After years of playing the earnest best friend, Adam DiMarco is breaking type. From The White Lotus to Overcompensating, and next in the Duffer Brothers’ upcoming horror series Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, he’s proving just how far his range can reach.

Adam DiMarco is busy. Perhaps it’s the grind of travel and time zones. The script-scanning and the self-tapes. Or maybe it’s the time commitments of interviews like this one. Regardless, lemon-ginger drink in hand, Adam is fending off a head-cold and soldiering on. 

Of course, sleep is often the first to be compromised in the face of momentum. Adam recently returned from Sundance Film Festival – a divergence from his typical “rhombus”-shaped travel route of Vancouver, Los Angeles, New York and Toronto – to perform hours of ADR for an undisclosed project (a layer of post-production where actors re-record audio in a studio setting to replace, add to or adapt the lines they delivered on set). This is in addition to the Canadian actor’s laugh-out-loud turn as douchebag-extraordinaire Peter on Benito Skinner’s Prime Video college comedy Overcompensating, and groom-to-be Nicky in Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen – a Duffer Brothers-helmed horror series created by TV writer Haley Z. Boston, premiering this spring.

One might imagine that his current career reality is the result of some meticulously devised strategy: oscillating between genres, networks, and cast types to showcase a very well-honed range. Adam insists the opposite. “There’s no set staircase of ‘You do this step, and then you do this step, and then you get to the floor,’” he says. “You just kind of have to ebb and flow along with it. There could be another strike coming, you never know, right?”

To say the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike came at an inopportune moment for Adam generally is an understatement. The longest action by actors in Hollywood history, some later-stage career entertainers might have secretly welcomed the break, but Adam was fresh off his first golden onscreen moment – season two of Mike White’s The White Lotus. Many have since heralded that installment of the iconic anthology as the best of the three. In February 2023, the cast won Best Ensemble at the SAG Awards for their performance, a major victory for the then-33-year-old Adam. However, four months later, the industry was in complete shutdown.

“It was tough just because that came at the tail end of all the hype, and I was feeling ready to jump into the next thing. I think I had a couple of projects that got cancelled during that time, so it just required a bit more patience…just knowing that everything is temporary.” In hindsight, it might have been a blessing. Hollywood loves a formula, and continuing to slot Adam back into his star-making role of Albie Di Grasso – the overly earnest, forever friend-zoned graduate – might have persisted. “I’d say in the beginning of my career, a lot of my typecasting was [being] the guy best friend of the lead girl who likes her, and she doesn’t like him back. I just was kind of like, ‘Okay, let’s try to do the best version of it.’ But I love character actors.”

Overcompensating allowed him to flex a different muscle. He will return later this year for the much-anticipated second semester at Yates University to play Peter – the overindulged frat president with copious social capital and a flagrant disregard for – if not disrespect for – pretty much any woman he encounters. Adam himself played hockey growing up, and thus is not unfamiliar with these types, though it’s a testament to both Adam’s portrayal and Benito’s writers’ room that Peter is still, somehow, charming. 

“I still like to ad-lib and improvise a lot when I’m working,” Adam explains, elaborating on an earlier confession that a famous scene in which his character ‘dabs up’ Benito incessantly was the result of some off-the-cuff experimentation. “I really like working in a space where you have that freedom to jazz it up. Sometimes you do something like that in an audition, and then when you get to set, they’re like, ‘Hey, we loved that in the audition, but now that we’re here, can you just say the words?’”

Adam has been auditioning for 15 years. After a year studying life sciences at McMaster University, he dropped out and gave himself a decade to find his footing in the industry. That decision ushered in his Disney era, where he appeared alongside network royalty like Zendaya and the “let’s make history” Debby Ryan. You might remember him as the rockstar crush of Debby’s Tara in 2012’s Radio Rebel simply because you loved the film, or because his onstage declaration of mutual affection sparked one of the most relentlessly recirculated memes in movie history. 

He’s certainly aware of that fact, as are most of his on-set peers born between 1990 and 1999. However, cutting one’s teeth in the chaos of the network’s nostalgic offerings has proven a rite of passage for much of his generation’s crop of foremost A-listers – from Miley to Selena, Zendaya and, of course, Mr Efron. It’s all part of the trajectory to the career sweet spots they now inhabit, in which they can hop between genres, roles and disciplines at whim, all while commanding their respective sets with the authority and assuredness of an actor now miles from those greener early days. “When I first started out acting, directors, producers, and executives were all older than me, and I felt more timid or nervous,” Adam explains. 

“But now as I get older, you get to be the same age as them or even older, and it’s like, ‘Oh, I feel way more comfortable,’” he says. “It helps just in terms of references. Although I do find there are micro generations within the generations, too. The references can get so niche.”

In conversation, Adam is an amalgam of Radio Rebel’s Gavin and Albie: soft-spoken, self-reflective and a little shy – a heartthrob defined by kind eyes rather than Tim Riggins’s surliness, with passionately progressive politics and a curl pattern that is the stuff of TikTok-tutorial legend. The pursuit of creative control across multiple disciplines, however, reveals a little more edge. He writes, performs, and co-produces his own music and is currently developing scripts as both a writer and producer. “Writing is hard, but it is so fun to co-write with someone that you get along with,” he says. “I’ve been thinking about [original IP] a lot with Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen and how cool it is that it’s just this new concept from the fucked up mind of [writer] Haley Z. Boston. [With original IP], audiences don’t know what to expect going into it.”

Adam was enthralled by the premise of Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen, which follows a bride and groom in a paranoia-underscored week leading up to their wedding. He bonded with Something Very Bad’s producers, the Duffer Brothers, over board games, and after being gifted Traitors-reminiscent murder-mystery game,, Adam hosted them for a games night. He played moderator. 

The role of the “traitor” in the Peacock behemoth reality show appeals to Adam more than the dutifully deductive “faithful”, because he likes to know where his allegiances lie. Perhaps, so he can fully get behind his team. Like he did when Benito Skinner rang him during the Overcompensating press tour, with the prank revelation that he, himself, was bailing on the remainder of season one’s promotion to fly to Scotland to film that very game of deception (for the entirely reasonable sum of $6m). Adam didn’t shut him down. “I was like, ‘Oh, okay, well yeah, I thought you wanted to promote our show, but take the day to think about it. It’s a lot of money,” he laughs. 

It’s a window into the level-headed, objective brand of friendship you get a sense Adam can be depended upon for. A humility that, naturally, translates to his navigation of his career too. There’s no exaggeration, no self-aggrandising, despite the clear wins of recent years. Adam DiMarco holds multiple truths at once – gratitude for the work, exhaustion from the grind – and speaks to them without varnish or restraint. Ultimately, that seems to be where Adam is most at ease: in the truth. And on screen, it may be exactly what makes him so damn believable. “I don’t know if I’ll ever feel fully comfortable [in the industry],” he says. “I just always considered paying my rent a success. If I’m an actor and I don’t need another job, that’s a win.”

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Photography Daniel Prakopcyk
Styling Jordan Dorso
Words Beatrice Hazlehurst
Grooming Candice Birns at Forward Artists
On-site Producer Dakota Griffin
Fashion Assistant Tyler Doty
Videography Robert Marrero

Senior Editor Ella Bardsley
Features Editor Ben Tibbits
Assistant Editor Aswan Magumbe
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