Warning: Some spoilers ahead for My Life With the Walter Boys season 2.
Corey Fogelmanis hasn’t thought about Girl Meets World in a while. “It feels like a long time ago,” Fogelmanis says over breakfast at Baby Blues Luncheonette in Brooklyn.
Mostly, he remembers the commute. How his mom would drive him — in between his sister’s soccer and lacrosse practices and her own job, since his dad was driving for UPS at night and sleeping during the day — from his hometown of Camarillo, California, to Los Angeles, a little over an hour away.
He was 17 when Disney Channel’s Boy Meets World spinoff (starring Rowan Blanchard, Sabrina Carpenter, and Fogelmanis) ended. That same year, he graduated high school. The world was opening up to him, in all the good and bad ways it does when you’re on the cusp of adulthood. Anything was possible.
“It felt like I had a lot to prove,” he says, alluding to the reality that post-Disney roles didn’t come right away. “It also felt like I had a lot to learn, too… There was a long moment where it was like, ‘Oh, you need to show people what else you can do before they're going to let you do it.’”
Today, Fogelmanis is freshly 26 years old (an August Leo), living on his own in Brooklyn, and watching Girls for the first time. He’s experiencing something of an artist’s dream with his current mix of projects: a big-budget Hollywood feature (David Fincher’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood sequel), a soapy, fandom-oriented Netflix drama (My Life With the Walter Boys season 2), a queer coming-of-age drama (Tommy Dorfman’s directorial debut I Wish You All the Best), and a series of music videos with his close friend Conan Gray.
Fogelmanis spent the intervening years studying acting (first at Anthony Meindl's Actor Workshop in LA, and then a semester at the New School) and being out in the world. Now, it’s open to him once more.
Fogelmanis arrives at Baby Blues on the first crisp morning of fake-fall in New York City; he’s wearing a light brown sweater for the occasion, soft and warm, with wired headphones strewn around his neck. He dreams of the leaves changing color, and of cinnamon rolls at Sunday Morning in the East Village, but they’ll have to wait until the next time he’s back in town. This is the first time he’s been working on different projects simultaneously. When he filmed My Life With the Walter Boys season 1, he moved to Calgary and lived there for four or five months. Now, as he heads back up to do season 3, there’ll be a lot more back and forth.
“I feel like it's just what I've always wanted,” Fogelmanis says. He’s recently been filming The Adventures of Cliff Booth, the Fincher movie with Brad Pitt reprising his role, and he says it’s “the coolest experience” he’s ever had. He compares it to creating a painting: every detail, every brush stroke, is important. “It's just all so intentional, even down to the pieces of hair that are hanging down my forehead,” Fogelmanis says.
He loves to be a small piece of something larger than himself. He first noticed that desire when he did community theater as a kid, and then later when he was in middle school band with his childhood best friend, playing the clarinet. “It was just going somewhere every day and getting to be a tiny little cog in this whole thing we would make,” Fogelmanis says. That mindset served him well on the set of Girl Meets World, and he acknowledges that it has carried over into his career now.
“I personally really like being told what to do. I think maybe being an actor as a kid kind of conditioned me in that way because there were very little conversations [about] like, ‘How do you imagine this part being played?’ It was like, ‘Do this,’” he says. “I got very comfortable at just doing as I was told and making it natural. As I've gotten older and become an adult in these spaces, there's a lot more consideration for what I want to do. [But] I'm like, ‘No I just want you to tell me.’”
That lack of control is part of why he just has to laugh when scenes from his time as Farkle Minkus (son of Stuart Minkus) recirculate on the internet. “I was a literal child just saying whatever I was there to say,” he says. When I mention a comment on the I Wish You All the Best trailer that reads, “Jughead, Farkle, and Annabeth from Percy Jackson all in the same movie is crazy” — referring to Cole Sprouse, Fogelmanis, and Alexandra Daddario — he smiles. “That’s so funny. When a name is more memorable than your own name, it's just going to stick more.”
