Let it be known. Mr Lukas Gage wants your attention. “There’s something about me that gets off on creating a reaction,” the actor says when I meet him one afternoon in Los Angeles. “Whether it be good or bad, at least it’s starting a conversation. My biggest fear is to be boring.”

Gage is something of a provocateur. This is, after all, the man who made a name for himself in the first season of Mr Mike White’s HBO series The White Lotus by being on the receiving end of – and there is no polite way of saying it – a rim job. And the guy who went viral when, during a video audition, he overheard the director, who forgot to mute himself, callously remark, “These poor people live in these tiny apartments.” Gage interrupted him to reply, “I know it’s a shitty apartment, so give me this job so I can get a better one.”

Then there’s his latest project, playing Adam, the pompous and privileged socialite owner of a Soho House-like private club in London for the fourth season of Netflix’s bloodthirsty series You. In an early episode, Gage partakes in some watersports, decidedly not of the swimming pool variety.

“I saw something on TikTok where someone said, ‘Why is Lukas always in the craziest sexual situations on TV or doing the weirdest shit?’ And I’m just not too precious about it,” he says. “But that’s why I try not to read that stuff. I don’t mind being self-deprecating or being in on the joke, but I really wish the conversation was more about like, ‘Oh, this is a really different character from the one he played in The White Lotus.’ But instead, what gets highlighted is that three-second scene.”

Gage possesses a certain air of exhibitionism that directors and collaborators seem to pick up on. It is almost as if he’s courting controversy, something he blames partly on being a triple Gemini.

To sit with him over a mid-morning salmon bowl at Gjusta in Venice Beach is to see his mischievous side at work. It is in the devilish glint in his ocean-blue eyes, the unkempt finesse of his sandy blond hair and the way he can come off as both seductive and impenetrable in equal measure, answering a question but leaving plenty left unsaid. Perhaps in that, Gage channels the stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age and their ability to be somehow both an open book and totally opaque.

Take his dating life, which, on the day we meet, is making headlines. The week before, he posted an image of himself on Instagram with Mr Chris Appleton, the beefy hairstylist to the stars (Ms Kim Kardashian, JLo), in Mexico. The image sent the online rumour mill into overdrive. It seemed the two were an official item, but when pressed, Gage coyly demurs. “We’re just hanging out,” he says, as we walk from lunch towards a tattoo shop to get inked.

Gage has never confirmed his sexuality, despite plenty of rumours. The closest he has come is when someone on Twitter lamented that non-LGBTQIA+ actors, such as him, kept being hired for queer roles. As if conjured by magic, Gage materialised in the comments, cheekily replying, “u don’t know my alphabet,” and when they asked him to elucidate, Gage answered with a simple “no [heart emoji]”. Provocative, no doubt, but also a reminder that Gage seems to know that, in our social media age primed for oversharing, a little mystique can do wonders.

At the tattoo parlour, he is much more straightforward. He wants three small Ts, which stand for “time to trust”, just above his middle, fourth and little toes, facing up towards him. Along the outer edge of his left foot he adds the acronym WIEWO (what if everything works out?).

“I’m such a basic bitch,” he giggles as the artist, Mr Joey Hill, gently digs these letters into his flesh with a needle. And yet, call it manifestation, it does seem that things are working out for Gage. He recently wrapped a remake of the 1989 movie Road House, starring Mr Jake Gyllenhaal and the mixed marital arts fighter Mr Conor McGregor, and is now working on the next season of the critically acclaimed show Fargo. He will also be playing a villain on the HBO superhero show Dead Boy Detectives. And, this spring, he’s debuting Down Low at SXSW, the movie he co-wrote with Ms Phoebe Fisher, in which he stars as a male escort who upends the life of a repressed man, played by Mr Zachary Quinto.

In a way, his whole life has been an exercise in WIEWO. Raised in Encinitas, California, near San Diego, the youngest of four boys, Gage caught the acting bug after seeing the very adult Donnie Darko as a child. It sparked in him a longtime love of the horror genre, which he believes is often overlooked. He thinks Ms Mia Goth was robbed of an Oscar nomination for Pearl. (He is also a superfan of the Real Housewives franchise.)

His mother, a real estate agent, wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of driving Gage the two hours it took to get to Los Angeles for auditions. That is, until he landed his first role, in a warts commercial when he was about 11. “It was like, ‘Oh maybe this isn’t some pipe dream’,” he says.

Later, he moved to LA and slept in motel rooms or on his aunt’s couch. It was a chance encounter in 2011 with the actor Mr Luke Wilson, who was in White’s dramedy Enlightened at the time, which led to his first professional onscreen speaking role on that show (“Mike says he remembers, but it was such a small thing”).

Gage and Wilson developed a friendship and even worked on a short film together, after Gage told him he was an aspiring writer and actor. “I had that fearlessness,” he says. “I had nothing to lose. I just went up to him, really curious and started fanning out. I have to give it to him for giving me the time of day. He set me up with my first agent. He’s the reason I got a Sag card [the US equivalent of an Equity card].”

As for trust, Gage has been trying to tap in to some reserves of inner faith, especially when it comes to work. Take the set of You in London, where he learnt that the days he felt yielded his best results were the ones when he let go of all of his actorly prep and just allowed himself to live fully in the moment and trust his scene partners.

The first part of the season revolves around a murder mystery and no one in the cast was told who the murderer was. When Gage grilled the showrunners about his character’s arc, they just told him to trust himself and that whatever he believed was right. It was a freeing moment for him.

Back at the parlour, Gage walks me through his other tattoos – the words “shyshy” on the inside of his foot, a homage to his grandmother, the word “Hai” and some self-made markings on his toe. His side flank also features a large tattoo, which can be spotted in certain shots of The White Lotus. Many of them were made during various altered states, he reveals with a shy grin. What he does remember about getting that one was the way he felt the vibrating needle in his teeth.

Now that his career is on the up, he is being more judicious about where he gets his tattoos, hence the foot placement, though, if things go sideways, he could always make a living selling feet pictures, he quips. Gage likes the idea of not putting it all out there, of keeping his cards close to his chest while presenting the world with a toothy smile. You can see it in the flash of his eyes, in his impish grin. He says that when he’s working on a new role, he always gives the character a secret, something he knows that the audience won’t. It’s a fun little game he plays with himself.

“In the scene, I’ll have that in the back of my head,” he says. “I like knowing what the character’s not saying way more than what he is.”

Now, doesn’t that get your attention?