Joe Keery Levels Up

What makes the Stranger Things actor and budding movie star one of the most likable guys in Hollywood? We tried to get him to explain. (Operative word: tried.)

- BRENNAN KILBANE

He doesn’t wash his hair. He rarely even touches it, except during moments of contemplation, when his fingers will comb the fallen front strands back into an upward swell that maintains an anime level of consistency. He does not “get” haircuts in the way most people get haircuts—by asking for and then paying for them. Haircuts simply happen to him, in the way a belly rub happens to a dog on a walk.

Joe Keery’s most valuable asset isn’t the massively popular Netflix show he is very famous for (Stranger Things) or the Disney movie he is about to be very famous for (Free Guy)—possibly more famous than the 29-year-old has ever been. It’s his gravity-defying head of hair. A viral meme theorized that his curl pattern, the result of two cowlicks on the sides of his forehead, unfolded in a perfect Fibonacci spiral, and maybe that is why the public went absolutely nuts in late 2019, when Keery showed up to a Chanel dinner and was photographed in a limp bowl cut, his sacred geometry violated. “It didn’t go over well,” he says now. (People were threatening to dox the hairstylist.) “I saw some funny photos of it, and apparently I looked like a fucking idiot. But that’s okay. I think it’s good for everybody to look like an idiot at some point.”