Who Was Your First Fictional Crush?

Our Valentine to our childhood loves: Alicia Silverstone in those Aerosmith videos, Wesley from "The Princess Bride," a young Ethan Hawke, and more.

Feb 14, 2025

Particularly when we’re young, we find ourselves through the pop culture we love—and that includes figuring out what kind of person makes us swoon. This Valentine’s Day, we’re sharing our sweet—and embarrassing—stories about our first onscreen crushes. We’d love to hear yours in the comments!

Alicia Silverstone’s Made-for-MTV Eyeroll 🙄

She rolled her eyes, and I was smitten.

In 1993, my family moved to a new house, and perhaps the greatest of its enticements was that, for the first time ever, we would have access to cable. I became a 24-hour-a-day devotee of MTV, trying to make up for the years I had lost to the despair of four channels.

That fall, every time I turned on the TV, no matter what time of day, I would see the same band, come what may. And while I was not particularly interested in another glimpse of Steven Tyler’s leathery visage, for both aesthetic and musical reasons, spotting Alicia Silverstone as the star of Aerosmith’s trilogy of videos, “Cryin’,” “Amazing,” and “Crazy,” was more than enough. In “Cryin’,” Silverstone was saddled with bad boyfriend Stephen Dorff (ick), but a glimpse of her in a movie theater, shoveling popcorn into her mouth, rolling her eyes dismissively at Dorff’s two-timing, spoke volumes.

In the famous climax to “Cryin’,” Silverstone leaps from a highway overpass, seemingly despondent over her bad romance, only to reveal she is strapped to a bungee cord, and gives Dorff the finger. (MTV insisted on blurring out her extended finger, like its audience might be unfamiliar with the concept.) Silverstone would go on to star in the next Aerosmith videos, the band wisely understanding that the MTV audience wanted to see her, and not them, first as a dream cyber-girlfriend for the AOL era in “Amazing” and then as a rebellious Catholic schoolgirl (alongside Tyler’s daughter Liv) in “Crazy.” She was beautiful, vivacious, defiant, and self-mocking—and she did it all without ever saying a word.

When Silverstone’s film Clueless came out in 1995, I dragged three of my bro-iest friends to the theater to see it with me. Needless to say, they were not enamored by Cher Horowitz, or by the bubblegum vision of adolescence and Los Angeles it offered. Silverstone talked! And she was like a dream Valley Girl, her slightly off-kilter mouth making every bon mot seem like a private joke or a muttered aside.

In college, my then-girlfriend came to Los Angeles to visit me over summer break, and she told me that the one place she really wanted to see was Westside Pavilion, because Cher had visited the same mall in Clueless.

Reader, I married her. —Saul Austerlitz

I ❤️ Ethan Hawke in this Nerdy Sci-fi Movie

One weekend, when I was in seventh grade, I watched a movie that so moved me that I got up off the couch, found a ball-point pen, and wrote “I ❤️ Ethan” on the palm of my left hand.

I don’t remember what I thought this would accomplish, but it was still on my hand when I went to school on Monday. During computer class, my friend Michelle, whom I perceived as more sophisticated than I was, especially when it came to boys, asked me who Ethan was. In the moment, I spun a tale: Ethan was this really cute boy I met over the weekend. We met at a local carnival, on the Tilt-a-Whirl. He had sandy blond hair, blue eyes, and a sly, dreamy smile, but more importantly, he was really smart and into science. Obviously, he went to another school and lived in another town and, no, you wouldn’t know him.

That’s because he was Ethan Hawke, the actor, who was not particularly famous at the time. He had starred in the little-seen 1985 film Explorers, which Wikipedia tells me bombed at the box office because it came out the same weekend as the Live Aid concert and when Back to the Future was dominating theaters. This was a few years later, and I had picked it up at the local video store on VHS. I loved science and space and computers, and this had it all! As Ethan’s character, Ben, and his genius friend (played by a bespectacled baby River Phoenix!) built a working space ship with a lot of astronomy and computer talk, I fell in love. My lies, incidentally, were based (lightly) on truth: The kids in the movie go to a carnival site and pilfer a Tilt-a-Whirl car as the basis of their invention. But in the moment, I think, it wasn’t just that I wanted to pretend Ethan Hawke was my boyfriend. I was also embarrassed by the nerdiness of my truth: that I had loved a silly movie so much that I had written in ink on my hand.

Of course, I didn’t know then that I would go on to embrace this nerdiness and turn it into a career as a pop culture expert, or that Ethan Hawke would go on to an impressive lifelong career that I would continue to track and admire. Ethan may not know it, but we’ve been on this journey together the whole time. And I still do ❤️ Ethan—in a purely professional way, obviously. —Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

Wesley’s 😍 Look in The Princess Bride

I don't really remember having a strong crush on any characters when I was growing up: no daydreaming or writing about it in my diary or posting Tiger Beat photos in my locker (I'm fully dating myself with this reference, I know!). But I do remember that the first time I was aware of feeling drawn to someone was Wesley in The Princess Bride. I first watched the movie when I was around age nine, and my siblings and I rewatched that movie constantly while reciting our favorite lines, always finding it just as funny as when we watched it the first time.

It's a perfect movie, and Wesley is a big part of the reason why. Not only is Wesley boyishly handsome, but he also had this smoldering look when gazing at Buttercup that I don't think I had ever seen before: basically, the embodiment of the heart-eyes emoji. Whether he was Wesley the farm boy or the cynical, swashbuckling Dread Pirate Roberts, he exuded this intense magnetism that all started with that gaze. In fact, when I think about The Princess Bride and its impact on me, it was how the movie depicted “true love.” And for me, it always was about the way he looked at her. —Kirthana Ramisetti

Indiana Jones is Equally Heroic and Hot ❤️‍🔥

You're asking me to name my first fictional crush, but how exactly am I supposed to choose when the options are: Wesley from Mr. Belvedere, Uncle Jesse from Full House, Randy Taylor from Home Improvement (JTT hive, where you at?), Brandon Walsh from Beverly Hills, 90210, Christian Bale circa Little Women, and, most embarrassingly, various animated characters, such as Dimitri (Anastasia) and Raphael, the cool-but-crude Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.

Oh, and INDIANA JONES. The globe-trotting adventurer is probably the most enduring of my formative crushes: Brave, vulnerable, smirking and sincere, all at once. My heart still swells whenever I watch Harrison Ford put on his fedora and embark on a dangerously noble mission to save an historical artifact that BELONGS IN A MUSEUM — and punch Nazis along the way. A man of principle. And nobody, not even Tom Cruise, made a better action hero than Ford. He didn't need big muscles, either. He had a face that filled up the screen and left you mesmerized. That's a movie star, baby.