Mescalinity
Performative Masculinity on Screen
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While it is bigger than Paul Mescal, we can call it mescalinity: a post-superhero manliness that might also include Josh O’Connor, Harris Dickinson, Timothee Chalamet and perhaps Jacob Elordi, Austin Butler, and Jeremy Allen White. While it can be defined through its difference from the cumbersome masculinity of the Chrises (Hemsworth, Evans and Pratt), the Rock and Vin Diesel, it also seems quite different from the generation of serious actors just before Mescal and co: Bradley Cooper, Joaquin Phoenix, Oscar Isaac, Michael Shannon, Michael Fassbinder and Joel Edgerton. While the superhero figures would deal with emotion as if a peripheral feature, and Phoenix, Fassbinder and co. viewed feeling often as a complicated force between aggression and affection, honesty and betrayal, these newer actors offer, it seems, a variation of what has recently been called the performative male. ‘‘The ‘performative man’ is a new Gen Z term describing young men who deliberately craft a soft, sensitive, emotionally aware aesthetic, signalling the rejection of ‘toxic masculinity’.’’ (The Conversation) While it might be unfair to say that Hemsworth, for example, has anything to do with Andrew Tate, and Tate’s masculine toxicity that has led the social influencer to claim ‘‘I’m not saying they’re [women] property. I am saying they are given to the man and belong to the man.’’ Or, ‘‘Feminism is a lie and women have zero power without men.’’ (The Week). Nevertheless, the sort of bulked-up, heroic narrative thrusts of a Marvel figure are a lot closer to the ego-ideal of a Tate than the intricate masculinity of Fassbinder in films like Fish Tank and Shame and Phoenix in Her and Two Lovers, or the performative masculinity of Mescal and Chalamet. The work of Fassbinder, Isaac and others of that generation is for another piece, and we will only talk about their work here, all the better to illuminate what these younger actors (all aged between 28 and 40) represent. They might be too old to pass for Generation Z, but they coincide with several features that performative males possess. ‘The performative male knows the optics of sensitivity.’’ It is ‘‘less like a lived value system and more like a curated set of props. His choices often feel like they’re designed to broadcast a brand rather than reflect genuine conviction. Spend enough time around him and you’ll notice the subtle gap between performance and practice. He’s not necessarily insincere, but the need to be seen as evolved often outweighs the quieter work of actually embodying it.’’(Veg Out)
This could describe a type of acting we find in Mescal and Chalamet, as though they have passed through the prism of what passes for woke culture (a terrible and inaccurately used term that we will let go for the moment), to register a condition of feeling that an audience accepts. While we believe that Isaac, Fassbinder and Phoenix are drawn to behaviour that might often be deemed unacceptable, all the better for the viewer to find what they think and feel out of its complexity, in the newer actors’ work, this complexity is secondary to an ethically paramount throughline. In Aftersun, this isn’t a problem, or rather only a minor one. The film is about a man in his late twenties holidaying with a young daughter whom he can’t afford to treat beyond the rudiments of the trip. She can see beyond this bluster, yet cannot quite, until years later, see the psychological and emotional pain that accompanies it. There is in Mescal’s character a potentially violent side that seems suppressed, as though director Charlotte Wells knew that here was an actor who was brilliant at registering sensitivity, even vulnerability, but couldn’t quite capture the self-loathing that is at the centre of the character, yet not at the centre of the performance. Here is a man who can’t quite get his life in order in London, who has little money, a broken wrist that we might infer he got when drunk (he doesn’t remember how it happened, he says), and who spits in the mirror in self-hatred. But these appear to be details that remind us of his despair. They aren’t quite embodied in Mescal’s performance. We could imagine Phoenix or Fassbinder, in different ways, embodying this aspect, even if Fassbinder may have too readily brought out the potential aggression, and Phoenix focused more on the vulnerability. But they both possess a harshness to their film personae that needn’t have turned the despair into a secondary feature of the performance. This isn’t to say it is a secondary feature of Wells’s film, which visually conveys well the darkness it contains, with numerous moments of foreshadowed tragedy.
