After the shoot, we meet up at a coffee shop in Silverlake, a neighbourhood on the east side of LA popular among many of the working writers, artists and actors who constitute Hollywood. It’s a refuge for those who want to settle into a neighbourhood but refuse to give up and move to the Valley. Minghella has already had three, maybe four, espresso shots today, but the barista is able to sell him one more. I really want the cream- filled doughnut holes; I wait to see how much food Max orders.

Gone are the layers of fashion from the photo shoot. The real Max Minghella wears a plaid shirt, white tee, jeans and dirty Pumas. He’s one baseball cap away from what he calls “the Max uniform”. And all he eats is a slim plate of scrambled eggs. I don’t order the doughnut holes.

Max Minghella should’ve been a doctor. He comes from two immigrant families—one Italian, one Chinese—and a lineage packed with doctors. But both of his parents broke the cycle by following creative endeavours. More specifically, his father is the late Anthony Minghella, a writer and director known for Cold Mountain, The Talented Mr Ripley, and winner of 11 Academy Awards including Best Director for The English Patient. Minghella’s mother, Carolyn Choa, a powerhouse of success in her own right, has choreographed for the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, and the English National Opera.

They raised him in a loving home in England, where they put emphasis on academia and broadening his interests. They failed on both counts. And it’s his mother’s fault. Long before his father was collecting Oscars, it was Minghella’s mother who was involved in film. She worked for the British version of the Motion Picture Association of America by day and then would come home and recount the film’s plots as bedtime stories to him. Minghella was hooked, although these days it’s he who shares stories with his mother in the form of showing her his scripts.

“My mother’s a fascinating, wildly intelligent person who—I don’t know how to say this—she’s very Chinese,” he says. “She’s of a different culture and really carries that with her. So film has been the one thing we both connect over and love… She introduced me to all of the significant filmmakers.”

He also inherited one other passion from her. “I’m a fantastic dancer. I get it all from my mother. But everybody close to me would tell me I’m a terrible dancer. I should never boogie again.” (Having seen him shimmy between takes, I would side with him on this one. Though Minghella did do ‘the robot’ for a moment? Maybe that’s what those close to him are noting.)

The most important lesson we often learn from our parents, good or bad, is our model for romantic relationships. (Yes. He’s in a relationship. Yes. His mother has met her. No. Don’t believe the Internet about who it is. Many of the women he’s said to have dated, he’s never even met.) But, he doesn’t see a correlation between his romantic exploits and his parents’.

“I read a star sign the other day that described me so accurately I wonder if this is all just connected to what month you’re born. Something as arbitrary as that.” A serial monogamist, it’s always been this way. He says he never dated anyone he thought that he couldn’t eventually marry, even when he was 14. But don’t think that Minghella had it all figured out by his teen years.

“I was already a pretty douchey kid in school,” he admits. “And getting [acting jobs] on top of it was too much.” He now had Hollywood’s attention. One problem. “The first couple of things I did, I’d never acted before. Ever. So the first time I was seeing myself perform was in these wide release movies that I wasn’t doing a very good job in.”

And to help him off his high horse was Josh, his best friend from high school, who chauffeured him around. Minghella confesses: “I was on the phone, rolling calls the entire drive, and I never spoke to him, or acknowledged him or said, ‘thank you for picking me up’, and we got out of the car and he just lost it on me. I was 17 and that really was a wake-up call.