Gavin Casalegno had something to say about the hate for his character in The Summer I Turned Pretty.
The 25-year-old actor plays Jeremiah Fisher in the Prime Video series based on Jenny Han’s romantic coming-of-age book trilogy originally published in 2009.
The story centers around a love triangle between teenagers Belly Conlkin (played by Lola Tung) and the brothers Jeremiah and Conrad Fisher (played by Christopher Briney).
Jeremiah gets a lot of hate on the internet, but Gavin actually has received some of that hate himself, with people unabashedly projecting their frustrations for character on him.
In an interview with The New York Times, Gavin shared how much hate there is against him and the character. “They tend to dislike him, yes,” he told the publication. “I don’t check Instagram anymore, so I haven’t really seen that much hate. The only thin That I see is my sister send me the memes that are really funny.”
“I think it’s important to also understand and realize that this is a fictional story—and it’s also not me,” he continued. “I don’t think there’s a single human being in the world who can carry the emotional negativity to the degree that stuff like this happens.”
Some people are keeping it light-hearted, but there are a lot very intense members of the TSITP fandom that really, really hate Jeremiah. And that’s led to people directing their hatred toward Gavin.
Some comments are pretty innocent.
But then they start to get a little nasty.
The people are just not that into “team jeremiah.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Gavin even said people approach him and say how much they hate Jeremiah. So, it makes sense why the streaming service laid out ground rules before Season 3.
The third and final season of The Summer I Turned Pretty premiered on July 16, and ahead of its debut, Prime Video shared a series of posts warning fans not to harass the show’s cast on social media. “We have ZERO tolerance for bullying and hate speech. If you engage in any of the following, you will be banned: hate speech or bullying, targeting our cast and crew, harassing or doxxing members of the community,” the now-deleted IG story read.
In a July 10 Teen Vogue interview, Lola (who plays Belly) said, “I think we see with a lot of these love-triangle stories, people want the leading girl to end up with someone.”
Lola’s right! It’s not that serious, y’all. Some of us are old enough to remember that the TSITP, Hunger Games, and Twilight books all came out around the same time. If we hadn’t shown some restraint (and lucked out because social media was still new), nobody would’ve survived arguments between Teams Jacob, Edward, Gale, Peeta, Jeremiah, and Conrad.
Be nice to Gavin! He’s just an actor. But, that darn Jeremiah… wait, never mind. Let me chill out. He’s not real.