Twitter thirst reached a new level on Tuesday when Searchlight Pictures dropped the teaser for Not Okay, a social satire about influencer culture starring Zoey Deutch and a bleach-blonde Dylan O’Brien.
The Teen Wolf actor appears in the brief clip for one single second, in which he wears a sizable gold chain around his neck and flashes a coy, sleepy smile. He doesn’t even have any dialogue, but everyone on Twitter is in a frenzy over this man with big “30 years old, but rides a skateboard everywhere” energy.
The teaser for Not Okay opens with an ironic disclaimer: “This film contains an unlikable female protagonist. Viewer discretion advised.” The film stars Deutch as a maligned, fame-hungry influencer named Danni Sanders. Danni wears her hair in a look that was popular on TikTok two years ago, dark and parted Morticia-Addams-style down the middle with two bleached front pieces framing her face. As she stares teary-eyed at a laptop plastered with colorful stickers, she narrates, “Have you ever wanted to be noticed so badly, you didn’t even care what it was for?”
This desperate admission is followed by a compilation of online Danni Sanders hate—a magazine cover labeling her an “All-American Liar,” tweets and memes calling for her cancellation, and snippets of other fictional internet personalities discussing her notoriety.
So what exactly does our quote-unquote unlikable female protagonist do to earn such a reputation? She fakes a trip to Paris for Instagram clout, donning a cherry red beret and posing in front of a green screen, only for her fib to spiral out of control when the city is hit with a string of terrorist attacks while she is purported to be there. “On April 10th, I almost died,” Deutch says in voiceover as she edits herself into photos of the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower. “Just kidding!”
But nobody seems to care at all about Danni Sanders’ abhorrent antics when they can instead focus on the one second of Dylan O’Brien looking like every guy waiting in line at Café Leon Dore on a Saturday afternoon. O’Brien plays Danni’s love interest, Colin, per the description accompanying the trailer. At the time of writing, O’Brien had been trending on Twitter for two hours, with thousands of people reposting the same screenshot (because, again, there is only one to choose from).
Now, who among us has not lusted after a fuckboi with platinum hair and dark scruff? My personal favorite take on the incongruent facial hair look is Zac Efron’s, but O’Brien is cute, too. Plus, he gets points for playing Jake Gyllenhaal in All Too Well: The Short Film last year.
Still, the girls must be down bad if this blink-and-you’ll-miss-it teaser appearance is enough to get him trending.
Directed by Quinn Shephard, Not Okay arrives on Hulu on July 29.