Mescal’s performance conveys sensitivity but not loathing, yet this is no more than a minor failing in a very fine film. In Hamnet, it proves catastrophic, and can hardly be blamed only on Mescal; it probably couldn’t have been redeemed by any actor. Mescal is William Shakespeare, a struggling writer who marries and has kids with Anne Hathaway. They lose a child, and he seems more focused on pursuing his career than grieving for his lost offspring. But by the end of the film, Anna will realise that he has been thinking of their dead boy all along, and that the play he has written, which she watches, is really a hymn to their son. The child’s name was Hamnet; the play is Hamlet, and all has been redeemed. One offers a facetious account of the film (from Maggie O’Pharrell’s novel) that those who are moved by the material might find offensive. Yet our purpose isn’t to undermine people’s sensitivities, but to underline the performative aspect of them. If Mescal offers performative maleness, then it seems many have matched this display by posting TikTok videos of themselves emotionally devastated after watching the film and listening to the music. ‘‘Since the release of Hamnet, ‘On the Nature of Daylight’ has now become a trending sound on TikTok as people post their reactions to the emotional scene.’’ (ClassicFM)
Mescal became well-known after the TV show Normal People, and famous when Aftersun was released. In Wells’s film, his character, young father Calum, is viewed through the prism of his daughter’s retrospective memory, even if it eschews standard flashbacks to convey a sense of regret, as the young girl during this foreign holiday cannot easily understand the complexity of a father going through a crisis that may well have ended up killing him. She will now be roughly the age he was then, and she has a girlfriend and a baby, and circumstances might be more manageable than they were for her father. Mescal was only 28 in the role, and fourteen years older than the actress playing his daughter, Frankie Corio. Wells turns an improbability into an innovation, as Calum often seems more like a big brother to Sophie than her dad, and perhaps this partly works because we are seeing her through his daughter’s eyes, not only what she saw as she was then, but also what she might perceive now. She is seeing both a father not so much older than herself, and a man who may well have been then a little younger than she is in the present. Mescal captures a person who is trying to play a dad but without the financial or psychological resources to do so, and the role needs an actor who can be negligent without being neglectful, insecure without being petty. When he refuses to get up and sing karaoke with Sophie, this isn’t a man hiding his weaknesses by claiming to be above such things, but he does manage to bring out Sophie’s while she forces him to accept his own limitations. After she sings Losing My Religion, she goes back to her seat, and Calum proposes that he could pay for singing lessons. The implication is that she can’t sing (she isn’t great), and she takes this as an insult, and offers one of her own: that she doesn’t like it when he makes suggestions he can’t afford. A bigger age gap between them might have made the scene feel as if it were insolence on Sophie’s part, but instead comes across as the daughter having a greater grasp of reality than her father. Mescal plays the role with a tenderness even Phoenix might have struggled to convey, though if Mescal doesn’t quite convince of the depth of his despair, this isn’t because of shallowness, but the absence of an inner tension Phoenix, Isaac and Fassbinder all share. If Calum doesn’t quite come across as self-hating, this isn’t because he likes himself; more hate appears too strong an emotion for a character (because of the actor) who works off lukewarm feelings.
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This can seem like harsh criticism, and perhaps in some ways it is: as though we are suggesting that Mescal ought to take some classes with a Method acting coach, just as Sophie ought to try singing lessons. “I don’t really go in for it, he says, when speaking of the Method. ‘‘What I don’t like is the performance of how it’s like, more difficult.’’(GQ) But even if he did, that might create its own artificiality, a prosthetic intensity that just doesn’t belong to most actors of this generation. (Christopher Abbot might be one of the exceptions.) If we talk of the performative male, it can seem like the further reaches of a disagreement between Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg, and at the same time an inversion of the type of acting Dan Callahan sees in Meryl Streep and Judy Davis. Describing the difference between Adler and Strasberg, Ellen Burstyn notes, ‘‘It’s all about the word ‘if’. You know their argument about if? Stella used ‘as if.’ Stella said you don’t go directly to the experience, you don’t say, ‘thus and so is happening.’ You say, ‘it’s as if thus and so is happening.’’ (The Art of American Screen Acting: 1960 to Today) Strasberg seemed to want greater intensity than Adler, and perhaps when thinking of some actors who bring too much of it, and risk overacting, this resistance makes sense. For those given to greater diffidence, potentially Strasberg’s approach is more useful. Speaking of Davis, Callahan, quoting Lesley Chow, sees the Australian actor as postmodern, and Callahan compares her to Julie Harris and Bette Davis. While ‘‘a Method actress like Julie Harris strove to make each line sound as if she had just thought of it[…] Davis delights in highlighting the artificiality of her dialogue.’’ Chow reckons ‘‘Davis has a habit of reading her lines as ‘given’ – drawing attention to the fact that they are lines, and that she has been waiting to say them for some time.’’’ Is it this premeditation that is partly responsible for our perception that Davis is postmodern? Yet it’s also that, as Callahan says, ‘‘it is close, in a way, to Bette Davis’s tastiest 1940s work, which of course is not modern at all, but Judy Davis, maybe, is post-modern, as Chow suggests, because she seems to be conscious on some level of making the choice to work in this style, whereas Bette Davis had no naturalistic Method tradition to work against.’’ (The Art of American Screen Acting, 1960 to Today)
