Noah Centineo and the long fight to stop being Peter Kavinsky

Noah Centineo

Photo: Unknown / , via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 9, 1996 Miami, Florida, United States
Occupation	Actor
Known for	To All the Boys I've Loved Before, Black Adam, To All the Boys: Always and Forever
Awards	MTV Movie & TV · MTV Movie & TV (shared) · People's Choice

On the weekend Street Fighter opened at number one in North America, the man playing Ken Masters had spent weeks telling interviewers that his version of Capcom’s blond brawler is a hot mess underneath the swagger, a fighter whose bravado covers an unhealed break with his old training partner Ryu. It was a revealing pitch from Noah Centineo. For most of the people buying tickets he is still Peter Kavinsky, the fake boyfriend who turns real in Netflix‘s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, and nearly every role he has chased since has been an argument with that boy.

The argument started a long way from Hollywood. Centineo was born in Miami and grew up in Boca Raton, in a family of Italian and Pennsylvania Dutch descent. He went to an arts middle school, played soccer at Boca Raton Community High School and as a teenager moved to Los Angeles, finishing at Agoura High School while going to auditions. His first lead was in a family film about a dog, The Gold Retrievers. Then came the Disney Channel circuit: a recurring part as Dallas in Austin & Ally, guest spots on Shake It Up and Jessie, and the TV movie How to Build a Better Boy.

The job that taught him the trade was an inherited one. In 2015, when Freeform’s The Fosters needed a new Jesus Adams Foster for its third season, the part went to Centineo, then 19 — he was born on May 9, 1996 — replacing Jake T. Austin in a role the audience already knew with another face. He stayed through the end of the series and returned for its spin-off, Good Trouble. Replacing an actor mid-run is a thankless assignment; it rewards whoever can make a viewer stop noticing the switch, and he did.

Netflix turned that ease into a business model. In a single summer the platform released To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, adapted from Jenny Han‘s novel, with Centineo opposite Lana Condor, and Sierra Burgess Is a Loser, where he played the catfished Jamey. The Perfect Date followed. Kavinsky made him the kind of star that streaming produces in a weekend: a face shared across millions of phones before most of his viewers knew his name. He won the MTV Movie & TV Award for breakthrough performance and shared Best Kiss with Condor.

The studios wanted to know whether that audience would buy a ticket. The early answers were no. He took a supporting part in Elizabeth Banks‘s Charlie’s Angels, which Variety and USA Today listed among the biggest box-office disappointments of its year. He was cast as He-Man in Sony’s Masters of the Universe and left the project in April 2021. Years later he explained on the podcast Happy Sad Confused that the studio kept reworking it — “They wanted to keep tweaking and tweaking” — until his contract simply ran out. Nicholas Galitzine eventually wore the armour.

He closed the Kavinsky trilogy with To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You and To All the Boys: Always and Forever, then went looking for muscle. In Black Adam he played the size-shifting Atom Smasher next to Dwayne Johnson, in a superhero film that failed to recover its cost. On Netflix he led and executive produced The Recruit, created by Alexi Hawley, as Owen Hendricks, a rookie CIA lawyer dragged into field work. TheWrap reported that the platform asked the show to dial down its romantic-comedy tone in favour of action. Netflix cancelled it about a month after the second season arrived.

Here is the part his franchise run tends to hide. Centineo’s most persuasive screen work of recent years has come in the smallest frames he has accepted. He takes a small part in Dream Scenario, Kristoffer Borgli’s satire starring Nicolas Cage, and joins the ensemble of Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland‘s Warfare, a real-time account of a Navy SEAL platoon pinned down in Ramadi, where nobody gets a star entrance. His best showing came in Union County, Adam Meeks’s first feature, in which he plays Jack, a man working through a court-mandated drug programme in rural Ohio alongside Will Poulter, among non-professional actors drawn from a real county drug court. The film premiered at Sundance in January 2026 to warm reviews and earned modest grosses when Oscilloscope released it in August. The industry keeps offering him bigger costumes; the evidence so far says he is sharper without them.

He has also started to behave like someone building a career rather than waiting for one. He executive produced Union County and Our Hero, Balthazar, Oscar Boyson’s satire about a privileged teenager who goes looking for an online troll, in which he plays a life coach opposite Jaeden Martell; the film was runner-up for the audience award at Tribeca before reaching American cinemas in March 2026. Away from sets, he co-founded the nonprofit Favored Nations with his friend Josh Heller and runs it as chief executive. In 2020 he spoke openly about the years between 17 and 21, a stretch he called “a really dark time” of drinking and drugs, and about getting sober after his 21st birthday.

Street Fighter is the largest test he has taken on. Kitao Sakurai’s film, co-financed by Legendary Entertainment and Capcom and released by Paramount on October 16, 2026, puts him at the centre of an ensemble that includes Andrew Koji as Ryu, Jason Momoa and 50 Cent. It opened with roughly $31 million in North America, enough for first place but below the studio’s hopes, against a net budget of $82 million and mixed reviews. Centineo has said he would play Ken again: “There’s nothing about it that I wouldn’t want to do over and over and over again.”

He has already shot his next wager on spectacle. For Netflix he stars opposite Sydney Sweeney in Jim Mickle’s live-action Gundam, as rival pilots on opposite sides of a war between Earth and its space colonies; filming wrapped in Queensland this year, and Netflix has not set a date.

The heaviest bet arrives on June 4, 2027, when Lionsgate releases John Rambo, Jalmari Helander’s Vietnam origin story, with Centineo as the young soldier Sylvester Stallone made famous and David Harbour as Trautman, the officer who shapes him. Its screenwriters, Rory Haines and Sohrab Noshirvani, also rewrote Black Adam. That film asked whether Peter Kavinsky could stand next to a superhero. This one asks him to carry a name older than he is, and to make audiences forget, at last, the boy from the Netflix romance.