Hunter Parrish: Boy Wonder

At 22,  Hunter Parrish is making a career out of playing a sexed-up, rule-breaking rebel

The Plano, Texas, native seems to have a built-in aversion to superficiality, unlike many square-jawed Hollywood heartthrobs in the making. He’s single. He wants to record a folk album. He lives with a couple of his friends (and his Siberian husky) in a house rented on the cheap in Hollywood. He doesn’t even smoke, which seems impossible considering his day job: playing a drug-dealing, MILF-screwing teen on Showtime’s popular pot dramedy, Weeds. (Costar Kevin Nealon had to show him how to use a bong.) But Parrish’s boyish naïveté is what makes him so genuinely appealing. Even Mary-Louise Parker, his on-screen drug-kingpin mom, has said, “I want my son to be like Hunter.”

“I keep getting cast as this bad guy, and I don’t know why,” he says. He’s referring to his bully to Zac Efron in last year’s 17 Again, and his beloved-by-critics Broadway bout in the hypersexual Tony-winning indie musical Spring Awakening. This month, he appears as son to Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin in It’s Complicated, a Nancy Meyers–directed dysfunctional-family film also starring Steve Martin and John Krasinksi. “I had a healthy fear,” he says of his heavyweight costars. “A respectful fear.” Gosh, even the guy’s fears are polite.
VIA :Elle