There may be a great difference between Judy Davis and Paul Mescal, but they are both eschewing the Method and arriving at the performative. However, while for Davis this takes the form of self-consciousness, in Mescal, and perhaps others of his generation, it takes the form of conveying a social sensitivity, as though in the wake of woke, Black Lives Matter and Me Too, an actor needs to be ideologically reflexive. This isn’t to attack the important changes in contemporary culture that have come about as a consequence of being a little more aware of injustices. But there is awareness on the level of consciousness (surely central to the shifts in the 1970s after civil rights movements and 2nd wave feminism), and another that is a mediated event. Black Lives Matter and MeToo were enormously present in the media, but that potentially gave them a performative role greater than their social absorption, and gave people a sense of social expectation over a personal realignment. Some might insist, understandably, that attitudes hadn’t changed that much in the 1970s, but perhaps they changed more deeply as a consequence, and impacted the majority of the nation and beyond. The more recent movements clearly haven’t and resulted in a right-wing backlash so much stronger than in Reaganite America, which, too, had been viewed as a capitulation to conservative values. However, this didn’t mean women were put back in their place in the 1980s. It simply accepted that they had a place in the world of high-end employment that left many men wary. There were all these single white females Judith Williamson explored in pieces in Deadline by Dawn: Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl, Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, Debra Winger in Black Widow, etc., who were seen as threats. What we saw (however problematically, as the women were often presented villainously) was women advancing into their role in society, not retreating into a tepid masculinity, as we sometimes find in this new generation of male actors.
A good example of this potential irresoluteness might be found in Chalamet’s decision to distance himself from Woody Allen at the time of MeToo. Now this takes us close to gossip, and a little far away from the specifics of acting. Yet let us not pretend many an actor isn’t well aware that they are in an industry where their personality is a persona and also a product. Chalamet gave away his salary from A Rainy Day in New York during MeToo. The actor donated it to charities, saying he wanted “to be worthy of standing shoulder to shoulder with the brave artists who are fighting for all people to be treated with the respect and dignity they deserve.” However, Hollywood publicist Peggy Siegal explained this wasn’t Chalamet’s choice.“His agents made him give his money away, supposedly not as a sign of Woody’s guilt, but (in) support of hysterical woman and media.’’ Siegal reckoned, “he is genuinely upset about the whole thing and at 22 is a pawn in a bigger game.” (Mercury News) What interests us isn’t the truth or otherwise of such claims, but that Chalamet was becoming a star at a moment when performative masculinity was becoming a thing. It would make sense that an actor would make such a statement, just as 1960s actors could get away with saying that administering a slap to a woman now and again was no bad thing (Sean Connery in Playboy) or Richard Burton’s remark ‘‘that there will never ever be a true understanding between the male and the female.’’ Burton went on to say, '’I do not understand their minds. I don’t know how they work. There is not one single woman I’ve ever met in my life that I understood. They do the most incredible things. Their logic is so inexplicable.’’ (UPI) By comparison, when Saoirse Ronan remarked that women have constantly to worry about being attacked after Mescal and Eddie Redmayne were light-heartedly discussing the issue of self-defence on Graham Norton, Ronan, sitting between them, said: ‘‘that’s what girls have to think about all the time.’’ Afterwards, Mescal offered that: ‘‘she… was spot on, hit the nail on the head, and it’s also good that… messages like that are kind of gaining traction, like that’s a conversation that we should absolutely be having on a daily basis’’ (BBC) Mescal may be very sincere in his remarks, yet they are also a product of his given moment, and that moment is a performative masculinity that foregrounds sensitivity, kindness, consideration. When Facebook and TikTok tell us Elordi phones his mother three or four times a day, it doesn’t matter whether it is true, but it is performatively useful. Could we imagine Burton or Connery phoning their mums several times daily?
