Celebrity hairstylist Chris Appleton has opened up for the first time about how and why his whirlwind relationship with — and subsequent marriage to — actor Lukas Gage came to an end just six months after they had tied the knot.
Appleton — a celebrity hairstylist with high-profile clients such as Kim Kardashian, Jennifer Lopez, Dua Lipa, and Chrishell Stause — was a guest on a podcast named On Purpose, hosted by Jay Shetty. During the episode, Appleton discussed his headlines-making marriage with The White Lotus, Euphoria, and Road House actor Lukas Gage ever since they split as a couple.
Shetty asked Appleton how it felt to navigate a relationship with Gage given that this was a "public romantic relationship," noting that Appleton hadn't "even [been] in a relationship with a man" — famous or otherwise — before it.
Chris Appleton went "through a lot of private pain" at the time he was with Lukas Gage.
"This is the first time I've ever spoken about this," Appleton replied. "I think people have this perception from social media…I have it together, I work with these amazing people, life looks glamorous. From the outside it probably looks like I've got it all together. But the truth is, especially during that time, I was going through a lot of private pain."
Appleton struggled with having a public relationship that the entire world could comment on and criticize, he says. The celebrity hairstylist credits therapy for helping him "sit in my feelings and really go through them."
Appleton has two kids, Billy and Kitty, who are both reportedly in their early 20s. "I don't mind people saying good and bad things," he explained. "But, for me, as a dad, I wanted to protect my kids…I'm very aware that any relationship I go into, there will be a conversation around that."
"You know, you can love someone and then not be a forever happy ending. You learn so much from it; any relationship I've ever gone into, I've learned so much from it."
"Moving fast doesn't always mean you're reckless," the celebrity hairstylist insists.
Chris Appleton at the Elton John Academy Awards Viewing Party in March 2025.Kathy Hutchins/Shutterstock
"It was you who filed for divorce, right?" Shetty asked. "Like, you were the one who ended it?" Appleton said yes, leading Shetty to follow up, "When you look at that in the perspective of the whole conversation that we've had, and everything you've been through, I can imagine that's not easy."
Appleton insisted that "just because it's not forever doesn't mean it didn't mean something." For instance, he notes that "it's a bit like going to buy a house: I like bright and lots of space; I don't like confined and dark. Some people do. And that's OK. We're just not aligned."
As Appleton circled back to the concept of being "aligned," Shetty asked, "Why do you think you didn't have that alignment when you met [Gage]? Because [the relationship] moved fast, right?
"Moving fast doesn't always mean you're reckless. Sometimes it means you're hopeful," Appleton said. "I think we shame people too much for leading with an open heart…especially when it doesn't work out."
Appleton described that he has an amazing family and a career that he's worked hard for. "An ending doesn't mean that it didn't mean anything," he insisted. "It just means it ended."
Chris Appleton believes that people "bring old trauma and baggage into a relationship."
Appleton appeared on the On Purpose podcast to discuss and promote his first book, Your Roots Don't Define You, which is set to come out on January 20, 2026. Shetty, the podcast host, asked, "Why did it feel again important for you to talk about it now as part of this journey with the book?"
"I would like to share my experience so people can relate and maybe not feel so alone," Appleton said. "It doesn't matter what the situation was that you got stuck in: You can move on. You can evolve your life. You can have a comeback at any age."
He went on, "Love is messy; people are complicated. We all bring our old trauma and baggage into a relationship, whether you're willing to admit it or not."
Chris Appleton breaks down the importance of identifying a "pattern" in one's life.
The celebrity hairstylist hopes that the book can help people see themselves — and those around him — as they really are.
Appleton mused, "When you really see people and you break it down to like, 'Why have you always done this? Why have you always repeated this behavior? Why have you always gotten yourself into the same situation? Why have you gotten yourself into the same relationship?' There's a pattern to it."
