Mr KJ Apa is hot. To be fair, it’s 19°C, which feels lovely under the shade of million-dollar Mediterranean landscaping in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles, but sweltering in the sun. Mr Apa is cheerfully roasting himself on the deck of a house borrowed for our photo shoot. The house is all sharp brutalist lines and stern concrete. It looms in striking contrast to Mr Apa, who exudes an Abercrombie joie de vivre.

He moves around the table like a sundial as we speak, following patches of shade. He undoes a few buttons of his shirt, a beachy brown seersuckerish button-up, to better take the breeze. Then he grabs a cigarette from a pack of American Spirits that materialised on the table before he sat down.

“I’m trying to get a tan,” he says, squinting joyfully into the sun like a golden retriever with its head out the car window. I worry for his delicate ginger complexion and then remember that his flaming red hair is fake. This evening he’ll fly back to Vancouver, British Columbia, where he’s shooting the fourth season of The CW’s teen drama Riverdale. Mr Apa’s off-season hair is a dark brown, almost black, like his eyebrows. His brows were dyed to match his hair for the first season of the show, but the process was burning his skin, so he put an end to it. The hair was non-negotiable. It is the trademark of his character, Archie, from the comics on which the show is based.

“I’m half Samoan, but nobody knows it because I’m white and I have red hair,” he says. The “K” in KJ is Keneti, a Samoan name (“J” is James). “My dad is a chief in Samoa. I almost identify more as a Samoan than I do as a New Zealander, just because I grew up with so much Samoan family and the Samoan culture is really close to me. I feel ashamed of myself for not pursuing it more, for not spending more time with my Samoan side because I’m out there all the time.”