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Lukas Gage is apologizing for his cramped living space over Zoom but this isn’t that story all over again.
While the actor went viral in 2020 after a director was caught disparaging the then-25-year-old’s “tiny” apartment during a virtual audition, Gage is dishing a little deja vu today after hopping on camera from an apartment he’s sharing with “five Harvard guys” while shooting an as-yet-unannounced film in New York.
“It’s a small production and they only gave me a budget of like, $2,000 for the month,” Gage says with a shrug. “So I’m kind of living in this dark loft space for a while.”
The irony isn’t lost on the actor, who’s made a name for himself in shows like The White Lotus, You, and Fargo, and films like Smile 2 and Companion in the years since the caught-on-cam controversy. His famous friends (and an infamous marriage) have made Gage an almost-household name, and even if you can’t place him, everybody has seen that pretty, boyish face somewhere.
And yet, here is the famous, successful, beautiful Lukas Gage today, crouched under a too-short ceiling in a too-dark room of a too-small place. Can the breakout star just catch a break?
The idea of living in a dark place takes on a devastating turn in Gage’s beguiling new memoir, due out October 14. Titled, “I Wrote This for Attention,” the book is an unflinchingly frank and feral account of the actor’s chaotic childhood and angsty adolescence bouncing around the beach cities of Southern California, while embarking on a quest for stardom — and stability. Gage writes candidly about abandonment issues with his absentee father, underage run-ins with the law, and even a stint at a camp for troubled youth, while opening up about the toll that addiction and an unexpected death took on his broken family.
Despite his self-prescribed “borderline personality disorder,” Gage is an astute and captivating writer, alternating between self-deprecating confessions and revealing recollections on how the relationships in his life — with his parents, his brothers, girlfriends, and boyfriends — ultimately shaped the way he approaches his career today. The 320-page book also offers a surprisingly affecting glimpse into the turbulent backstory of a young actor who seemingly has it all.
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I Wrote This for Attention
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Gage started working on the book during the actor’s strike in 2023, culling details from old journal entries and notes saved on his computer. Though he initially wanted to turn the stories into a novel or book of essays, literary agents eventually convinced him to write his “premature memoir,” as he calls it. Still, he quickly realized it was the right thing to do.
“I always thought it was kind of interesting to have these stories from a person who hasn’t figured it all out and is still processing things,” he tells Rolling Stone, citing recent releases from Julia Fox and Jennette McCurdy as example of books he “connected” with. “I like to hear from those people, rather than people that have these huge, giant careers that feel so far away and unattainable to me.”
I Wrote This for Attention is at once amusing and uncomfortable, with stories on first kisses and first auditions sharing pages with darker recollections of being bullied as a child and later sexually assaulted as a teen in acting camp. Gage says while some memories were hazier than others, everything he put down in the book was true.
“My life was that chaotic and crazy, but the thing about it is, it’s still universal, with a lot of these themes like mental health and family and sexuality — these are things that people can connect to, even if they grew up in different situations than I did,” he says. “Part of my brain was like, ‘I’m gonna make the dialog really fun and entertaining,’ and obviously I don’t remember exactly what was said when I was five years old, but there are a couple of lines and things in there that I’m like, ‘I’ll never forget the way my mom or my dad told me that.’”
Courtesy of author
The lighter moments in the memoir are just as memorable as the headline-making ones. In true Gage fashion (read: overly dramatic with a side of sass), the book opens with a Noah Centineo quote(!) followed by an anecdote about four-year-old Lukas parading around a party in lingerie and Playboy Bunny ears. Turns out the guy who famously flashed his ass on The White Lotus has always been this cheeky.
One of the more poignant passages finds Gage recalling his childhood obsession with Britney Spears, writing about a night where he snuck off to the bathroom to listen to Spears’ ballad, “Lucky,” while his older brother and his “Dead Kennedys”-loving bandmates stood outside the door laughing. “I stayed mute and motionless in the tub, quietly withering while I waited for them to get tired of teasing me,” Gage writes. “But they kept going. Torture and death in a jar it was.”
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Gage says he’s since heard from many gay friends who share similar experiences revolving around their love for Spears, including Benito Skinner, who used “Lucky” on the first episode of his Prime Video series, Overcompensating.
“I think there’s something so inherently universal about Britney Spears and queer youth and the impact that she made on us,” Gage says. “I feel like a lot of queer kids could connect to her and that song, ‘Lucky,’ in particular, about having a mask and hiding who you really are and putting on a front and, you know, having a smile on, but inside, feeling completely lonely. I have so many memories of that CD in particular,” he continues, “like listening to it in the bathtub, and having my mom take me to Barnes & Noble, and me hiding under the checkout counter so she could say it was for her.”
Were there other artists that were seminal to his adolescence? “Stacie Orrico, I loved her a lot,” Gage blurts out, offering an unexpected throwback. “She had those two songs that I really, really loved.”
His biggest “number one” besides Spears though, was Gwen Stefani. “I was obsessed with No Doubt, and I was obsessed with the song ‘Bubble Pop Electric’ [from 2004’s Love. Angel. Music. Baby],” the actor says. “When it came out, she was the coolest thing in the world to me.”
“She DMed me recently,” Gage adds, with a smug smile of someone who’s now on the fringes of circles his heroes run in. “The little boy in me, like, almost shit his pants.”
While Gage comes across as confident and carefree in person, the actor admits that sharing his coming out story in the book — in addition to stories about his failed relationships — didn’t come so easily. In fact, he initially tried to play down some over-the-top anecdotes about his life, just as he writes that had tried playing down parts of his personality to appease an ex. But the guy whose first notable film role was in Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse has learned that subtlety has never been his strong suit — and trying to suppress his different sides and interests has never led to a desired outcome.
“Everything that I tried so hard to diminish about myself, like my eccentricities and my impulsiveness and my odd behavior were ultimately the things that led me to where I am, and things that set me apart from everybody else that was auditioning for these roles,” he offers. The lesson he wants to impart to young fans and readers: “The things that you try to hide from people and not let be seen, are usually the things that you really need to lean into.”
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I Wrote This for Attention
Readers will discover endless lessons and takeaways from I Wrote This for Attention, which is remarkably relatable. Gage says he’s still learning too. While writing the memoir was instrumental in helping him move forward from childhood trauma and scarred experiences, the actor insists he’s far from fully healed. If anything, releasing the book has made him more aware of the issues he needs to continue working on.
“I feel like I can look back and be really proud of that kid that moved up to LA to live in a motel and had no connections and somehow made it as a working actor,” he says. “But I don’t want to be one of those people — and I’ve worked with them before — that feel like they have it all figured out, and that their shit doesn’t stink. Like, once you do that, your art and your creativity suddenly become jaded and weird.”
“I do think I often fuel this dark part of my brain too much and lean into the negativity and the bad shit people say about me online, or about my acting, or about my writing,” he admits. “I try to not hold onto that too closely. And I think I’m getting better about that. But also, as Jennifer Coolidge says in my book, ‘Who cares?’”
I Wrote This for Attention is available now at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Gage also narrates the audiobook version of his memoir, which you can listen to for free with a free trial to Audible here.