The Sexiest Man Alive

Feast your eyes on this hunk o' beefcake, ladies!
Manolo says, appears to have gotten the whole lot sexier.

Will gladly pay you next Tuesday for the hamburger today
The good news is that he is no longer the angry young man. The bad news…
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Comments
jelodi97 14 years ago
Maybe he’s prepping for his next role as pro-golfer John Daly?
Andyshoes 14 years ago
What a sad, sad sight.
Bronwyn 14 years ago
That looks to me as though he’s at the Basin Reserve in Wellington, playing in a cricket game to raise money for the Christchurch earthquake appeal.
Have to say he’s looking just like your typical beer-drinking Aussie.
theDiva 14 years ago
I don’t care. I still wouldn’t kick him out of bed for eating crackers.
Bridey 14 years ago
He looks fine to me. But of course, I don’t regard someone who gets fat as automatically less sexy, or less attractive, or sad, or any kind of failure.
I go back nearly to the beginning as a Manolog reader, and I know I’m coming over all righteous. But this post genuinely surprises and disappoints me.
Manolo the Shoeblogger 14 years ago
The Manolo, who is himself not the sveltest person, does not make the fun of the personal weight struggles of the normal peoples. However, from the time to the time, he has made the little jokes about the celebrity weight gains. He has explained why he does this in the comment he posted at one of the previous examples of this occasional practice.
Also, allow the Manolo to say, that the Russell Crowe getting fat is very disappointing to the Manolo because he is so monstrously talented.
There are almost no actors alive who can so convincingly play righteous male anger.
Tom Cruise? Leo DiCaprio? Not even Christian Bale. Perhaps Liam Neeson, although his anger is tinged with sorrow. Daniel Day Lewis, yes, but his is the strange sort of anger. Russell Crowe can do righteous manly anger (one of the most important of male emotions) in the manner that does not seem forced or false.
Let us consider the example of the Brad Pitt, who looks beautiful, but cannot do justice to anger. And so when called up to play Achilles in the movie Troy fails to capture the essence of the hero. (“Sing, oh muses, of the anger of Achilles.”)
To see Russell Crowe fat and sassy, is to know that the spirit of Achilles, so prominent throughout history, cannot be properly transferred to the screen.
This does not excuse the Manolo’s jibes, but perhaps it explains them.
Manolo the Shoeblogger 14 years ago
From Shakespeare:
We want our Russell Crowes to be dangerous, not fat and satiated.
Bridey 14 years ago
Thank you for the response. Perhaps I don’t put as much weight, so to speak, on the celebrity as the Manolo does. What I see is a man who was considered attractive now derided as repulsive for no better reason than he’s got a gut. It’s hard not to understand that as a general comment on fatness and fat people.
As far as the other observations, and with all due respect to Shakespeare, when I consider, say, Bob Hoskins and Brendan Gleeson and Timothy Spall and Edward G. Robinson and Sidney Greenstreet and Orson Welles, I have no difficulty whatever perceiving a fat actor as angry or dangerous or even sometimes — as, say, in Gleeson’s case — sexy as hell. If there are no younger examples who come to mind, perhaps that is because of the lamentable fashion of having nearly every leading man, no matter what profession his character is intended to be in, look like he spends half his life at the gym.
For Crowe, I’d attribute his persuasive anger not primarily to his leanness, but to the fact that he has always read onscreen as a grown-up man, among a near-limitless horde of boyish beauties. Interesting that Neeson is also one of the people you cite as being able to convey genuine anger — he’s another actor who is impossible to perceive as other than adult.
Not that a boyish charm or appearance precludes being a good actor — not at all. But Pitt, DiCaprio, and even Bale never come off as 100 percent grown men, or haven’t yet. That inability to quite grow up matters far more, in my opinion, than their body fat percentage. It’s not age, but aura; James McAvoy isn’t 30 yet, but there’s not a whiff of the teenager about him, and Colin Farrell was never a little boy either.
(I think Cruise is a superb movie actor and Day-Lewis is a ham, so I am too contrarian, perhaps, to extend my observations on those two.) Sorry to run on, and again, I appreciate the response.
Virginia Postrel 14 years ago
Not my type, but in The Next Three Days, his regular-guy paunch worked well with his intense drive to break his wife out of prison. He’d also look a lot better in a different, or at least longer, shirt.
Manolo the Shoeblogger 14 years ago
Dear Bridey, you have put your finger exactly upon the problem with the modern actor: with the few exceptions, they are boys and not the men. Their experiences are those of the pretty boy drama geeks, and because of this they have no foundation upon which to model adult behavior upon the stage.
Actors of the previous generations had life experiences that lent depth and emotion and character to their work. (Lee Marvin was wounded fighting the Japanese at Saipan, Robert Mitchum was the juvenile delinquent who road trains around the country, Humphrey Bogart was in the Navy during the first world war)
As for the stout actors you have cited, they are more than electrifying as the supporting actors, or the villains, or the character actors, but unfortunately they cannot play our heroic leads.
To cast the fat man as Achilles…even the concept makes us laugh.
Bridey 14 years ago
But a fat man would be a fine Odysseus!
jelodi97 14 years ago
To this comment I say: Lee Marvin was a total macho badass. That man oozed testosterone from every single pore.
Jophiel 14 years ago
Fascinating. Perhaps the reason a disproportionate number of “non-boyish” movie actors come from Oz (Crowe, Hugh Jackman, Eric Bana, David Wenham) and Scotland (McAvoy, Gerard Butler)? Countries without highly developed drama-school-to-work pipelines?
Margo Anderson 14 years ago
So fat people can’t portray anger? This would seem to me to be ignoring the element of talent, and is not far off from saying that a fat actress can’t convincingly play sexy. I’m not buying it.