Noah Centineo can barely remember a time that he wasn’t acting.
“Man, I’ve been active since I was eight. That’s 18 years,” the 26-year-old tells Esquire Middle East.
It’s long enough that for a long time, Centineo forgot why he was acting at all. It’s just what he’d always done. And then, in 2018, Centineo took on the name ‘Peter Kavinsky’ in the Netflix teen rom-com To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, and overnight, Centineo was no longer just an actor—he was a phenomenon.
Suddenly, ‘Noah Centineo’ was the name on the tip the world’s tongue, and a quick succession of Netflix hits—Sierra Burgess is a Loser, Swiped, The Perfect Date—cemented him as the romantic lead of his generation, a ‘hearthrob’ status he was both grateful for and immediately uneasy with.
Acting? Acting was just something he did until he found his true purpose in life.
“I started thinking of doing other things. I’ve always just acted. It’s my job. I show up, you tell me. Give me the words and tell me how you want me to say it. I’ll say them, maybe get some emotion,” he tells us.
Then, something started to happen. As the work got more challenging, something awakened inside of him.
“I’ve learned that I love being in control of narratives, not just being assigned a role. I’ve learned that more than anything, I enjoy the struggle of finding a format and finding the delivery, finding the final narrative structure and character development,” he continues.
“I enjoy really asking questions about a plot point, maybe setting on fire half of the idea and then scouring the ashes to find what works and what didn’t work, then asking why didn’t this work? How can we fix this? How does this become dynamic? It’s just exciting to me.”
Now, with Black Adam’s hotly-anticipated release only weeks away and The Recruit, his spy series, headed to Netflix soon after, Centineo is approaching his future with a renewed purpose. He’s finally found his passion. Funnily enough, it was acting all along.
“It’s spectacular. It’s amazing,” Centineo says.
Read Esquire Middle East’s full interview with Black Adam star Noah Centineo below:
ESQ: I want to dive in to your journey, man.
Noah Centineo: Let’s do it.
ESQ: Obviously, you’ve been doing great stuff for so long. You had this gigantic moment with the ‘To All The Boys’ trilogy on Netflix, and all of a sudden you were at a different stratosphere nin terms of the attention that you’re getting.
Noah Centineo: That’s very true.
ESQ: No one on earth is prepared that. Now at a point where you can take all you’ve built with that, and turn it into something that is for you.
Absolutely.
ESQ: What’s future that you want to build for yourself? How do you define that path, or do you even try to?
Exploration. Yeah, just exploration and curiosity. I want to keep acting. I want to branch out. I want to find projects that make me excited that haven’t been developed yet. I want to develop them. I want to find people that I want to support, that I think their voices should be heard.
It’s been a lot of that kind of research. It’s been a lot of stepping into other roles. And as for development—I just would like more of that. The future for me is definitely a place of exploration. Thank you. Good question.
ESQ: What have you learned in our explorations up to this point? What are the lessons that you learned going through that extreme ascent to fame? Who are you on the other side of that?
These are such good questions. Maybe it’s because they’re about me. My ego loves it. [laughs]
ESQ: That must be it.
I’ve learned that I love being in control of narratives, not just being assigned a role. I’ve learned that more than anything, I enjoy the struggle of finding a format and finding the delivery, finding the final narrative structure and character development. I enjoy really asking questions about a plot point, maybe setting on fire half of the idea and then scouring the ashes to find what works and what didn’t work, then asking why didn’t this work? How can we fix this? How does this become dynamic? It’s just exciting to me.
It was never something that I thought about before I started. I started thinking of doing other things. I’ve always just acted. It’s my job. I show up, you tell me. Give me the words and tell me how you want me to say it. I’ll say them, maybe get some emotion. But now I’ve really found passion. After I’ve been active since I was eight, almost 18 years. So to find passion again, is spectacular. It’s amazing.
ESQ: Atom Smasher has decades of history, but you’re playing a younger version, a guy that’s going to become the character that we all know. When did you get to the point where you felt like you understood who he was and where he was going?
It was exciting to take on this character. Like you were saying before, yes, the comic books are one thing, but this is a clean slate. Because we know where he goes, you can make that are exciting for people as it goes on, if/when we get more, I hope.
For me, it really settled after my first meeting with Jaume Collet-Serra. It was hearing his thoughts, hearing his ideas, hearing what he wanted Cyclone and Atom Smasher to represent, it just clicked.
I then went through the comics. I have a buddy, his name’s Rob. And she is the biggest comic book fan ever. He’s one of my closest friends. He gave me some really great resources, websites that just broke down Atom Smasher in great ways, and I devoured those.
It wasn’t until we all got on set, and it was Pierce, Dwayne, Q, and me. We all sat there and we got this on its feet for the first time, and it was really cool. We all just are so, so different. All of our characters are so different. And we found a way to play them that just kind of fuses together really, really nicely. And that blew my mind.
What were the conversations like, you know, when you’re when you’re on set when you’re there with everybody, and obviously, it’s not just your characters, different personalities, everyone has a different personality? How did you ultimately click to the point where you felt like you had you had created this sort of, you know, found family on set, because honestly, you know, they are very different. But you’re also surrounded by some really amazing people in this movie, man.
As you said, this cast has such different but strong personalities from top to bottom. When did you feel that you’d really created a found family on set?
We all were hanging out before we shot. Q and I got very close, early on. Then came in Mo and Pierce, then all of us together. Dwayne was always involved, always in communication with us. By the time that we all stepped on set together, and had those ensemble moments, I’ve got to be honest, it really didn’t take long. Dwayne takes his job seriously, as seriously, and gets seriously fun, too.
ESQ: Rumours are that Warner Bros. wants Black Adam to be the start of a whole new future for the DCEU. Is that something you’ve had discussions about already, or are you holding that off until we see how the film performs?
No, at this point we haven’t been told anything. I don’t know if that’s a thing, but I know everyone’s excited, especially at DC and Warner. And when we were in production, so was every actor on that set. I know that we’re eager to do more across the board. And if people want to see more, we’re all in on this.
ESQ: How did you master the art of motion capture?
It honestly felt very natural. My character’s superpower is he grows, he gets bigger. So none of my fights are really practical, right? It’s all superimposed in post. So I had to do a lot of performance capture.
To do that, I reached out to the proverbial god of motion capture, Andy Serkis. He was kind enough to take some time with me. I asked him a whole bunch of questions. He was able to give me a lot of advice and a lot of help. When it came time, because Andy Serkis was so giving a gracious with his time, it was easy. It was also amazing to talk to the guy that was Smeagol/Gollum from Lord of the Rings, and Caesar from Planet of the Apes, King Kong and Godzilla. It’s absurd. Yeah. So that was really sweet.
ESQ: What did he tell you that was especially useful?
He taught me to adjust to the physics of the world we’re dealing with. With Atom Smasher, when he grows, his bones break, and it’s excruciating to do.
When it comes to that, we had to figure out how would we create that. Like, maybe we put really thin pieces of wood inside the suit so that if I’m supposed to be growing, we can break them, and then I can react to that. if I have a tail, maybe I put something behind me that pulls my weight back, right? If my arms are heavy, maybe I hold the weights in my hands. But those are different. It’s about figuring out what the physics of using them to your advantage.
ESQ: And finally, let’s talk about the film itself. What do you think sets it apart from the pack?
This film has teeth, though it is a fantastic, marvelous, extraordinary superhero film. I’ve been told is has the highest body count of any superhero film so far. That may be not be a great thing, but that’s the idea. We question morality with this film, but we never side with either opinion. We leave it open ended.
Black Adam is in cinemas October 20 across the Middle East