"Once you see the pattern, and once you break it down, [then] you can change it," he said. "I did it with hair for a long time, but I didn't realize I was also doing it in an internal way. Everyone can relate to the saying, 'Your hairdresser is your therapist.' But I didn't even know I was doing that."
Chris Appleton's book, Your Roots Don't Define You, is now available for preorders ahead of its January 2026 release. The full interview between Chris Appleton and Jay Shetty can be watched below.
11 times J.K. Rowling did something wildly transphobic, ranked
J.K. Rowling attends day four of Royal Ascot at Ascot Racecourse on June 20, 2025 in Ascot, England.
This story originally appeared on Out.
For almost a decade now, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling has been spreading transphobia and has become the poster child for the UK’s troubling movement of TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists). She has gone on transphobic tirades on social media, written a nearly 4,000-word anti-trans manifesto, donated some of her fortune to anti-trans causes, regularly misgenders trans women, and gleefully celebrates every time the transgender community has their rights stripped away.
The author, once revered for creating an inclusive fantasy world where good triumphs over evil, let her LGBTQ+ fans down by consistently doubling down on her transphobic rhetoric. She has painted trans women as predators who are lying about their gender to take away women’s rights and enter women’s spaces under false pretenses. This dangerous vitriol has even caused many of the stars of the Harry Potter franchise to come forward and call her out for her anti-trans takes.
For queer and trans fans of Harry Potter, this abrupt turn was jarring and has undermined their love of a fictional world where marginalized groups are loved and fought for. But Rowling hasn’t just disappointed her fans by spreading her hateful views; she’s also done so in some of the most bizarre ways, leaving many people not just outraged, but scratching their heads.
11. Tone deaf Dolly Parton tribute
Rowling joined the world in mourning Dolly Parton by posting a tribute on X that backfired when the country music legend’s fans came out in droves to point out that Parton loved the LGBTQ+ community and wouldn’t have supported Rowling’s TERF views.
After Parton fans flooded Rowling’s comment section with messages like, “She certainly would have thought of you as a nasty, hateful woman. Nice little tweet though,” Rowling attempted to hit back after a user called her “a fucking monster” by posting, “Well, joke’s on you, because neither of us want Jolene to take our man.”
10. Accidentally wrote “f*ck up some TERFs” on a child’s drawing
Seemingly by mistake, Rowling replied to post on X about a nine-year-old kid’s drawing of Ickabog, a monster from her children’s book, by including text she likely meant to copy and paste elsewhere.
“I love this truly fabulous Ickabog, with its bat ears, mismatched eyes, and terrifying bloodstained teeth! In court, Wolf claimed the Facebook post in which he’d said he wanted to ‘f*** up some TERFs’ was just ‘bravado’. #TheIckabog.”
Internet sleuths figured out that in the post, Rowling was misgendering Tara Wolf, a trans woman accused of assaulting Maria MacLachlan, who was at an anti-trans protest in 2017.
9. Accused Olympic boxer Imane Khelif of being trans
When Algerian boxer Imane Khelif took home gold at the 2024 Paris Olympics, Rowling joined fellow wealthy bigot Elon Musk in spreading the rumor that the cisgender boxer was secretly a man, leaning hard into the ever-present transphobia and anti-intersex hate in women's sports.
Even after both Rowling and Musk were named in a criminal complaint filed with French authorities over alleged “acts of aggravated cyber harassment,” Rowling refused to let it go and continued to post anti-trans posts accusing Khelif of lying about her gender.
8. Transvestigated another athlete
Less than five months after harassing Olympic boxer Imane Khelif for supposedly being trans, Rowling joined in on another transvestigation of a woman in sports when she accused cisgender Zambian soccer player Barbra Banda of secretly being a man — she is not.
Rowling took exception to the BBC naming Banda the 2024 Women’s Footballer of the Year. “Presumably the BBC decided this was more time efficient than going door to door to spit directly in women's faces," Rowling wrote on X.
