Chase Stokes, the Outer Banks actor trying to outrun John B in a NASCAR drama

Chase Stokes

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	September 16, 1992 Annapolis, Maryland, United States
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Uglies, Marked Men: Rule + Shaw, Valiant One
Awards	People's Choice Award, Drama TV Star of the Year · MTV Movie + TV Award, Best Kiss

Chase Stokes’s new character has already wasted his first chance. Ronnie Whitlock, the man he plays in AMC’s NASCAR drama Thunder Road, was a promising professional driver until his own behavior got him thrown out of the sport and sent to work in his cousin’s pit crew. It is an odd part to choose straight after leaving the role that made him, and possibly the most honest one on offer: an actor known around the world as a sun-bleached treasure hunter is starting again as a man who has to earn his way back into the driver’s seat.

For five seasons of Netflix‘s Outer Banks, Stokes was John B, leader of the Pogues, a kid chasing his missing father’s gold across North Carolina’s barrier islands and then across half the map. The show found him an audience at the exact moment the world was stuck indoors. It ended with Stokes describing a body that had nearly given out on him and a plan, stated in public, to leave a teen franchise the way Robert Pattinson left his. Whether John B turns out to be a ceiling or a foundation is the question his next two projects now have to answer.

The name on his birth certificate is James Alexander Chase Stokes, and the city is Annapolis, Maryland, where he arrived on September 16, 1992. His parents, Jeff Stokes and Jennifer Canning, divorced when he was four. He moved with his mother to Canton, Georgia, and as a teenager to Orlando, Florida, where he went to Timber Creek High School. The first ambition was professional ice hockey. After that came a string of campuses rather than a plan: a degree from Valencia College, then time at the University of Central Florida and at Seminole State College.

Acting arrived in small pieces. He played Reed in a single episode of the first season of Stranger Things in 2016, a role that taught him how a set works and not much more, followed by three episodes of Daytime Divas, a part in The First and the 2018 horror film The Beach House. The money did not keep up with the ambition. On Jimmy Kimmel Live! in 2021 he described spending about two months sleeping in the back of his car in a Hollywood parking structure, changing spots every day so nobody would notice, and getting fired from a waiting job at Elton John’s post-Oscars party because he stopped working to watch the band. He has said he was broke and facing eviction when the audition that changed everything came along, and in February 2019 he first turned down the chance to read for Outer Banks before trying out for two parts, Topper and John B.

Chase Stokes on Outer Banks, Living in a Parking Garage & Getting Fired from Everything

Netflix released the first season on April 15, 2020, a few weeks after lockdowns emptied the streets. The coast, the treasure map and the class war between the working-class Pogues and the wealthy Kooks gave a housebound audience somewhere warm to go, and Stokes, square-jawed and earnest, sat at the center of it. The role cost him another one: he had shot the pilot of One of Us Is Lying as TJ, then lost the part when the second season of Outer Banks claimed his calendar. In 2021 he won the People’s Choice Award for drama TV star of the year and, with co-star Madelyn Cline, the MTV Movie & TV Award for best kiss. The two had confirmed their off-screen relationship in June 2020, appeared together in the video for Kygo and Donna Summer‘s “Hot Stuff” that September, and separated in October 2021, while the show required them to keep playing a couple.

The series kept growing outward. The second season arrived in July 2021, the third in February 2023 and the fourth in two parts in October and November 2024, after a month of filming in Morocco. That fourth season ended by killing JJ, Rudy Pankow’s character and John B’s closest friend, a decision showrunner Jonas Pate said had been planned since the end of the third. The fifth and final season shot from June to December 2025, partly in Dubrovnik, and premiered on August 20, 2026. It opened at number one on Netflix’s English-language TV list with 9.4 million views in its first week, the series’ fourth consecutive launch at the top, but well below the 15.5 million that the first part of the fourth season drew in October 2024. Netflix is still developing a prequel with creators Josh Pate, Jonas Pate and Shannon Burke.

The show’s reception was always split between the audience and everyone else. Each season needed a bigger, less plausible engine to keep the treasure hunt running, and by the end the plotting relied on coincidence more than character. Stokes never played it with a wink. That commitment is the reason the series worked for its fans, and it is also why it was so hard to picture him anywhere else: five seasons of total sincerity in the same wet T-shirt left casting directors one image to work from.

