Things You Might Not Know About Noah Centineo

Published on August 28, 2019. Updated April 27, 2020

Every generation has their superstars and heartthrobs and for right now the star on top of that list is Noah Centineo. The young actor’s rise to fame has been fast and furious and yet he has remained down to earth and humble. From starring in some of Netflix’s most popular original films with To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before and The Perfect Date, and with numerous roles lined up, here is everything to know about Hollywood’s hottest young star:

12. His Scar

One of Noah Centineo’s most distinguishable features is a scar on his lower left cheek. Naturally, his fans wanted to know how he got the scar and the actor revealed to Buzzfeed that when he was young he got attacked by a dog. “I got attacked when I was six years old by a Mastiff,” he said. “He ripped a hole in my face, so you could see my teeth, my gums, and all the way through my tongue to the other side. There was a massive, gaping hole.” He added that he didn’t believe the dog knew what he was doing and still loves dogs. “Getting a dog, a bigger dog, after that was great,” he said. “And now, the bigger the dog, the better.”

11. He’s Sober

Although Noah Centineo never had any issues with drugs or alcohol he decided the day before his 21st birthday that he had been partying too much and went sober. “I had been partying quite a bit when I lived in LA. I was having a really good time. When I was turning 21, I was like, damn, I’ve been partying like crazy since I was 17…. I was like, wow, maybe I should take a break,” he explained in an Instagram Live video. “It was an act of self-love,” he added in a later interview. “Like, ‘Listen, society. You say I can drink legally at 21?’ I didn’t remember what the 14-year-old Noah was like before partying was a thing. I kind of just had forgotten about that because I got swept up in having friends who were young and doing our own thing and financing our lives.” He added, “What I found was, when I took care of my body, my mind and my emotions and my heart were way happier. When I wasn’t drinking, when I wasn’t smoking weed and partying, I was responsible for my actions and I could choose my actions from a more mindful place. And my life changed — drastically.”

Photo by Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images

10. Early Life

Noah Gregory Centineo was born on May 9, 1996 to Kellee Janel and Gregory Vincent Centineo in Miami, Florida. Noah got his love of films and film-making from his father who worked as an executive producer. Noah and his older sister Taylor were raised in Boynton Beach, Florida where he attended BAK Middle School of the Arts and then Boca Raton Community High School before dropping out in tenth grade to pursue acting full time. Like most young actors, he finished up school with an independent study program, but knew school was never going to be his focus. “I moved across the country to become an actor, not an academic type,” he said in an interview. “I know myself, I’m not gonna be a mathematician or a professor.”

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9. Getting Started

Like most popular stars, once Noah Centineo knew he wanted to act, he dedicated himself to it. For Centineo it all started when he went with his sister to a casting call for a South Florida talent agency because she wanted to be a model. While there, Noah was encouraged to audition and his whole word changed. “My sister wanted to be a model and I was dragged along to support her,” he told Pop-Culturalist.com in 2017. “I give [my success] to her. She gets really tense when I tell the story, but I give it to her.” His talent agency got him into modeling and commercials before he was finally sent to the west coast to audition for pilots. His big break came in the form of Disney’s Austin & Ally at 15. Producers were so impressed by the young actor, his one line bit part got turned into multiple episodes, and Centineo made the decision that his future was in acting. “That’s when I looked at my parents and was like, ‘Yo, I’m about it. If you move me there I’ll be successful. This is what I want to dedicate my life to,’” Centineo told The New York Times in September 2018. Not long afterward he realized that his fame was growing when he had a sweet interaction with fans. “I was at the AMC movie theater in Century City with my mom. We were walking through the lobby and these girls came up to me and they said, ‘Are you Dallas from Austin & Ally?'” he recalled to BuzzFeed Celeb. “And I was like, [acts stunned] ‘Yeah, yeah.’ And they were like, ‘Could we have a picture with you?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, of course. Sure, thank you!’ And we took pictures. And my mom was kind of just standing there, beaming. I was like, ‘Dang. Dang!'”

Photo by Tasia Wells/Getty Images

8. His Hobbies

Noah Centineo is extremely humble and seems different from a lot of young superstars in the entertainment industry. Self-care is a huge priority for the actor and he makes sure to “unplug” from technology at least for a few hours a day, but he is using his social media popularity for the greater good. “I’m currently strategizing the best way for me to leverage my platform, my growing platform, my friends’ platforms, to help fight a various group of social injustices,” the actor told W Magazine when asked if he planned to use social media for activism in the future. Centineo added, “Currently, I’m not really able to discuss it because it’s still in the developing process, but to answer your question, absolutely.” He also loves to write! “I think I use writing as catharsis,” he explained, adding, “Just stream of consciousness, whatever I’m thinking or going through. I’ll just write it,” he continued. “Sometimes it rhymes, so it could be like spoken word poetry, other times it’s just narratives. But nothing formulaic yet.”

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7. He Got Catfished

Catfishing is so common on the internet that it even happens to celebrities, including Noah Centineo. Right in the middle of his The Fosters fame when the actor was 20 he met someone online but they weren’t truthful. “It happened like a year and a half ago. I’d met someone on Instagram, and I developed this ostensibly intimate relationship with them, and then turns out they weren’t who they were,” he told BuzzFeed in 2018. “As catfishing does.”

