Why are we falling harder for fictional men than the actors who play them?

There was a time when having a celebrity crush meant having a celebrity crush. You picked an actor, singer, or athlete, plastered their pictures everywhere, watched every interview they gave, and knew far too much about their personal life. The person and the persona were usually one package. But now, that relationship has become much more specific. You can be completely indifferent to an actor in real life and still be deeply invested in the man he plays on screen. In fact, sometimes the actor barely matters once the character has taken over the internet. Ask anyone who spent the summer of 2025 defending Conrad Fisher from The Summer I Turned Pretty, for example. Chris Briney may play him, but the obsession was very specifically with Conrad. 

This is partly because fictional characters give us something celebrities cannot really offer: a controlled fantasy. We know that actors are real people with relationships, opinions, bad interviews, boring errands, and lives that exist completely outside the story. A fictional man, on the other hand, can remain exactly as he appeared in the scene that made us fall for him. He can be complicated, romantic, emotionally vulnerable, impossibly well dressed, the greenest flag, and conveniently unavailable all at once. More importantly, we can separate him completely from the person playing him. And the internet has made that separation even easier. An Instagram edit of Benedict Bridgerton does not need to contain Luke Thompson at all. It can simply be Benedict: the clothes, the flirting, the voice, the longing looks, the particular brand of chaos. 

The character can be your boyfriend without the actor having to be

The appeal of fictional men has always existed, of course. Mr Darcy, Heathcliff, Jack Dawson, and Don Draper did not become cultural crushes yesterday. What has changed is the way intensely specific fandom around these characters can now exist separately from the actors themselves. Social media allows people to build an entire personality around a fictional man through edits, memes, quotes, fan theories, and conversations. The character becomes almost like a standalone celebrity.

Look at Dr Robby from The Pitt. Noah Wyle has been famous for decades, but the current internet fascination has very little to do with revisiting Wyle's old celebrity status. It is about Dr Michael "Robby" Rabinovitch: the exhausted, competent, emotionally complicated doctor who spends his days trying to keep a chaotic emergency department functioning. 

The same thing happened with Off Campus, Prime Video’s adaptation of Elle Kennedy’s college romance series. Garrett Graham and Dean Di Laurentis quickly became internet boyfriends in their own right, with viewers obsessing over the characters and their very specific personalities, rather than simply the actors playing them. Garrett, the star hockey player with a softer side, and Dean, the flirtier, more chaotic member of the group, have both developed their own fandoms online. The show itself has also helped this along by giving viewers plenty of time with the Briar University hockey group outside their central romances. Garrett’s relationship with Hannah and Dean’s secret romance with Allie gave fans two very different versions of the fictional boyfriend fantasy, while the actors themselves exist completely separately from the characters.

That may be the real secret of the internet boyfriend. We are not only consuming the character anymore. We are participating in creating him.

We know the actor is real, which makes the character easier to love

There is also something strangely freeing about knowing that your fictional crush is, well... fictional. Celebrity culture has become much more intimate, and therefore much harder to romanticise blindly. We see celebrities posting their opinions, relationships, awkward interviews, political views, family lives, and everyday routines in real time. The mystery that once made movie stars feel larger than life has somewhere disappeared.

Characters, meanwhile, remain safely contained within the story. You can love Bridgerton brothers without caring whether you would like Jonathan Bailey or Luke Thompson at a dinner party. You can be obsessed with Conrad Fisher without needing to follow Chris Briney's dating life. You can spend an unreasonable amount of time thinking about Garrett Graham without pretending that Belmont Cameli himself is the man of your dreams.

And perhaps that distance is exactly what makes fictional men so satisfying. They give us the fantasy without asking us to know the person behind it. We can argue over whether Conrad was right, make edits of Anthony Bridgerton's most romantic moments, or invent entire futures for characters who technically exist only for a few hours of your screen time.

The modern internet boyfriend is less likely to be the man on the red carpet and more likely to be the man on the screen. The actor gets the credit; the character gets the obsession. And considering how quickly fandom can turn a fictional man into a meme, a discourse topic, and a full-time personality trait, that fictional man may become the bigger celebrity anyway.

Lead image: IMDb

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