months in an amazing location like Hawaii … then suddenly you’re back in your apartment and figuring out what’s next,” he says. “It’s hard to trust in that moment that you’re going to be OK because we’re taught to believe in the scarcity complex – that there’s not enough jobs out there.”
If Gage’s career felt bumpy, then his love life was even bumpier. In his teens, he developed an intense on/off relationship with a fellow wayward teen he calls Kaylee in the book – she was in and out of juvenile detention and often wore a monitoring bracelet on her ankle. Aged 19, however, Gage slept with a man for the first time and realised he was, in fact, queer.
“There was a part of me that always felt like something was different,” he says, “but I couldn’t articulate what it was. I wish I’d had that clarity earlier on because I think it would have made things a lot less confusing as a kid. I look back, like, wait, dancing as a Playboy bunny as a little kid? Writing a diary while I played Britney Spears? How the hell did nobody have this conversation with me as a kid?!”
By the end of the memoir, Gage is seeing a therapist. She starts putting together pieces of his life – the trying out of different personalities, the needy relationships, his fear of abandonment – and arrives at a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder (BPD). Although Gage doesn’t particularly like labels, he accepts that it has been incredibly useful in understanding himself and some of the choices he has made in his life. “Suddenly, all of these things that I felt very confused by made sense,” he says.
It was during therapy that Gage ended up speaking about his traumatic summer camp experience. At first, he made light of it, so his therapist forced him to face it. “She said: ‘You’re in your 20s now, would you do that with an 11-year-old?’ It wasn’t until she’d put it that bluntly that I actually had to sit with it.”
So is this how the story ends? A facing of his demons, a diagnosis to explain his past and a bright future ahead of him, all tied up neatly with a pretty bow? That wouldn’t be a very Lukas Gage way of doing things. In early 2023, Gage met celebrity hair stylist Chris Appleton. The pair were so infatuated with each other that they were married by April that year. Kim Kardashian (one of Appleton’s clients) officiated the wedding and Shania Twain performed You’re Still the One to the newlyweds. By November, Gage had filed for divorce.
“One of the tricky things [with BPD] is that, at first, they throw a bunch of medication at you,” says Gage. Rather than soothe his impulsivity, it exacerbated it. “It made me manic,” he says. These days, his meds have been fine-tuned and, he says, he does now carry an awareness that “you should a) probably get to know someone for four seasons before you settle down with them, and b) also have the clarity to listen to my loved ones when they’re saying, ‘Hey: you need to take a beat.’ I do think I can do that now, and I have done since.”
The thing is, Gage doesn’t particularly want his book to have a neat ending. “My life is uneven and I wanted it to be honest rather than clean,” he says. “I’m still a work in progress. I’m still gonna make mistakes and mess up and not be the best partner or friend or family member. But I can acknowledge it now and invite this criticism rather than be resistant to it.”
Despite knowing there will be rocky patches, he’s excited for the future. Writing interests him – not another book for a while, that took it out of him, but he’s just sold a screenplay that he’s excited to announce soon.
I wonder if he has any worries, though, about releasing this memoir while he is still working his way up the fame ladder? Could all of these messy tales put potential employers off hiring him?
“There was a part of me that did want to tame it down a little,” he admits. “But I wanted it to be truthful and show people who don’t have it all together, who don’t have this cookie-cutter upbringing, that they can do this too, and that some of the messiness is actually the thing that makes you different.”
Besides, he says: “I don’t think I am a liability. I’m good at my job, I’m responsible, I never miss anything, I’m never late for work, I’m never a mean person.”
Well, look at that, I say. We began the interview with you saying you didn’t rate your acting and ended it with you conceding that, actually, you’re pretty good at your job.
“Yeah, we had an arc,” Gage says with a knowing smile. “There you go. Full of contradictions, once again.”
• In the UK, the NSPCC offers support to children on 0800 1111, and adults concerned about a child on 0808 800 5000. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) offers support for adult survivors on 0808 801 0331. In the US, call or text the Childhelp abuse hotline on 800-422-4453. In Australia, children, young adults, parents and teachers can contact the Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800, or Bravehearts on 1800 272 831, and adult survivors can contact Blue Knot Foundation on 1300 657 380. Other sources of help can be found at Child Helplines International
• I Wrote This For Attention by Lukas Gage is published on 14 October (£20, 4th Estate). To buy a copy for £18, go to guardianbookshop.com
