Chase Stokes Is Starting a Bold New Chapter: OnOuter Banks, Uglies,and Reviving the Movie Star

Mar. 15, 2025

A smile spreads acrossChase Stokes’sface as he lowers himself into a folding director’s chair on the set of his PEOPLE shoot in Los Angeles in early August. “Something that stands true on every film set is these canvas, uncomfortable seats,” he says. “Every time I sit in this chair, I get a little bit giddy because it’s either the start of a new chapter or new relationship.”

It’s fitting, then, that the actor, 31, says he’s entering what he describes as “chapter 2” of his career. After five years of playing the beloved John B. Routledge in Netflix’s teen dramaOuter Banks, Stokes is ready to stretch out of the expected. “Being 31 now, it’s kind of that time,” he says.

And he’s already started making moves: He next stars in the Netflix filmUglies, based on the bestselling dystopian 2005 novel, premiering Sept. 13. He’ll also play a tattoo artist with a fiery temper inThe NotebookdirectorNick Cassavetes’supcoming romanceMarked Menand an army captain in the thrillerValiant Onein early 2025.

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Beau Grealy

“There really isn’t anything off-limits,” says Stokes, who also has plans to produce. “I’m making sure that I’m really attacking my career with no restraints.”

“When I look at my career 40 years from now, I would hope to have 10 percent of what Paul did,” he says later. But with so much discourse recently about the dearth of true movie stars—and whether an actor alone can still draw audiences to the movie theater—is Stokes chasing a futile goal?

“I don’t think the movie star will ever die,” he says confidently. “We’re seeingGlen Powellright now just absolutely having a moment [withTwistersfollowing the success ofAnyone but You]. If you look at the generation before us, there are four different Chrises that are massive movie stars; you’ve got multiple Ryans—Ryan ReynoldsandRyan Gosling. I want to shoot for the moon and land somewhere among the stars with those guys.”

“This season in particular is our biggest yet scope-wise, and it’s also a season that has, I think, the most consistent heartbeat through the middle,” he says. “You really get back in touch with these characters and see them in a way that you did in the first season.”

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Solidly in his next chapter is Stokes’s girlfriend of a year and a half, country starKelsea Ballerini. While the high-profile couple typically splits their time between Nashville, where Ballerini, 30, has a house, and South Carolina, where Stokes shootsOuter Banks, the two have temporarily set up a home base in L.A., where Ballerini is currently coaching herfirst season ofThe Voicein Universal City, and Stokes has work commitments around Hollywood.

“That was kind of our thing: Let’s just set up shop versus being on planes, for the boys,” he says, talking about his dog Milo and Ballerini’s dog Dibs (who, Ballerini recently announced, has aninoperable heart cancer). After work, their evenings together typically involve cooking—Stokes’s go-to is skirt steak with a homemade chimichurri–and bingeingLost.

“We wanted to set up a sense of real life out here for a little while,” he says. “When you’re constantly bouncing around all the time, it’s hard to ground yourself. We’re just trying to find a new sense of normalcy.”

Ever sinceOuter Bankspremiered in 2020, life has been a whirlwind for Stokes. Fame came suddenly as the show rose in popularity amid the COVID-19 lockdown. To this day, people often come up to him and call him John B.

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He’s glad that fame came at age 27, following years of struggling as a working actor. “I don’t think I would’ve been able to handle childhood success,” he says.

Born in Maryland to mom Jennifer, a stay-at-home mom turned pharmacy technician, and dad Jeff, a fitness industry entrepreneur, Stokes first moved to Georgia and then Florida in eighth grade with his mom after his parents divorced. His grandmother introduced him to movies likeGhostandDirty Dancingwhen he was a kid, and he loved Newman andRobert Redford’sButch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

But before Stokes turned to acting, he wanted to be a professional ice hockey player. Because of injuries—and being accident prone—he had “to hang it up at 17,” he says.

He became interested in working behind the camera while taking a television production class in high school. Eventually Stokes started doing the morning announcements on-camera.

“I didn’t feel comfortable being in front of the cameras, so I just made a fool of myself,” says Stokes. “Everybody was like, ‘Wow, you’re kind of funny.'"

“I said, ‘Okay, if I want to do this as a career, it has to be my career. I can’t commit to working bartending shifts anymore,’” he recalls. He lived in his car for some time while struggling to make it as an actor. “I probably called my mom every three weeks like, ‘I’m done. I can’t do this,’” he says. “She was like, ‘Nope, keep going.’” By the time he heard about the chance to joinOuter Banks, he had to borrow money from his mom to get to the audition in South Carolina. Needless to say, he nailed it.