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Such sensitivity can feed into roles that might, on paper, seem more brutal than they become. Elordi, playing the role of Frankenstein’s monster and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, plays each part with a physical force that matches his enormous height (he is 1.96 metres tall). But he also insists on playing up the characters’ feelings of hurt. In Frankenstein, he is maltreated by the doctor, and in Wuthering Heights, so badly beaten by the man who adopts him that he has permanent whip welts on his back. He may become terribly violent in Frankenstein, as he throws people around like they are made of papier mache, and horribly sadistic in Wuthering Heights, when he takes revenge on Cathy by humiliating Isabelle Linton, as he gives literal form to a woman chained to the kitchen stove. But this is all because he is pained, and inner wounds give him the license to express outward aggression. In both instances, Elordi’s characters don’t take responsibility for their actions; they are forced into them by bad upbringings. Perhaps the directors (Guillermo Del Toro on Frankenstein; Emerald Fennell on Wuthering Heights) see that here is an actor who can’t convince us with innate aggression (Connery and Burton had no problems there), and spend a chunk of the story explaining why Elordi’s characters have vengeful force. 1.96 inches is astonishingly tall for a leading actor, and risks lankiness on screen: a feature other rangy leading men couldn’t quite escape without bulking up: Gary Cooper was 1.90, James Stewart, 1.93 and Eastwood also 1.93, and they remained lean for most of their careers. Others got heavier, and the height became less pronounced – John Wayne, for example. The risk of lankiness in tall men in cinema may often be why smaller ones have frequently registered far greater aggression, and few more so than Joe Pesci, who stands 1.63 metres, or James Cagney, who was around 1.64. Of course, most of these heights are approximate, but close enough for us to see that someone tall can seem elongated, and someone short, pugnaciously assertive. Yet what matters most is that an actor can register inner conviction, whether that be rage, frustration, passion or purpose.
Has this generation of actors turned all emotion into something tepid, as if both responding to the times and a more general product of them as they are part of a generation that ‘‘has also had a profound impact on the cultural and social fabric of society’'? Ian Sheeran adds, ‘’Millennials have been at the forefront of movements that challenge traditional gender roles, sexual orientation norms, and racial inequalities. Their openness to diversity and their commitment to inclusivity have helped to foster a more tolerant and accepting society, paving the way for greater representation and equal opportunities.’’ (Medium) These are no bad things, but they risk dissolving specificity into politically appropriate generalisation. Emma Stone, Eddie Redmayne and Rooney Mara are all millennials who have expressed regret playing roles that might be deemed appropriations: playing what was written as an indigenous American role in Pan, Mara later insisted, ‘‘I really hate, hate, hate that I am on that side of the whitewashing conversation. I really do. I don’t ever want to be on that side of it again. I can understand why people were upset and frustrated…Do I think all of the four main people in the film should have been white with blonde hair and blue eyes? No. I think there should have been some diversity somewhere.’’ (Telegraph)
We offer a comment from one of the US’s finest young actresses, to say this is merely one aspect of an actor’s engagement with the world and their work, but it does seem a generational assumption that was missing from earlier actors’ notion of playing a role. In his memoir, Paul Newman speaks of his indigenous character in Hombre, and reckons, ‘‘If I was playing that part now, I’d approach it differently. I think I’d make that immovable presence the core of the character, but not in such an obvious way. And I would desperately fight to wear brown contact lenses. The blue eyes just destroyed everything.’’ (The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man) If actors are products, then part of this isn’t only seeing that they are stars capable of making large sums of money, but also figures reflecting the expectations of an audience’s preoccupations and expectations. Rooney needn’t be seen as any more ethical than Newman (both of them have been known for taking liberal political stances and putting money into various causes), but part of a sense of justice now incorporates strongly a regret over or unwillingness to play roles that might be deemed ‘in-appropriate’, would be seen as appropriations. However, Newman offers it as about the performance; Mara risks presenting it as virtue signalling.
