Ansel Elgort: 'I'm super easy to hate'

Actor Ansel Elgort. Photo / AP

I'm really focused always on the prize," Ansel Elgort said in 2014. "I want to keep creating and making important things and that's what I want Ansel Elgort to be about."

Ansel Elgort, the star of Edgar Wright's high-speed heist thriller Baby Driver, speaks about himself in the third person quite often.

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His "brand", for that is how Ansel Elgort likes to refer to it, encapsulates not only acting, but also music, fashion and technology, and his interviews are usually peppered with humblebrags and name-drops and references to his own personal narrative.

Little of this is new for millennial celebrities, many of whom seem outrageously, fastidiously aware of their place in the celebrity ecosystem in a way that was rarely found in less image-conscious stars from decades gone by. But there's been a strange trend developing in Ansel Elgort's recent press for Baby Driver - a trend that has no defining source, not one particular incident, nor any specific piece of tabloid gossip.

Yet it remains something that interviewers have felt compelled to recently ask about: just what is it about Ansel Elgort that makes him so unlikeable?

The son of revered Vogue photographer Arthur Elgort and opera director Grethe Barrett Holby, Ansel Elgort grew up in the midst of the lofty Manhattan art scene, being hugged by Karolina Kurkova in his father's photo shoots, studying performing arts at the real-life school from Fame and partying in the Hamptons on the weekend. He also loved collecting Games Workshop-style miniature figurines, but not to Ansel Elgort's detriment as a budding ladies man.

"Girls love it when you have some weird nerdy thing in your room," he told GQ. "It makes you look less threatening, even though I'm, like, very threatening. I'm the most threatening guy ever."

At 18, amid his professional debut in the off-Broadway play Regrets, Ansel Elgort was the focus of a breathless Vogue story about his journey so far ("[Ansel] Elgort radiates the brooding magnetism of James Dean," the piece claimed, "uplifted by a kind of glinting purity"), earmarking him as one to watch. Film work quickly followed, in the 2013 remake of Carrie, Jason Reitman's hysterical internet panic flop Men, Women & Children, and the aborted Hunger Games riff Divergent.

While Ansel Elgort has never actively courted press attention, he radiates a certain something that has turned him into the current douche du jour, a spot previously inhabited by the likes of Shia LaBeouf, Miles Teller and Ashton Kutcher. For many, Ansel Elgort represents a venn diagram of Things Currently Disliked In Culture: the goofy-faced epicentre of wealth and privilege, obnoxious frat bro logic, Bieber-style fashion crimes, EDM music, buzzwords like "branding", "content" and "influencer", social media self-obsession, and brash, overpowering entitlement.

"I don't walk around calling attention to myself," Ansel Elgort recently told Billboard Magazine. "It's important to be able to blend in, otherwise you turn into a Hollywood douchebag. I'm sure plenty of people think I am one, too. I'm super easy to hate. But it's fine. It's hard to be liked and successful."

But it would be slightly disingenuous to claim Ansel Elgort's success is the source of his polarising reputation. While it's hard to find any famous person who isn't aggressively rail-roaded by weirdoes in internet comment sections, the dislike of Ansel Elgort in particular seems oddly specific, if unhelped by an array of slightly clueless interview quotes. ("Me and [frequent co-star] Shailene Woodley have a really platonic relationship. I've never once wanted her sexually, which is nice"; "If you can find a girl who you can go to an EDM concert with, have a conversation with, who will sit on the couch and watch you play GTA for three hours - and then you go to bed and have amazing sex? That should be your girlfriend.")

Despite the bad press, it was the young-adult weepy blockbuster The Fault in Our Stars that helped Ansel Elgort assemble a rampant fanbase, enabling him to launch a comedy phone app called Anselfie, garner an Instagram following of 8 million thirsty youths, and fashion influencer status. Whatever you do, though, don't even think about calling Ansel Elgort a model.

"I would do anything to get my Wikipedia page to not say I am a model," he tweeted in 2014. "Just because I've done photo shoots for acting like any other actor doesn't make me a model. Can one of you amazing people take that s--- off there?"

It was all part-and-parcel of building the Ansel Elgort universe, however.

"If you're an actor now and you want to be given big roles in studio films, they want to have an actor and an artist in their movie, but they also want a brand in their movie," Ansel Elgort said in 2014. "And in order to compete and be at the top level, you have to [be a brand], if you're young. I had a conversation with Kate Winslet about this, and she was saying, 'You don't need social media', and I said 'You don't need social media,' because you have six Academy Award nominations, but I'm just starting, and studios want that from me."

With that in mind, there's also more to Ansel Elgort than mere acting stardom. He has his own musical alter ego, one that arguably ranks a firm 10 on the Sasha Fierce scale of silliness. Before coming out of the closet as a budding pop star in 2016, Ansel Elgort secretly played festivals and recorded music under the pseudonym Ansølo ("I called myself Hanzolo, but when I told a pal of mine at school, he was like 'Dude, that's the stupidest name ever. Why don't you just call yourself Ansølo?' And I was like, 'Oh, word. That's cooler.' Hanzolo just sounds stupid.")

Ansølo wasn't just an effort to appear really, really cool. It was also a means to defend the EDM community from invasion by the Ansel Elgort brand and all the attention that comes with it.

"I really respect the dance music industry," Ansel Elgort told People Magazine. "I didn't want to come in and abuse the fact I was an actor and use my name to book gigs. I'm not getting into music because I need to - I have a bunch of movies coming out. I just do this because I love it."

He's found fans, too, who just couldn't believe that actor and musician Ansel Elgort was so talented. "When I first met Afrojack, and Nicky [Romero] told him I made [promotional single] Totem, he was, like, freaking out," he told GQ. "He told me that it was his favourite track to play at the time, and he couldn't believe that I'm an actor and a credible producer."

Earlier this year, however, Ansel Elgort appeared to change his mind about his musical anonymity, releasing the video for his debut single Thief under his real name. The song itself, a Weeknd-ish slice of sparkly dance pop, is fine, but it goes without saying that its accompanying video is the stuff of sexual nightmares.

Cavorting topless under a leather jacket, Elgort furrows his brow, bathes with a supermodel, furrows his brow, wildly shakes and gesticulates his arms and legs while bathed in the glow of millennial pink, furrows his brow, and overly enunciates his lip-syncing until he resembles a puppet whose mouth is being yanked in multiple directions by tiny cables. Somewhat understandably, its YouTube comments are a parade of jokes and giggle emojis.

Thief seems to get to the root of the Ansel Elgort conundrum. It's a horrible video, and Ansel Elgort's presence in it is abnormally cringeworthy. But he powers through, devoid of any of the self-consciousness that would likely convince any normal person that this was all a terrible, terrible idea. It's a level of confidence that's often alienating and enviable, an ability to feel entirely at ease in any persona and in any role that you put your mind to, and something so often only bred amongst wealth, privilege and pre-existing access.

Industry royalty, slightly clueless and ridiculous, with fingers in seemingly every flavour of pie -- Ansel Elgort isn't just an actor and a DJ and a fan of turtleneck sweaters, he's also Gwyneth Paltrow. And maybe that suddenly explains everything.

This article was originally published by The Telegraph.