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He also learned recognition comes at a cost. “You go from a level of ‘Oh my gosh, it’s working’ to ‘Oh my gosh, now I want a sense of my privacy back,’" he says.

As he now navigates his relationship with Ballerini in the public eye, Stokes says, he’s “content with how much I give and how much I keep for myself.”

While he and Ballerini oftenshow off their lovefor each other on social media in cuddly Instagram photos and silly TikToks, “I don’t owe it to anybody to put intense or super personal things out there,” he says. “I try not to take it that serious.”

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Case in point: Ballerini recently posted a video to her Instagram Stories of her and Stokes singing some throwback country songs on a drive through L.A. “I’m the a—— in L.A. who drives the giant pickup truck listening to Brad Paisley,” he jokes.

Several weeks after the photo shoot, Stokes has resettled into life with Ballerini in Los Angeles, but they’re keeping their Nashville mentality.“We have big careers and a big world around us, but we like to keep it very simple and very small,” he says. That means sometimes Ballerini will “come and hang out on-set with me, or I’ll go into the studio with her.”

In addition to coachingThe Voice, Ballerini is also readying to release a new album,Patterns, on Oct. 25. “It is unbelievable,” Stokes says. “It is a master class in songwriting. To watch her on the back porch writing and see what it is now, it is the most fascinating thing.”

Stokes first met Ballerini after she slid into his DMs in December 2022, four months after she filed for divorce from musician Morgan Evans. At the time, Stokes was shooting a movie out of the country. “We spent a lot of time texting back and forth, but I think there was definitely an immediate moment of, ‘I really like this girl, and I would like to get to know her better,’” he says. “My mom got remarried later in life, and she always said that as you get older, you understand your values and the things that you like and don’t like.…It’s really about building a life together.”

Stokes says he and Ballerini have a rule to not go more than three weeks without seeing each other. “We don’t BS each other,” he says. “If we need to make the effort to show up when one’s across the country, we do it.” Though some of the songs onPatternsget personal about their relationship, the album has “been something that has inspired me to get deeper into myself, into my art,” he says. “I want to challenge myself in the ways that she constantly is. I don’t want to just be the guy fromOuter Banks, and I won’t ever let myself be that.”

Cue his Cassavetes moment. Getting to work withThe Notebookdirector onMarked Menwas a “holy grail” opportunity. When Cassavetes spoke to Stokes on the phone for the first time, the director says he was “really surprised at how serious a guy” Stokes was.

“Chase always wants to please, has a strong take when he comes in and is usually right on the money,” Cassavetes says. “So my job became very easy. I told him he could do whatever he wanted. He’s fun to look at. He’s charming as hell. He makes you believe in the good in people, and he’s just a very watchable actor. I’d want to do like 10 films with him.”

On-set, Cassevetes also helped Stokes—who has dealt with anxiety attacks since he was 15—cope with impostor syndrome. “I struggle with where I fit in the world, and he was like, ‘You got this, man,’” the actor says. “That was really, really powerful."

Stokes says “lots of therapy,” including equine therapy, has helped with the “ebbs and flows” of his anxiety, and the experience with Cassavetes led him to carefully study opportunities that come his way: “Who’s making the film? Who are the producers behind it? Who are the artists I’m working across from?”

Stokes is as apt to hype up others. On late-nightUgliesshoots, he would often add moments of levity, says his costarJoey King. “Any night shoot we had, when we were so tired he was always the one to make us all feel so great,” recalls King. “His humor and good nature is just so effortless, so he always kept the spirits up.”

And these days he’s embracing it all.Outer Bankshas been “a big, beautiful chapter of my life, and I will forever be thankful for it,” he says. “I’m excited to potentially continue to tell that story, but I’m equally as excited for the opportunities that I can’t even talk about yet. It’s been a lot of learning, a lot of struggling, a lot of laughable moments, but all of it was leading to being able to say, Here I am.”

And when it’s time to retreat, he says, “I’m going to go home and bingeLost.”

CreditsPhotographerBeau GrealyCinematographerEric LongdenGroomerMarissa MachadoStylistAvo Yermagyan

Credits

PhotographerBeau GrealyCinematographerEric LongdenGroomerMarissa MachadoStylistAvo Yermagyan

PhotographerBeau Grealy

CinematographerEric Longden

GroomerMarissa Machado

StylistAvo Yermagyan

source: people.com