Without necessarily intending it, Fogelmanis’s last three roles have been queer people living their lives outside of LA and New York. In Walter Boys, his character Nathan is navigating his first gay relationships in rural Colorado alongside the show’s main love triangle; in Conan Gray’s music videos for Wishbone, Fogelmanis creates a romantic Texas dreamscape as the Brando to Gray’s Wilson; and in the YA novel adaptation I Wish You All the Best, teenage protagonist Ben rebuilds their life after they come out to their parents as nonbinary and are subsequently kicked out of their home in North Carolina.
“It's important to me that I am a part of things that are good for people, and are affirming, and also just help people see all the sides of something,” Fogelmanis says. “And so I love, as an artist, that I'm doing these different things all the time, and that it's not just this stereotype of ‘gay best friend.’”
In Walter Boys season 2, for example, Nathan’s presence feels a bit bigger, and we finally get to see him make some bad decisions (season 1 is a bit more Love, Simon-esque). He begins the season continuing his relationship with Skylar (Jaylan Evans), but is drawn in by newcomer Zach (Carson MacCormac) with whom he eventually cheats on Skylar — only to find out Zach was playing him all along.
“Nathan is very much susceptible to the attention of others,” Fogelmanis says. “It was hard to justify, actually, some of those things that I do… I remember when I first got those scenes, I was talking to Jaylan and we were trying to figure it out because we almost didn't really get a chance to see them be a thing that long, and is it a missed opportunity or whatever? But I like that we get to see someone that's not perfect because there's so many different types of gay people, and I think it's important that you see them in happy relationships and see them love right and love wrong and make mistakes.”
As for season 3, well, don’t expect Skylar and Nathan to get back together so easily, if at all. “I don't know exactly what season 3 has for him yet, I don't know everything, but hopefully there's some alone time for him… [Skylar and Nathan] might not stay together, but we likely will be friends for the rest of our lives. After Nathan grows up a little bit and takes accountability.”
Corey Fogelmanis and Conan Gray’s friendship origin story actually started with Teen Vogue. Fogelmanis says Gray spotted him at a Teen Vogue party in 2019 during Fashion Week, and though they didn’t get a chance to meet, Gray followed him on Instagram. They met up for the first time in Central Park a few months later, “near the ice skating rink that’s in Serendipity,” he says. At the time, Gray was finishing up his debut album Kid Krow. They’ve been friends ever since.
When Gray FaceTimed him to ask about acting in the music video for “This Song,” the first single off his 2025 record Wishbone, Fogelmanis missed the call. Gray followed up with a text. “He was like, ‘I had this idea, and if you want to do it, I would love to do it with you.’ I was like, ‘Absolutely yes.’ I was such a big fan of him. We had actually tried to do something together for his last album, but it just didn't work out. It was kind of just perfect how it did end up happening. The music is just so great, exactly what I love from him, which is just so personal and vulnerable. I was very honored.”
When they made the “This Song” music video, Fogelmanis says there was only one planned. “Then we had a great time, and they put together a rough cut of it and he was so happy,” he says. So they kept working together, releasing music videos for subsequent songs “Vodka Cranberry” and “Caramel.” They even filmed at the motel from Paris, Texas.
As the fictional Wilson and Brando, they’ve got plenty of lore, which fans enjoy unpacking on Reddit and TikTok. Sometimes this bleeds over into real life speculation about whether Gray and Fogelmanis are actually dating. (They are not; Fogelmanis has a boyfriend he’s been dating for about five months.) The rumor mill doesn’t really seem to bother Fogelmanis — he thinks it’s a credit to their acting and chemistry.
“It's so funny because when we made the videos, we had kind of come up with this concept for the character and the stories. I loved it, I felt like they were awesome, but I knew what he had written the songs about. And so it's like I also was kind of thinking about that. But the way the videos came together made it [so that] people have really taken to the lore. He literally said to me, ‘People are talking about the songs as if they're about these characters, as if I wrote these songs about Will and Bran.’ And he's so happy about that… So I think it means we did a good job.”
