As an era of macho politics sets in, sinewy stars like Dominic Sessa (pictured here), Timothee Chalamet and Mark Eydelshteyn embody a slinky alternative image of White masculinity in American pop culture. Photo: The New York Times
He’s reedy like a long-distance runner; his flopsy curls tumble like overcooked fusilli. He’s attractive but in a way you can’t always put your finger on.
He’s Hollywood’s White boy of the moment, and he has ambled into the film industry to counter the broad and built look that the Marvel cinematic onslaught helped usher in during the 2000s.
It began, perhaps, with Timothee Chalamet (only in Hollywood can you be an elder at the advanced age of 28).
Since at least Call Me By Your Name in 2017, Chalamet has typified the impish handsomeness of so many rising young male actors. Their jawlines are so angular they look as if they’ve been run through a contouring app, and they appear to weigh less than the barbells that Chris Evans or Hugh Jackman must bench-press each morning.
There’s Dominic Sessa, the slender South Jerseyite with the look of a bassist in a Strokes cover band who broke through in last year’s The Holdovers; Finn Wolfhard, a wiry Canadian with deep-set eyes who emerged in Stranger Things and is now starring in a rebooted Ghostbusters franchise; and, most recently, Mark Eydelshteyn, a lank Russian whose spaghetti limbs seem to move every which way all at once in Anora.
For years, leading White actors have been so muscular they practically hulk off the screen.
See: Jake Gyllenhaal in the Road House reboot or Chris Pratt, who morphed from doughy to diesel to lead Marvel’s Guardians Of The Galaxy franchise.
Read more: The 'looksmaxxing' beauty trend can make men feel inadequate, psychologists say
To cast beyond Hollywood, the rise of the wispy male star can also be read as repudiation of the CrossFit bros who populate the right-wing manosphere.
Timothee Chalamet has typified the impish handsomeness of so many rising young male actors. Photo: The New York TimesWhile not even close to being politically strident, twiggy celebrities like Chalamet and Eydelshteyn represent a very different masculine ideal from inflated MAGA-adjacent (Make America Great Again, the political slogan popularised by Donald Trump back in 2016) characters like boxer Jake Paul and UFC titan Dana White.
“There is a true desire to have something other than this aggressive, belligerent, overtly predatory kind of White masculinity,” said Jeffrey McCune, the Frederick Douglass professor and chair of the department of Black studies at the University of Rochester.
McCune said that some sinewy Black actors could perhaps be lumped into this look.
He cited 29-year-old Ashton Sanders, who broke through in the Oscar-winning Moonlight, as a lithe, soft-eyed actor who embodies “a certain kind of Black vulnerability” onscreen.
More broadly, Dev Patel rose to fame as a floppy-mopped scene stealer, though he scrambled that image by tacking on mass for this year’s fight-fest Monkey Man.
Still, McCune offered that because that particular flavour of macho masculinity is spread clearest through White cultural figures (see: the MMA training clips that fill Mark Zuckerberg’s Instagram and the still-ripped-at-70 Robert F Kennedy Jr posting shirtless workout videos), it stands to reason that young White actors would be put forth as an alternative.
“This trend might be saying that there’s a White visual desire for something less hard,” McCune said.
This cultural expansion and contraction has played out before.
The Reagan 1980s, when pumped-up stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone reigned, gave way to the emergence of underfed 90s heartthrobs like Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix in My Own Private Idaho and Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.
It would be a stretch to say the hunk is dead – there are still many fan pages devoted to Jeremy Allen White in his Calvins (Calvin Klein underwear).
But there is clearly an appetite for male stars who don’t look as if they could crush a car with their bare hands. With concave chests and noodley arms, these men look a little awkward and, most of all, vulnerable.
“It’s a quieter kind of brooding masculinity,” said Drew Ayers, associate professor of film at Eastern Washington University who has written about the beefed-up look of action stars going back to before Marvel.
“It’s less in your face and assertive.”
Read more: What is 'looksmaxxing' and why is this male beauty trend controversial?
These stars project authority not from brawn but “from a different source,” Ayers said. “I think, positively, it offers a different version of masculinity that the power doesn’t have to emerge from your body.”
Their safe-harbour handsomeness has also made these stars enticing ambassadors for high-fashion labels:
Both Wolfhard and Sessa have appeared in Saint Laurent ads. They have also gained significant female fan bases. In particular, Chalamet, who is Hollywood’s resident sub-30 heartthrob.
These stars’ reediness is an asset. They don’t swallow the frame as Mark Wahlberg does but slither through it, cautious to never crowd out their female counterparts.
In Anora, Eydelshteyn’s performance as Ivan, a bratty son of a billionaire, is a master class of rubbery physical comedy.
Like a vaping Buster Keaton, he flops his way through the film, kicking up a dust cloud of chaos in his wake. With his feeble physique and spongy curls, there is an endearing cutesiness to Eydelshteyn.
During a panel promoting Anora, Eydelshteyn said he taped his audition in the nude. The audience then burst out laughing.
Eydelshteyn’s ungainly body wasn’t played for awe but for comedy. – ©2024 The New York Times Company
