Chase Stokes Is Starting a Bold New Chapter: On “Outer Banks, Uglies,” and Reviving the Movie Star

After five years of playing John B., the actor opens up about plans to take his career to the next level — all while 'building a life' with girlfriend Kelsea Ballerini

A smile spreads across Chase Stokes’s face 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 drama Outer 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 film Uglies, based on the bestselling dystopian 2005 novel, premiering Sept. 13. He’ll also play a tattoo artist with a fiery temper in The Notebook director Nick Cassavetes’s upcoming romance Marked Men and an army captain in the thriller Valiant One in early 2025.

“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.”

There’s a readiness in Stokes to take on the position of Hollywood’s next leading man that’s personified as he walks—er, hops—into the three spotlights splashed on the concrete floor of today’s photo shoot. As he poses in a brown AMI Paris blazer and a fuzzy sweater on a leather armchair, comparisons to Paul Newman are thrown around by members of his team. He oozes just the right amount of Newman’s rugged sex appeal as he kicks up his Frye boots and bites on a silver necklace.

“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 seeing Glen Powell right now just absolutely having a moment [with Twisters following the success of Anyone 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 Reynolds and Ryan Gosling. I want to shoot for the moon and land somewhere among the stars with those guys.”

But Stokes isn’t ready to say goodbye to John B. just yet. Season 4 of Outer Banks premieres on Oct. 10 and catches up with his character’s group of friends, the Pogues, after their discovery of the golden city of El Dorado.

“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.” 

A fifth season has yet to be announced, but no matter what happens, Stokes is grateful for the foundation the show has provided him. “This show has been my baby for five, almost six years now, and being in that pressure cooker for so long, you kind of know what it takes,” he says of bringing his career to the next level. “It's just about finding the right people to do it with in the next chapter.”

Solidly in his next chapter is Stokes’s girlfriend of a year and a half, country star Kelsea Ballerini. While the high-profile couple typically splits their time between Nashville, where Ballerini, 30, has a house, and South Carolina, where Stokes shoots Outer Banks, the two have temporarily set up a home base in L.A., where Ballerini is currently coaching her first season of The Voice in 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 an inoperable heart cancer). After work, their evenings together typically involve cooking—Stokes’s go-to is skirt steak with a homemade chimichurri–and bingeing Lost.

“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 since Outer Banks premiered 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.

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 like Ghost and Dirty Dancing when he was a kid, and he loved Newman and Robert Redford’s Butch 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.'"

In 2012 he graduated from Valencia College in Florida, and five years later he moved to L.A. to pursue acting. After booking a role on the TV show Tell Me Your Secrets in 2018, Stokes quit his bartending gig to focus on auditioning full stop.

“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 join Outer Banks, he had to borrow money from his mom to get to the audition in South Carolina. Needless to say, he nailed it.

Despite his initial hesitation to join Outer Banks (he thought it was a remake of Steven Spielberg’s 1985 film The Goonies, and “I had this huge fear of destroying something beloved by the world,” he says), the actor quickly got on board after reading the script. Stokes, like his character, did a lot of growing up during the show. His first paycheck was only about $1,300 because he mistakenly claimed nine dependents. “Sometimes you slip and fall on your face, and you learn the hard way,” he says.

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.

Since season 2, Stokes’s character has been married to Sarah Cameron, played by his ex-girlfriend Madelyn Cline. Despite their breakup in 2021, “we don’t skip a beat in the world of John B. and Sarah, and I think that’s rare,” Stokes says. “It was a great relationship, and now we’re exactly where we started: incredibly talented costars.”

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 often show off their love for 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.”

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 coaching The 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 on Patterns get 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 from Outer Banks, and I won't ever let myself be that.”

Cue his Cassavetes moment. Getting to work with The Notebook director on Marked Men was 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-night Uglies shoots, he would often add moments of levity, says his costar Joey 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.”

About to turn 32, “[my] 30s are my favorite so far. You make all your mistakes in your 20s, and you figure out who you are a little bit,” he says, by way of advice.

And these days he’s embracing it all. Outer Banks has 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 binge Lost.”

Credits

Photographer Beau Grealy

Cinematographer Eric Longden

Groomer Marissa Machado

Stylist Avo Yermagyan

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