A few weeks ago, I decided to make a major change in my life. I was tired of being told “No,” and fed up with the one I held nearest and dearest saying that I couldn’t be who I am. It was that day that I took a stand against my oppressor: The 128gb iPhone XR I have had since late 2018, which has been pushing max capacity for years, due to an unending and inexorable collection of screenshotted male celebrities.
The person to ultimately push my poor phone over the edge was the internet’s latest quirked-up white boy of the week, Logan Lerman. Past contenders for this title have included Dylan O’Brien, Noah Centineo, and basically any man between the ages of 19 and 32 who can be found on the landing page of your favorite streaming service. Lerman, however, is different. He’s an anomaly in a collective sea of milquetoast men with patchy facial hair.
He’s currently starring in the second season of Amazon’s Hunters, playing a Nazi hunter (hot!). I hear he’s fantastic in it, and good for him. It’s another reason he’s prime internet boyfriend material. Something about him—and him in particular—earns a spot in the camera roll.
I know what you might be thinking. “Oh, talented and precocious entertainment critic, how many photos could you possibly have in your phone?” How’s 33,626 for you? And I guarantee that in the time it takes me to finish click-clacking my fingers across this keyboard to when your eyeballs land on these words, that number will be up to its next hundred.
I don’t mean this in the way that you’re thinking, either. Get your mind out of the gutter! I’m being completely honest when I say that I’ll often save photos of beautiful celebs because I enjoy swiping through them on the train when I don’t have service. Or, I’ll browse through them on rainy days like an old magazine, sending them to my friends to marvel at like we’re all reading Tiger Beat at a sleepover. I’ve kept a copy of Timothée Chalamet’s British Vogue cover on my coffee table for the last two months, just because it gives me high school-level butterflies to look down from episodes of The Americans to see his curls staring back at me.
Some people collect geodes or go birdwatching. I like beautiful things too! What’s stopping me from enjoying nature’s bounties from the comfort of my backlit phone screen? I’ve made peace with my unbreakable obsession with celebrity men. All my boyfriends stay in my phone, something my real-life boyfriend (not a figment of my imagination) has used to poke fun at me for five years every time I complain about having to delete 10 identical photos of Colin Farrell when I want to save a picture of my literal family.
But now and again, these discoveries must be shared with the public. And when a video of Logan Lerman dancing to “Milkshake” by Kelis appeared on my Instagram feed, attention had to be paid. It was too good to stay in the camera roll. But first, it had to be brought to the camera roll. With that, I backed up the photos of my boyfriends onto the cloud and grabbed the 512gb iPhone 13 Pro I had been procrastinating setting up for days. Like Ben Franklin and his little electrical volts or Gwyneth Paltrow and her vagina candles, this discovery was too good to keep to myself.
The video may only be eight seconds long, but it’s more than enough to revere Lerman as the most prolific internet crush of our time. Something about a boy with floppy hair, wearing full cozy-time regalia—a sweatshirt, sweatpants, and socks—while dancing to Kelis just feels critical. That’s not to mention the Jon & Vinny’s takeout bag, resting on the table behind him. I have never been to Los Angeles’ beloved casual Italian eatery, but there’s a primal, alluring quality about a man willing to patronize a place that sells banana bread with warm, salted butter for $6.25.
Others seemed to echo my own thoughts. Multiple people appeared in my notifications with different versions of, “He’s so boyfriend” in response. Others appreciated Lerman seemingly lacking any care about posting a silly video of himself dancing. As one person so concisely put it, “He was waiting for Dylan O’Brien’s crown to slip.”
Except, there’s a difference between Lerman and O’Brien. O’Brien, an alum of the MTV hit Teen Wolf, hit it even bigger over the last couple of years, starring as the love interest in Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well” short film and as a tertiary character in last summer’s Hulu dark comedy, Not Okay. For that film, O’Brien bleached his buzzcut to capture the smug, dopey charms of a TikTok huckster—sending a ripple through the internet’s collective libido. Yes, I am sorry for how disgusting that sentence sounds. But I was there, and I saw cities turn to rubble in seconds.
Logan Lerman, however, is different. He’s not everywhere, and that’s what makes him the ideal candidate for cultural courtship. Lerman has the mystique of a real movie star, combined with the charms reserved for the Chalamets of the world, and good looks befitting an architect in a supermarket romance novel. This is a man that harkens back to 2012, when Tumblr made us believe that the hottest thing you could be was someone who dared to wear a peacoat.
Lerman is the rare, actually enigmatic celebrity white boy. He’s not on paparazzi walks in skin-tight workout shirts or doing photoshoots in leather pants. He’s never shirtless. (You can’t swing an 8-foot iPhone charger without hitting a photo of Noah Centineo half-naked. He doesn’t find his way onto our phones like that. When Lerman scored the lead role in the Percy Jackson franchise in 2010, he was smart. He parlayed the YA series’ flop into an iconic role in The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and the rest was history, preserved in gif form on the internet like fossils in amber.
Here is the rare actor who doesn’t so obviously crave attention and stardom that it becomes exhausting for the rest of us to witness. His roles are rare; Lerman acts when he wants to and posts just as sporadically to social media. So, when he blessed us all with the video of himself dancing to promote the second season of Hunters, it felt like a gift.
This was proof that, in addition to being endlessly charismatic, he’s also keenly self-aware. This man two-stepping to “Milkshake” was arguably a sign that it’s okay to be a little thirsty. It’s who we are! It’s alright for Logan Lerman—and all the others we cycle between from month to month—to dance into our hearts. And, into our camera rolls.