7. Smoked a cigar to celebrate being a TERF
After donating £70,000 (roughly $88,200) to the anti-trans group For Women Scotland in 2024 to help them fight against a 2018 Scottish law that legally recognized trans women as women, Rowling celebrated in a ghoulish way when the U.K. Supreme Court decided that trans women aren’t considered women under the nation’s Equality Act.
Rowling responded to the court decision by posting a photo of herself with a drink in one hand and smoking a cigar with the other. While people like right-wing commentator Megyn Kelly commented “God bless you,” the post was also full of people slamming her for her cruelty in the face of people having their rights taken away. Pedro Pascal even called her out for doing “Voldemort villain s---" and referred to Rowling as a "heinous loser."
6. Accidentally turned herself into a meme
Rowling accidentally turned herself into a meme when she changed her profile pic on X to a photo that showed what looked like black mold-covered walls inside her mansion.
While the photo most likely shows wallpaper and not mold, users ran with it and began joking that the black mold had infected her brain as an explanation for her hateful anti-trans views.
5. Whined about being doxxed
On the eve of Transgender Day of Remembrance in 2021, comedian Holly Stars, actor Georgia Frost and drag king Richard Energy protested Rowling’s anti-trans views by staging a demonstration and posting a photo holding signs in front of the author’s home near Edinburgh, Scotland.
Rowling took exception to her house numbers being visible in the photo and accused the “actor activists” of “doxxing” her in an eight-tweet rant on X. But is it doxxing if the information is already public? Rowling claimed she received “so many death threats I could paper the house with them,” but both of her residences are historical landmarks, and one even has its own Wikipedia page.
4. Wrote a transphobic character that sounds an awful lot like herself
Under her pen name Robert Galbraith, Rowling wrote The Ink Black Heart, where a character gets harassed and doxxed because of their transphobic and racist views.
Rowling claimed that the character wasn’t based on her own experience, despite Rolling Stone writing that the character is doxxed “with photos of her home plastered on the internet” and subjected “to death and rape threats for having an opinion,” which probably sounds pretty familiar to people who have been following the author’s anti-trans outbursts.
3. Called David Tennant the "gender Taliban"
Rowling called Harry Potter actor David Tennant and people like him the “gender Taliban” in a post on X after he spoke out at the British LGBT Awards, where he called transgender critics “a tiny bunch of little whinging f*ckers who are on the wrong side of history, and they’ll all go away soon” and said they are on the “wrong side of history.”
In response, Rowling leaned into hateful anti-trans rhetoric that conflates being transgender with being an abuser of women. “This man is talking about rape survivors who want female-only care, the nurses currently suing their health trust for making them change in front of a man, girls and women losing sporting opportunities to males and female prisoners incarcerated with convicted sex offenders,” she wrote.
2. Dared police to arrest her
Rowling spoke out against Scotland’s new hate crime act in 2024 by daring police to arrest her for misgendering trans women. The act criminalizes “stirring up hatred” regarding age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity and variations in sex characteristics, which can result in a fine or a seven-year prison sentence.
Rowling then went on a lengthy tirade on X — something she is known for at this point — where she accused lawmakers of protecting trans women at the expense of “the rights and freedoms of actual women and girls.” She finished by telling the police to come and arrest her if what she wrote “qualifies as an offense” under the new law. “I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment,” she wrote.
1. Posted an upskirt photo
Rowling, who claims to be a protector of women and rails against trans women being allowed in women’s restrooms, targeted a transgender British podcaster who she disagrees with by posting an upskirt photo of her. Freda Wallace became Rowling’s latest target when she refused to engage with the transphobe online.
Rowling responded by misgendering Wallace and posting a photo of her originally taken by anti-trans activist and fellow transphobe Maya Forstater, from slightly below Wallace to show her upper thigh. Rowling said that Wallace refused to debate her but to prove she has “no hard feelings” she posted the photo of another debate. “I hear he left an indelible impression on the audience. And the chair,” Rowling wrote.