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6. Early Roles

While he might be recognizable now, not too long ago that wasn’t the case. Centineo’s very first role came in 2009 when he starred in the family film The Gold Retrievers. It wasn’t until two years later he landed his next two roles, first in the children’s film Turkles, and then as Dallas in Austin & Ally. While he was getting work, it wasn’t enough to convince his parents that his career path was going to work out. My parents were, like, ‘We’ve been out here for almost three years and you haven’t made it as an actor.’ They didn’t see it,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 2018. “I wasn’t on my own show. I wasn’t famous.” He elaborated, “My parents were like, ‘You’ve got to go to college.’ I was like, ‘No, because if I go to college, I’m not going to be able to dedicate all my time to acting.’ And they were like, ‘Well, you’ve got to go to college and get a job.’ So I got a job and I enrolled in college, but I was begging them, ‘Please, just give me the summer, give me the summer.'”

Photo by David Mendez/Young Hollywood/Getty Images

5. Taking Over as Jesus Adams-Foster

Without a doubt, Centineo’s biggest breakout, and perhaps, most controversial role was as Jesus Adams-Foster in ABC’s The Fosters. The show made the very risky move to recast the role of the very popular character after original star Jake T. Austin left the series because he was not happy with how little he was supposed to appear in the show’s third season. Luckily, fans embraced Noah as Jesus and producers loved him so much, the part became a much bigger part of the series again. “When you’re doing a TV series, you want actors to inspire you to write and give you great confidence in the stories you are going to tell for them. We knew once we had found Noah that we could take him on this very difficult, very hard, very dark journey and that you would keep rooting for him. That story very much came out of Noah’s gifts. I just knew from that first moment [in his first episode in 2015] — the way he interacted with the cast, the way he melted right into the stew with everybody, that it was going to work and it was going to be special. And then when we came back for the next season, he proved that again and again and again over the first few episodes. Within two episodes, we were completely confident and almost forgot that we had done [a recasting]. It was as if he had always been there,” The Fosters co-creator Peter Paige shared.

4. Music Video Star

In 2018, Centineo’s realm of popularity thanks to his Disney roles and of course The Fosters skyrocketed into a whole other area of fame with his starring role in Netflix’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. Amid the many film roles that came rolling in afterward, 2018 also saw Centineo star in the music video for one of the year’s most popular songs! Centineo stars alongside Camila Cabello in the singer’s music video for the hit single “Havana.” The actor explained, “I got a phone call from my manager when I was on set of The Fosters, and he says, ‘Hey man, so we have an opportunity for you to work on a music video. I’m not sure you’re going to want to do it….I say, ‘Well, who’s the artist?’ and he says, ‘Camila Cabello.’ And I say, ‘WHAT?! Oh my god! What’s the song?’ and he goes, ‘Havana.’ And I’m like, ‘Dude, you don’t even understand. My sister just showed me this song a week ago. Yes, yes, yes, a million times! I’m in.'”

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3. Almost Quit Acting

In his late teens, Centineo was working endlessly to land a major role but one casting in a pilot nearly derailed his career entirely. He got booked in the pilot for a potential Disney series called Growing Up and Down, but the network passed and left Centineo in contract limbo. “I went through a really dark patch because I wasn’t actually allowed to work. I was contractually obligated to be on hold for a certain amount of months. And that sucked miserably,” he explained. “When you take away a person’s ability to act on their purpose, they kind of deteriorate, I think. So, that’s what happened. I was like, ‘Maybe I should just not act. Maybe I should go to a third-world country and do something of actual worth.'” Luckily, his perspective changed, “And then I came full-circle and realized that, hey, if I act and if I really do this damn thing, then I can leverage the platform and still do good work. The bounce back was realizing that and saying, ‘I want to help other people be—and be happier.’ So now I had something a lot stronger. I wasn’t just trying to be an actor, I was trying to create a platform for the betterment of society. And just as soon as that clicked, I got The Fosters.”

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2. Personal Life

In the age of social media, many are pointing towards Centineo’s incredible social media popularity as one of the beacons to just how famous he has become. His Instagram leap was from 800,000 to 13.4 million followers which was only within weeks of the Aug. 17 debut of Netflix’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before and he is now dubbed “the internet’s boyfriend,” but many want to know if he is in a real relationship. Centineo has said he is single, and has yet to be linked seriously to any other young stars, but he admits that he is a big fan of love. “I’m really into love. I’m a hopeless romantic some days and a hopeful one on other days,” he told Teen Vogue. He later revealed to Seventeen, “My concept of a perfect date really is just as long as conversation is flowing, you feel comfortable, and you can be yourselves around each other.” While he is currently single, his millions of fans shouldn’t hold too much hope, because he doesn’t think he could date a fan. “I don’t close any doors totally, but probably not, because then it’s like more of a infatuation with like, a position more than like, the person,” he said. “It can overshadow that, which is difficult, I would think.”

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1. What’s Next?

After becoming the “internet’s boyfriend” thanks to his role as Peter Kavinsky in To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before he is gearing up to reprise the role in the highly anticipated sequel. After a lot of success with the Netflix originals, Centineo is now moving on to theatrical features with a role in the upcoming Charlie’s Angels reboot and a huge role as He-Man in an upcoming Masters of the Universe film. While he is grateful for all the success the young adult rom-coms have brought him, he does not hide the fact that he wants to move into bigger and more mature projects.” I’d like to do auteur pieces, something more existential and heavy. It’s possible that like romantic drama would be a cool way to segue into other genres. I’m really into Gaspar Noé’s work. I’m really into the Coen brothers, and the Nolan brothers,” he told IndieWire. “Everything that I’m doing right now, everything that I have done or everything I have lined up are stepping stones,” he told THR. “I’m not anywhere near where I want to be.”