John Green is trying to keep it real

Three days before this year’s Indianapolis 500, author John Green is at Indianapolis Motor Speedway talking about cars. Wearing an IndyCar Series cap that is sufficiently broken in and stained with perspiration lines, Green marvels at the 1950s cars that raced when his grandfather regularly attended the 500. In the track’s infield sits Green’s Tesla Model S, a sleek electric car that goes from zero to 60 mph in as little as 3.1 seconds. It features a 17-inch touchscreen in the dashboard, and it travels about 250 miles on a single charge. He calls it a “true marvel of engineering.”

At the same time, the Tesla’s sports-car luxury is a source of mild embarrassment. Green and his wife, Sarah, make the midnight-blue vehicle more down-to-earth by calling it “Lidewij,” the name of a Dutch character he created for smash-hit book and movie “The Fault in Our Stars.”

Green is a car guy, but he’s not sure he’s the type of car guy who drives a Tesla. His other ride is a Chevrolet Volt, a sensible hybrid of gas engine and electric motor. A Volt can be bought for less than $35,000. The asking price for the most basic Tesla is at least twice that much. But Green didn’t pay for his Tesla. It was a gift from Fox Filmed Entertainment, the company that sold more than $300 million in tickets worldwide for last year’s adaptation of “The Fault in Our Stars.” Fox CEO Jim Gianopulos personally arranged the gesture of gratitude to Green for the movie.

“It’s what I got instead of money for ‘The Fault in Our Stars’ (movie),” Green said. “I would never buy a car like that.”

Reconciling the trappings of showbiz success with the low-key life he makes in Indianapolis is a current challenge for the 37-year-old who writes young adult fiction. Known as an advocate for pro-intelligence “Nerdfighters,” the name adopted by his fans, Green risks the projection of a different persona each time he wades into the mainstream. Will Hollywood’s facade eclipse the real John Green? In his hometown, Green loves taking his 5-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter to Holliday Park to explore trails and to Chuck E. Cheese’s to play video games. His annual Indy 500 tradition is to bicycle to the track with friends. During his pre-race visit to IMS, Green is fired up to visit driver Pippa Mann outside her Gasoline Alley garage. Meanwhile, Green’s expanding fame has him rubbing shoulders with bigger stars all the time. “Paper Towns,” the next film adaptation of one of his novels, arrives in theaters on Friday. English fashion model Cara Delevingne — paid $3.5 million for her runway work in 2014, according to Forbes magazine — portrays the lead female character in “Paper Towns.”

In April, Green tweeted a photo of himself posing with rapper Snoop Dogg backstage at a YouTube-sponsored conference in New York.

“An agent mentioned that I’d written ‘The Fault in Our Stars,’ and I guess Snoop had seen the movie on a plane,” Green said.

Green and Snoop were two of a handful of celebrities headlining the event organized for online video creators.

“I kept thinking, ‘Man, 19-year-old me is really freaking out right now,’ ” Green said. “Of course, in real life, everybody is just a person.”

The difference between perception and reality is a main theme of “Paper Towns,” a mystery in which a teenager disappears after a night of adventure.

The character Margo, portrayed by Delevingne, is the “it” girl who seems to have the world on a string but is compelled to break away from her surroundings. Quentin, portrayed by Nat Wolff, is an average high school senior who has more lust for life than even he realizes. Lacey, portrayed by Halston Sage, is an attractive classmate whose intelligence is rarely noticed.

When talking about “Paper Towns,” Green’s mantra is that we should strive to “imagine others complexly.” One of the book’s most-quoted lines: “What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.”

Seven years after the book’s publication, celebrities now make up a significant portion of the people Green meets.

As he points out, celebrities mostly are encountered in two dimensions. They’re seen on TV screens or in the pages of magazines.

“It’s very difficult to think of celebrities as people,” Green said. “You go into that experience with so much familiarity with their work, and they, of course, know nothing about you. So you feel like you’re meeting someone who’s more than human, but you aren’t.

“You’re just meeting a regular person who happens to have an unusual job that they’re fairly good at. Or they’ve been very lucky. In most cases, both.”

In Green’s own version of celebrity, he’s exceedingly accessible online where his Twitter profile @JohnGreen has more than 4 million followers and his “Vlogbrothers” channel at YouTube (shared with his brother, Hank Green) has more than 2.5 million subscribers.

Green said it’s not always easy to balance the privileges of such a large platform with the frustrations and fears that accompany it. As another of his books, “Looking for Alaska,” moves toward a film adaptation, Green has been threatened with violence by online followers who want certain casting choices for the yet-to-be-made movie. The author has no control over casting (which is something he seemingly says more often than “imagine others complexly”). “I get to have a complicated relationship and a multilayered conversation with my audience that most people with audiences don’t get to have,” Green said. “I think the challenge is for me understanding and also them understanding what the relationship should be and how can I participate in conversations both online and off when I’m not really entering those conversations as a peer or as an equal, because I have a much larger platform.”

Whether he’s the celebrity, the fan, online pal or Hoosier family man, the point is that people aren’t objects.

“My life has been a series of trying to internalize the theme of ‘Paper Towns’ ever since ‘The Fault in Our Stars’ movie came out,” Green said with a small laugh.

He can look to Delevingne as an example of someone who’s relentlessly analyzed and judged on the basis of her appearance, which Green has noted is “projected onto literal billboards” around the world.

Knowing what that’s like helped her win the role of Margo, the centerpiece of what’s misconceived in “Paper Towns.” Offscreen, the 22-year-old is friends with Kendall Jenner, Taylor Swift and Kate Moss. Green said he, Wolff and “Paper Towns” director Jake Schreier weren’t aware of Delevingne’s supermodel life before she auditioned for the role. “At no point did I feel that she seemed different than any other member of the cast,” Green said. “Except on a couple of occasions she had to make very quick trips to Prague.”

He said Shailene Woodley, who portrayed lead character Hazel Lancaster in “The Fault in Our Stars,” has been a valuable adviser in helping him adjust to the Hollywood aspects of his work. At just 23, Woodley is an industry veteran who earned a Golden Globe nomination for her work in 2011’s “The Descendants” and now plays the lead in the $580 million-and-counting “Divergent” series. Without question, Woodley is doing her part to define Green for the public. In a 2014 essay that accompanied Green’s selection as one of Time magazine’s 100 “most influential people in the world,” Woodley wrote that he’s someone who “sees people with curiosity, compassion, grace and excitement.”

And at April’s MTV Movie Awards, Woodley heaped praise on Green while accepting the award for best female performance.

“His words will transcend time because they transcend any age,” Woodley said in a speech that moved Green to tears as he sat in the Nokia Theatre audience. “There’s not one single demographic that won’t be affected by the wisdom and the compassion and the beauty that he laces into every single thing that he does in his life.”

Away from Hollywood, Green is chipping away at a novel that’s expected to be his first since the 2012 publication of “The Fault in Our Stars.”

“I would like to write another book,” said Green, who backpedaled slightly from earlier comments that his new story is based on social media and online interactions. “I don’t know what I’m writing about,” he said. “I’m writing about personhood.”

Personhood. Sounds like a project made for imagining others complexly.

Call Star reporter David Lindquist at (317) 444-6404. Twitter: @317Lindquist.