Alex Pettyfer

Jeans: Diesel. Boots: Dolce & Gabbana. Fragrance: Diesel Fuel for life for men.

“I’m the gypsy man,” says 20-year-old actor Alex Pettyfer, who grew up in Windsor, England, and now proudly marks his days as a roving citizen of the world. “I don’t really live anywhere. I’ve got a roof over my head in Los Angeles, and I’ve got a lot of friends everywhere.” Pettyfer’s wandering ways—and willingness to submit to chance—have served him well in his young life. The first role he ever landed was as Willy Wonka in his primary school production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. “We all had to draw our roles out of a hat,” Pettyfer recalls. “I really wanted to play the role of ‘Tree to the Right,’ but I ended up as Wonka.” Not long after, while on a school field trip, he accidentally walked into the audition room for Tom Brown’s Schooldays, a 2005 tv movie of the Thomas Hughes novel, and, remarkably, scored his first professional lead. But if Pettyfer’s upcoming slate of projects is any indication, he’s about to go all kinds of places he’s never been before. In 2011’s Beastly, an updated Beauty and the Beast–style romance set in present-day Manhattan, Pettyfer plays hideous monster to Vanessa Hudgens’s lovelorn damsel. He is also in the process of completing work on the highly anticipated new Steven Spielberg– and Michael Bay–produced, D.J. Caruso–directed sci-fi thriller I Am Number Four, in which he plays the film’s eponymous Number Four—a teen alien on the run after his planet has been destroyed. After wrapping I Am Number Four, Pettyfer plans to once again hit the road before plotting his next move. “I love traveling, but I hate planes,” he confesses. So how does such a free spirit overcome a fear of flying? “I get on.”