How did Noah Centineo get his start?
Noah Centineo has his sister to thank for his career. When he tagged along on one of his elder sibling’s auditions near their home in Boynton Beach, Florida, a casting agent insisted that 8-year-old Noah try out too. “I was like, Absolutely not, not my thing,” recalls the actor, now 26. “But they thought I’d be good at it, so I was like, OK, I’ll try. And I ended up loving it.” After booking his first regular gig on Disney Channel’s Austin & Ally, he put together a PowerPoint presentation to convince his parents to let him move to Los Angeles full-time. “It said, ‘This is what I wanna do with my life, and if you move me to LA, I will be successful.’ And they believed me!”
Which projects has he worked on?
That cross-country move led to a part on the Freeform series The Fosters, and eventually his breakout role in Netflix’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (and its two sequels). Young fans fell hard for Centineo’s Peter Kavinsky, voting him Favorite Movie Actor in the 2019 Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards. (He also scored Best Break-through Performance and Best Kiss, with costar Lana Condor, at the MTV Movie & TV Awards.) Centineo found it gratifying to grow with the show’s audience. “There’s a lot of change that happens in anyone’s life in three years, so there’s this really cool element to franchises,” he says. “There’s something so beautiful about the audience maturing and experiencing life in tow with the characters.”
What is Noah Centineo’s role on Black Adam?
This month, Centineo’s fans get to see him as they never have before: donning a superhero suit, alongside Dwayne Johnson, in DC’s Black Adam. To prepare for his role as Atom Smasher, Centineo pored over the comics, although he notes his character is different on the big screen. “In the comics, he’s a fully formed adult,” he says, “but in the film he’s a young metahuman who’s learning what it means to be a superhero.” Centineo also embraced the fantastical aspect of the material. “As an actor, a lot of the stuff that I’ve done is practical, so being able to step into a space where buildings are falling down and you’re catching things and you’re so big that you’re looking down on an entire city, it’s all very imaginative work.”
What’s next?
Centineo has a handful of other projects lined up, including a Netflix spy series that he’s executive producing, but given how wide the DC universe is, the odds are pretty good that Black Adam won’t be the last film in which we see Atom Smasher. Which other characters from that Extended Universe would Centineo like to see in a cross-over? “I really loved the cast of Shazam,” he says. “They were shooting their film in Atlanta while we were, and I got to spend a lot of time with them on our off days. It would be super fun to work with that cast. But I kinda wanna see Black Adam and Superman go toe-to-toe. I think that would be pretty freaking cool.”
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