He ultimately just loves to see his friends thrive as creators, and to witness — and in this case, be part of — the vision they’re bringing into the world. “I just love being friends with creative people because it's just so interesting to see how they make things, and what they think,” Fogelmanis says. He says something similar earlier in our conversation about Sabrina Carpenter, also one of his close friends.
“I've always just loved what she makes,” he says of Carpenter. “I've always been the biggest fan of her music, and just who she is as a person. I'm so happy that now she's in a place where she can do whatever she wants. It's so fascinating to learn about her industry and how you don't get the budget to make your video unless your label really kind of sees the numbers of people supporting it. Now she can make the videos she wants to make. She can make the live show that she envisions in her head a reality.”
Fogelmanis admires the vision, the clarity of knowing what you want and making it happen — whether it’s David Fincher or Conan Gray or Sabrina Carpenter in the driver’s seat. He mentions people throughout our conversation who are just fully themselves, like Alex Consani and Chappell Roan. He saw that energy in Ben De Backer, the protagonist of Mason Deaver’s novel I Wish You All the Best, and in Tommy Dorfman, the writer, producer, and director bringing Ben’s story to life. (The film hits theaters on November 7, 2025.)
Dorfman and Fogelmanis met through LA circles (they have a mutual friend in Rowan Blanchard) and kept in touch over the years, bonding over a love of movies. Dorfman had posted the book cover on her Instagram Story, and Fogelmanis remembers thinking, “This is the most beautiful cover I've ever seen.” It was one of the books he took with him on his cross-country move to New York City in 2019.
When Dorfman began the casting process, Fogelmanis submitted a self-tape in which “the words that she had written just flowed out of my mouth.” That ease is palpable in the way Fogelmanis moves as Ben, fluidly and with a sort of loping grace. We see them experiment with more traditionally feminine clothes, fall in love with a classmate named Nathan (played by Miles Gutierrez-Riley), and test out different ways of existing and expressing who they are in art and in life. (Lena Dunham has a memorable turn as their wise, quirky art teacher.) There is a lightness that Fogelmanis embodies, too, a curiosity about who they are becoming.
The movie filmed three years ago, and Fogelmanis still misses it.
“I really do look back on that time as so special and free in a way that I don't feel right now. So that was kind of interesting for me to realize like, oh, you can be at a place and then it can go away or can become something else,” he muses.
There is a lot he has taken with him from I Wish You All the Best: a way of seeing the possibilities in the world, and a reminder that it’s okay to be scared to let people in — and that you should do it anyway. One of the scenes that felt most poignant to him is after Ben has sex with Nathan for the first time. The experience leaves them feeling ultra vulnerable when Nathan just seems so good and has his sh*t together.
“This experience of being scared to let someone in… That feeling of putting someone on a pedestal and really admiring this person that you're with, and wanting to just feel different about yourself,” Fogelmanis reflects. “I feel like so much of the movie is about getting to a place where you feel sturdy enough to give back the love that you're receiving… I couldn't believe that she'd written those words. Because I felt like she was writing my life.”
Fogelmanis says as much talking about his still relatively new real-life relationship. “I spent a lot of time alone,” he says, “and so what I'm realizing in this is I'm so used to keeping so much inside, and [my partner] been very gently encouraging me to let him in.”
The opening up, the exhale before admitting something difficult, the sharpness of it. And allowing that imperfection for someone else in return. It’s being one piece of a messy, beautiful thing you’re making together, a romance or a movie or a life. It’s your mom driving the car home after a long day, enabling you to do what you love. It’s making a music video with your friend that’s so vivid people can’t help but imagine it as real.
“Maybe I'll make something of my own,” Fogelmanis says about a future he sees as far off, at least at the moment. “But for now, I'm really happy being a part of somebody else's vision."
Credits
Photographer Bea Oyster
Groomer Courtesy of Laura Costa
Assoc. Culture Director P. Claire Dodson
Culture Editor Kaitlyn McNab
Corey wears a Coach shirt, sneaker charm, sneakers, and Abercrombie & Fitch jeans.
Corey wears a Calvin Klein top, Coach pants, and Golden Goose sneakers.
