You can’t have a Netflix rom-com without a hunky guy who strips off his shirt to reveal a set of impeccable, shiny abdominal muscles. In The Wrong Paris, which began streaming on Netflix today, that honor belongs to Pierson Fodé, aka Netflix’s latest leading hunk.
Pierson Fodé is the actor who play Trey McAllen, aka the cowboy in The Wrong Paris, who is the bachelor in a fictional, Bachelor-esque dating reality series. Directed by Janeen Damian, with a screenplay written by Nicole Henrich, The Wrong Paris stars Miranda Cosgrove as Dawn, an aspiring artist who dreams of leaving her Texas home to attend art school in Paris. She gets accepted and everything!
But when she can’t afford the flight and tuition, her sister offers an unusual solution: Audition for the reality dating series, The Honey Pot, which films in Paris and offers a generous appearance fee to contestants. Free flight to Paris, plus money for tuition! There’s just one problem: The show isn’t filming in Paris, France. It’s filming in Paris, Texas.
Dawn is more than a little upset by this deception, but she can’t back out of her contract without losing her appearance fee. Plus, this season’s Honey, Trey, is actually pretty smokin’. And that’s where actor Pierson Fodé comes in.
Pierson Fodé is a 33-year-old American actor from a small town in Washington, who moved to LA when he was a young teen to pursue a career in acting. In fact, Fodé’s first ever big acting job was on the Nickelodeon show that launches his Wrong Paris co-star into superstardom, iCarly.
“It’s so crazy,” Cosgrove told Decider in a recent interview. “When he first came to L.A. to act—I think he was like 14 or 15—[iCarly] was the first part that he booked. The scene is literally just me and him together. It was on a Halloween episode of iCarly. That was the first time we ever met. It was pretty quick, even though we got along really well and I remember working with him, but it was pretty quick.”
Though he doesn’t have any lines, Fodé can be seen in the background—wearing a leather jacket and talking to Cosgrove—of a scene from Season 5, Episode 4, which aired in 2012, and is now streaming on Paramount+ and Netflix.
“This is the first time we’ve met up again and talked since,” Cosgrove told Decider. “It just felt like a full circle moment. It’s kind of crazy thinking we acted as kids together, and now we get to be in this movie opposite each other.”
In the years since his iCarly debut, Fodé went on to land a recurring role Brooks Wentworth III on the short-lived, Cameron Boyce-led Disney Channel series Jessie, which he followed up with a lead role on the soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful, where he played the role of Thomas Forrester from 2015 to 2018. In addition to other TV guest appearances, he’s had small roles in action movies like 2022’s The Man from Toronto and 2024’s 72 hours.
But The Wrong Paris is Fodé’s first time playing a romantic lead in a studio feature film.
“I couldn’t ask for a better person to make this movie with,” Cosgrove told Decider. “He’s so easygoing and fun, and he grew up on a ranch in real life, so he helped me a lot. He helped me with horseback riding and making sure the lassoing looked good, and all that stuff. He was just so behind me the whole time, and it was so nice to have someone like that.”
Coming up, you can also see Fodé acting alongside Lily James and Dan Stevens in the upcoming Hulu movie Swiped. We have a feeling the future is bright for this cowboy.