Lukas Gage knows he’s an easy target. “I have an energy that people don’t totally get on board with at the beginning or don’t believe is real,” he says. As an actor — he first broke out on Euphoria and the first season of The White Lotus — he’s often played the punchable-face archetype. “People see me on talk shows or on that reality show [Keeping Up With the Kardashians, more on that later], and it can feel very ‘pick me.’”

So when he decided to name his memoir I Wrote This for Attention, he knew exactly what he was doing. The book, which started out of a strike-induced desire to channel energy into a creative project, covers all the topics he knows people want to hear about. Mainly: his very public whirlwind romance (and equally whirlwind divorce) with celebrity hairstylist Chris Appleton and the time that a video of an accidentally un-muted director criticizing his apartment during an audition (“These poor people live in these tiny apartments”) went viral. Gage also spends significant time reflecting on his childhood in San Diego and opens up about his recent borderline personality diagnosis.

“I wanted to be honest, and I also want to be understood and to take accountability for my behavior, because victimhood can prevent you from true freedom,” he says. “Being accountable is very sexy. And also, I do want attention!”

How does releasing a book feel, especially compared to promoting your acting work?
With acting, if you get a bad review, you can kind of blame it on the writing or the director or the editing. There’s so many things that are not in your control. This book is just me, so there’s no one to blame. But I’m inviting criticism just by writing it, and by giving it this title. I’m inviting people to have conversations and not necessarily agree with me, and that’s okay.

How comfortable are you with that? Does inviting criticism come easily?

No, I do give a shit what people think. But I also know that it comes with the territory when you’re a public figure and you have to just expect it and accept it.

Was there a defining moment for you when you realized you were, in fact, a public figure?

We live in such a weird time right now where anyone can get famous overnight. I’m a unique case. Most people start as a working actor and then become a public figure and then a celebrity. That’s the normal pipeline. Mine was: working actor for a second, then public figure because of my viral video [in which a director is caught on a hot mic criticizing my apartment during an audition] and then back to a working actor. It was chaotic, and I’m still kind of juggling that.

A lot of people write memoirs and either don’t think about, or forget, that people are going to read it. But you speak directly to your reader.

Oh yeah, I was very much aware that everything I was writing would be out in the world. The title is a double entendre, it’s me seeking attention and validation and understanding from the world and reaching out, but it was also me seeking that for myself. I’m being self-deprecating and self-aware, but I also have the understanding that there’s something I need from myself.

What is your current relationship to reading about yourself online?

I would be lying if I said I don’t look myself up. I’m not as obsessive as I once was. There was this really weird side of myself that fed off this dark, negative criticism — and I was fueling it by only searching for the bad things. Like, yep, I thought this about myself and now I know it for sure. I’m always going to be a curious little freak, but I don’t need to let it consume me anymore. I don’t need to be so involved with what Sally from Ohio hates about me and my book and my face. But anyone who says they don’t read reviews and stuff at all is full of shit.

When you read through your old journals to write about your childhood years, what stuck out to you must?

How much of a liar I was. I lied so much to my own journal. Lying was a tool to help me get out of certain situations, but I didn’t realize how much it was also a tool to change my own narrative about myself. I was a bit of a provocateur, an exhibitionist and a brat as a kid and seeing that helped me make sense of why I was like that.

Did you give any of your exes a heads up that you’d be writing about your relationships with them?

No. I’m not huge on staying in touch. Being cordial is fine, but I don’t try to keep up conversations with them. And besides the obvious public one, I try to make an effort to protect their identities and make it hard to figure out who is who. And there are two sides to every story, so if their perception of what happened is different than mine, involving them gets messy.

Some people are more obscured; you have a character called The Ex that I thought was Chris Appleton at first. It quickly becomes clear it’s a different guy, but then you also don’t name him even though it’s obvious it’s him. Can you talk about your strategy there?

It’s funny you say that because you’re not the first person who was confused by The Ex. I clearly have a type. There was no way to obscure my ex-husband’s identity because that relationship played out so publicly. But I did decide not to get into the more personal nitty-gritty of it all; it didn’t feel fair because of how obvious it was that it was him. It’s funny that my big public marriage is one of the shortest relationships of the whole book. There’s also just less to say about it.

Do you expect to hear from people who are in the book?

I don’t think so. I sent early copies to the people who I still know, or whose approval of it I wanted. Even the people where it’s like, I know you hate me and our relationship’s fractured, but here’s the book.

I was a little surprised that you wrote about the experience of your video with the director critiquing your apartment, mostly because I figured you’d be sick of talking about it by now. Did you wrestle with wanting to just move on?

I’ve been asked about it so much, but also in short interviews you can only sort of deliver sound bites on it. I wanted to explore the parts I haven’t been able to talk about, which is that even though I chose to post the video, it didn’t come without its repercussions. I wasn’t, like, loving life and being like, I’m viral, I’m cool. I was freaking out. I didn’t want to get anyone canceled. I wanted attention, but I was realizing I didn’t want it like that. Getting recognition for the first time, as the kid who got made fun of for his apartment, wasn’t on my vision board. But now it’s like, here you go, here’s the whole scoop, now I’m over it.

Do you still feel like a working actor?

Yes, my career isn’t much different than it was five years ago. I’m not getting offers, I’m auditioning for what I book. But I think being competitive fires me up. I am really excited for Rosebush Pruning, this film I’m in with people like Riley Keough, Callum Turner, Elle Fanning. I’ve never played a role in a film that is this substantial; I’m mostly just like doing jump scares into TV shows and then leaving, so I think this is going to show people a different side of me.