LOUIS VUITTON MEN’S top and pants and PANDORA bracelet and rings. — **LOUIS VUITTON MEN’S** top and pants and **PANDORA** bracelet and rings.

Picture this: you’re in your living room, winding down in your La-Z-Boy recliner, feet propped to the max to relieve some of that lower back pain. You’ve got a beverage in one hand and the television remote in the other, mundanely flipping through the channels. A few minutes later you randomly land on a network and see one of your old coworkers from years ago on screen. A bit bizarre. Okay, but now picture this: you’re in the same relaxed position, but you’re Polish, and your channel surfing reveals your former colleague—a 17-year-old Scottish hotel maid from 2012 that you used to dance to ABBA music with—dressed as a pirate on Disney Channel.

“I was a maid with, like, old women,” the on-screen marauder/off-screen former housekeeper, better known to the world as Thomas Doherty, recalls on our Zoom call about his professional career background “That was like six o’clock in the morning,” he continues, “going to breakfast and then cleaning the bedrooms and changing sheets on massive pads. I’d be hungover because I was a teenager. Sometimes I’d go for a sleep on the beds.”

DIOR MEN’S jacket and pants and PANDORA rings. — **DIOR MEN’S** jacket and pants and **PANDORA** rings.

LOUIS VUITTON MEN’S top and PANDORA bracelet and rings. — **LOUIS VUITTON MEN’S** top and **PANDORA** bracelet and rings.

HERMÈS pants and PANDORA necklace and bracelet. — **HERMÈS** pants and **PANDORA** necklace and bracelet.

The now 26-year-old has worked a wide array of jobs. Self-employed car washer, gay bar employee, paperboy, and the one you probably know him as—actor. Doherty first appeared on Disney Channel in 2016 in the British TV series The Lodge, but it was his role as Harry Hook in Disney’s television movies The Descendants 2 and 3 that truly propelled him to recognition. This year he is starring in the HBO Max Gossip Girl reboot as Max Wolfe, the hedonistic, pansexual son of two accomplished gay men (a theatre impresario and a landscaper, respectively).

Taking on a role in such an already be loved television show comes with pressure and challenges, but the most difficult part for Doherty wasn’t living up to devout fan’s expectations—although that was important too—it was getting the accent down. “ I’ve never done the American accent before and having to act and think about an accent is really, really hard.” Not having a New York City accent wasn’t the only part of being from Scotland that influenced Doherty’s relationship with the show. “I never grew up with Gossip Girl. I was 12 when it came out,” he says. “I was playing soccer, and I honestly don’t even really know if it made it over to Scotland. I watched it by coincidence when I was filming in Georgia—it wasn’t a coincidence, I consciously put it on, and I just got hooked on it, because my girlfriend at the time, she loved it. It’s fun, it’s glamorous, it’s like escapism.”

SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO top and pants and PANDORA bracelet and rings. — **SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO** top and pants and **PANDORA** bracelet and rings.

Indeed, the sultry and salacious show is all of those things and more. Privilege and power will always win in the end: a statement spoken in the show’s trailer. “Unfortunately, I do think that, for whatever reason,” Doherty remarks when asked about the show’s credo, “the way that our minds as humans are collectively geared, it does help. It does happen a lot. But I don’t think it does always win in the end. I think it actually leads to a lot of sadness and inauthenticity.”

First impressions tell you a lot about a person, and ‘inauthentic’ is the last word most would use to describe Doherty. Although the random people he plays video games with online seem to have slightly different first impressions. “I was playing Fortnite and some girl was talking to me, she’s younger and she was being like, ‘You sound like Harry Hook from The Descendants.’ And I was like, ‘It is me!’ It is me,” he smiles. “She was like, ‘No it’s not’— she didn’t believe me. I was like, ‘What do you think about him?’ She was like, ‘He looks like a demon!’”

We’re all of course free to use whatever adjectives we’d like to describe Thomas Doherty, but demonic isn’t one I gravitate towards. He engages in conversations and cares what you have to say. He takes a few moments to think before answering questions… or before showing off his tattoo collection. Out of his thirteen pieces of body art, his favorite is a Lord of the Rings quote wrapped around his ankle that reads: All you have to decide is what to do with the time that’s given to you. In hearing this, one can’t help but flashback to those early morning hours of Doherty cleaning hotel rooms and wonder if it was the cleaning of sheets, or that of toilets, that gave way to his alternatively spending his time acting. Then again, it might have been all that ABBA.