Fike’s rise was so rapid and unexpected that The New York Times, FX, and Hulu collaborated on a 2020 documentary short about it. So rapid and unexpected, in fact, that he hasn’t had much time to develop a celebrity side of himself—the safe, frictionless persona that many stars show the public. At one point, he wonders aloud where the jellyfish are. “Don’t they have an aquatic section here? Am I tripping? Am I thinking of an aquarium?” He has become famous by being himself, entirely: an all-American kid, in a deeply Gen Z sense.
Over the course of our conversation, there’s not a single difficult topic—not his family nor incarceration nor addiction—that Fike can’t spin into a positive. (He describes jail, for example, like a sabbatical: “It really was just a year off to focus on myself.”) But he acknowledges that things got dark during that period, especially while he was trying to put together his debut, 2020’s What Could Possibly Go Wrong. “I was going through so much then, and I was heavily addicted to so many drugs,” he says. “Trying to make a f*cking album in the midst of that much pressure, the drugs, my family being insane, and me being insane, was impossible.” He admits that he “could have been more proud” of his first LP. It doesn’t take long for Fike’s sanguine side to shine through again, though: “Whatever happened was cool,” he says.
And with his long-awaited second album, he’s got good reason to feel optimistic. “This one,” he says, “sounds really good.”
As we sit down at the museum café and approximately the 6,000th person of the day tells Fike they love him in Euphoria, he explains why he ultimately decided to sign on for a second season. To start: His first outing paid off in the form of bigger acting projects. “There’s some crazy sh*t that I’m about to be doing, and that I’m about to be committed to for a long time, potentially,” he says, declining to discuss specifics. But returning also gives him the chance to spend even more time with his girlfriend.
Fike and Schafer met on set in L.A., and Fike is very much in love. He tells me he’s gone to the Prada store in SoHo eight times in the past four days—to buy clothes, of course, but also to see Schafer’s face on the ads displayed in the windows of the store. “That’s the best part,” Fike says. Right now Schafer is in Milan, and he misses her.
Fike and Schafer found an easy chemistry early on, but it took Fike a second to warm up to the other people on set. The whole experience of being the new kid at Euphoria High, he says, “was very intimidating” at first. “Zendaya, it’s just crazy seeing her in real life. You see her in f*cking movies and sh*t, and I’m like, ‘Oh, sh*t, that’s Spider-Man’s girl, dog!’ And then Tom Holland would show up to set and kiss her on the mouth, and I’m just here like, ‘This is wild!’ ”
Whatever guards Fike had up when he arrived on set were soon lowered by the show’s emotional intensity. In the first few days, Schafer filmed a crying scene. Fike was floored by her execution. As he tells it, the set went quiet as she got into character. “I wanted to hug her. The tears started going, she said, ‘Okay, I’m ready.’ And then they did the scene.” Afterward, Fike asked Schafer to teach him how to cry on command, which she did.
The process is simple, in theory: “You just compile all these terrible experiences, and bring them to the front, and then just watch them,” says Fike. When Schafer explained it to him, “I was like, ‘That’s f*cked up. You do that all the time? It’s horrible!’ ” Fike says the experience of learning how to cry in front of the camera, not to mention the girl he had a huge crush on, was weird. But the emotional implications were profound. “In those moments, your relationship is accelerated,” Fike says, “because you’re so vulnerable with someone, immediately. Which usually takes a long time. Some people fall in love, like, f*cking months after they meet, or years after. We developed an attraction—it sped it up so fast. We just really got to know each other so quickly.”
Part of him is bugged out by his new reality. “I have better friends in Paris than I do in Naples right now,” he says. “It’s very surprising, and it’s heartbreaking as well, honestly.” But another part of him is ready to ignore all the annoyances and inconveniences and lean as far into celebrity as possible, and see what happens. Do you ever worry about getting overexposed? I ask as Fike picks at a BLT. “No,” he replies. “I’m trying to go crazy. I’m trying to be like Lindsay Lohan. I’m trying to be annoyed at paparazzi and sh*t.” Actually? “I’m not even kidding. I’m trying to get, like, annoying famous.” Why? “I just think it’d be dope…. I want those iconic pictures from back in the day. The cool stories. The f*cked-up knees from all the Ecstasy. You know? I want all of it.”