There is a less comfortable layer to the record. In May 2020, weeks after the show made him famous, old posts resurfaced in which he had used racist, homophobic and ableist language. On May 18 he shared an apology written in his phone’s notes app, admitting to “insensitive tweets” and writing, “This does not excuse my words, nor am I excusing myself.” Soon after, the tweets were gone and he was telling followers that “somebody obviously got access to my account.” The two explanations do not sit easily together.

The last season brought its own trouble behind the camera. In October 2025, TMZ reported, and Variety and People followed up, that co-creator Jonas Pate had allegedly grabbed, shaken and screamed at a female production assistant during filming in Dubrovnik, and that Stokes stepped in and separated them while Madelyn Cline tried to calm the situation. Netflix and Pate did not respond to People’s requests for comment. The episode sits awkwardly beside the “true family” Stokes has said the cast became, and it showed him taking a side on a set he had spent six years at the center of.

Away from the Pogues, the film résumé has been thinner than the fame. Netflix’s Uglies, released in September 2024, cast him as Peris, the best friend who has already been made beautiful, in an adaptation of Scott Westerfeld’s novel. Marked Men: Rule + Shaw, which reached theaters on January 22, 2025, gave him a romantic lead as the tattoo artist Rule Archer, and the military thriller Valiant One, released a week later, cast him as Captain Edward Brockman and credited him as a co-executive producer. None of them broke the association with John B, and Music Got Me Here, the drama about music therapist Tom Sweitzer that he joined in 2022, has not been released.

He knows the trap. Talking to People after the final season wrapped in December 2025, he said the cast wanted the story “to end on the right note versus [turning] four seasons into season nine and we’re going after aliens or something. We want to cut the cord before we lose the plot.” He also named the model he is following: “I always reference Robert Pattinson after he finished Twilight,” he said, describing an actor who took creative risks after a franchise. “That’s the blueprint for me. I want to show people that the floppy-haired beach boy from the Netflix young adult show is now 33 years old.” Of the finale, he said only that it ended “exactly how I was told when I started the show.”

The price of those years became public as the final season was released. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter in August 2026, Stokes said that when he left the show “my liver was failing, my kidney was failing. I had so many health issues that I had to figure out, and my brain was all out of whack.” He described “alarmingly low” testosterone, blood tests twice a month, transcranial magnetic stimulation and intensive therapy, and said that without the break he “probably, unfortunately, wouldn’t have been around much longer.” He now says he feels great for the first time in a long time. Fame itself, he added, came with no instructions; he remembered walking his dog in Los Angeles while a tour bus stopped beside him so its passengers could photograph him. “There isn’t really an idiot’s guide of how to navigate success in this space.”

His private life has rarely stayed private. He began dating country singer Kelsea Ballerini in January 2023, and the relationship played out in red carpets, anniversary posts and a turn in one of her music videos. They split in September 2025. In November, after reports that they had reconciled during a visit to the Croatian set, he posted Instagram stories saying he had been blocked and had done nothing wrong, a public response to a private breakup that drew criticism. They were back together by New Year’s Eve, and by February 2026 they had separated again. The show’s years also carried a loss off camera: in July 2022 his stand-in on the series, Alexander “AJ” Jennings, was killed in a hit-and-run near Charleston, South Carolina.

The next chapter is already being shot. In September 2026 AMC announced that production on Thunder Road was under way across Georgia, ahead of a 2027 premiere on AMC and AMC+. Created by John Fusco and run by Justified veteran Taylor Elmore, it is the first long-form drama made in partnership with NASCAR, built around the Whitlock racing dynasty: Dennis Quaid plays the patriarch Duane, with Maggie Grace, Matt Barr, West Duchovny and Michael Rooker in the cast. Stokes is a series regular, which means years, not weeks, as somebody other than John B.

The more personal bet is behind the camera. Stokes plans to make his feature directing debut with I Told the Sunset About You, a coming-of-age romantic thriller from his own original concept about a restless waitress whose routine breaks when she meets a drifter named Jameson heading for the Pacific coast. Monarch Media, the company behind Valiant One, is producing; no shooting date has been announced. Ronnie Whitlock gets a second chance on the track. The film will show whether Stokes, at 34, has a story of his own to tell once nobody is asking him where the gold is.