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 movie industry to counter the broad and built look that the Marvel cinematic onslaught helped usher in during the 2000s.
It began, perhaps, with Timothée 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, Mr. 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.”
ImageFinn Wolfhard at the premiere of “Hell of a Summer” at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2023. Credit...Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty ImagesFor 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.
To cast beyond Hollywood, the rise of the wispy male star can also be read as repudiation of the something-to-prove CrossFit bros who populate the right-wing manosphere. While not even close to being politically strident, twiggy celebrities like Mr. Chalamet and Mr. Eydelshteyn represent a very different masculine ideal from inflated MAGA-adjacent characters like the boxer Jake Paul and the 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.
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I noticed an empty seat next to an extremely large and intimidating-looking man. He was wearing a weathered motorcycle-type jacket, and his hair was rather wild8k8, matching the expression on his face.