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Of course, there are two sides to this representational coin: the first is that powerful actors use their box-office muscle and push aside financially puny but more understandable candidates for roles. The other is that actors who might be ideal for a part retreat from playing it because they fear it could be attacked on social media, and thus their success is tempered as they deal with the backlash. There is a long history of dodgy Hollywood casting in the context of race, sex and gender, but perhaps one way of understanding it, and maybe rescuing actors from the fear of appropriation, one that lacks first principle and risks falling into online-rage debate, is Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of facticity. This can play out in our context a little like a variation of Reinhold Neibuhr’s famous claim: ‘‘God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; Courage to change the things I can; And wisdom to know the difference.’’ If Sartre recognises the facts of our life (birth place, eye colour, first language and so on) that cannot be changed, all the better to understand the freedoms one has as an individual without falling into the bad faith of claiming we can do nothing in certain circumstances where we can, then this might be useful in thinking of actors who are wary of taking certain roles, and risk, as a consequence, falling into performative timidity. When Sartre says, “The human being’s essence is in suspense in his freedom. It is therefore impossible to distinguish freedom, in the sense in which we refer to it, from human reality’s being. Man does not exist first in order to be free later; rather, there is no difference between man’s being and his being-free.’’ (Being and Nothingness) What might this mean for the actor? When critics and commentators speak of actors appropriating a role, it usually means that, in Sartrean terms, they do not have the facticity required for it. But this often extends into areas that are not facts, but closer to choices and dispositions, and this can create interesting contradictions in what roles an actor might take. It is more a fact that an actor is born in Ireland than that they are heterosexual, but few have had problems with Mescal playing Scottish in Aftersun, American in The History of Sound and Foe, and English in Hamnet. Though when he took a secondary role in All of Us Strangers, he insisted, ‘‘the issue is that there have been so many queer performances in cinema that have been offensive, but that’s because the filmmakers and the actors have been careless,” Mescal said, “I don’t think this film exists in that conversation whatsoever, and that’s it.” (Pink News) In The History of Sound, he plays gay and American. Should he only play Irish heterosexuals? As an international star, that would be far too limiting, but this surely says more about Mescal as a product than as an actor. Sean Connery got to play Irish, Spanish, American and English (without famously ever really losing his accent), not because he was Scotland’s finest actor, but its biggest thespian export. Who could deny Connery wasn’t careless playing Spanish in Highlander, or a little lax as an Irish cop in The Untouchables? Yet Connery brought to his roles an assertive masculinity that didn’t quite make such casting incongruous. Connery playing gay might have done. It is as if what Connery understood was that what he brought to playing a role wasn’t the authenticity of the superficial characteristics, but the vital importance of the Conneryesque. This can risk immediate tautology, but when we think of Connery in Marnie, we have a poor working-class Scot playing a publisher from established wealth. Yet what matters most importantly for the role is an assertive physicality that Connery never had any problem displaying. That was the serious side he brought to the role; the accent was irrelevant. He sometimes might have seemed lazily unprepared for the parts he took, but he was rarely miscast because Connery understood what he could project in a given work. Ostensibly it might seem a mistake to cast a working class Scot as an upper class American, but that depends on what is the most important characteristic of the role, and we might say that Connery could say, in choosing a part, that he needed the serenity to know what he was capable of, the courage to understand the choices he needed to make, and the wisdom to know the difference. But if an actor is too concerned with how they will be perceived by the media, then turning down roles based on ethical assumptions that refuse to risk appropriations, a dilution may be inevitable. This is where, alongside facticity, we need to acknowledge specificity. If facticity is the noun that cannot be denied, specificity is the verb that seeks to move beyond the inevitability of one’s circumstances. We have plenty of truisms that accept this: knowing one’s place, not rising above one’s station, staying in one’s lane. But surely vital to creativity is a rejection of such claims, putting aside the static class assumptions often affiliated with such remarks. Connery, by this reckoning, shouldn’t have only been wrong for the role in Marnie, but also for James Bond. Bond creator Ian Fleming said, ‘‘He’s not my idea of Bond at all, I just want an elegant man, not this roughneck.’’ (Variety) Perhaps Fleming was thinking of the superficial facts of Bond’s life and those of Connery’s: Bond, like Fleming, was privately educated; Connery went to a comprehensive school and left at 13 with no qualifications. Yet what matters in Connery’s Bond is that he is ruthless, a government assassin, and this assertive quality was central to many of Connery’s key roles. He didn’t lose the accent; he retained the force of will and became an icon of a certain type of integrity, no matter the practical disintegration of the role into the persona of Connery himself.
This suggests that casting has often been predicated on disposition over factual necessity, and if actors become too concerned with the latter, they risk playing a narrow version of their biographical selves, instead of a broad version of their creative possibilities. Mescal may not be gay, but he is dispositionally tender, or at least can convey this with ease on screen, as Connery would hardly have tried. When we think about the differences between such actors, it isn’t that one is Scottish and the other Irish. After all, just as Mescal played Scottish in Aftersun, Connery sometimes played Irish, in Darby McGill and the Little People, The Molly Maguires and The Untouchables. But nobody would claim a young Sean Connery would have been better casting than Mescal in Aftersun just because he was Scottish. It would have been factively appropriate casting, but dispositionally a disaster.
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Here is the risk: that young actors are a little too concerned to stay within factive parameters, and hazard weakening their dispositional possibilities. This could lead to an enervated generation in a twofold manner. Firstly, that actors won’t take dispositional chances, and secondly, the actors coming through might be the ones who are there because they are unlikely to do so: they possess an agreeable timidity which works for the industry at this moment in time. Chalamet appears both hugely ambitious and risk-averse, a potentially contradictory position that can nevertheless work well in a business that has an eye not just on the box office, but also the mediated landscape film increasingly works within. If the old adage was that you were only as good as your last movie, this meant that if it bombed, the actor might be in trouble. But they weren’t likely to be in trouble because of the content of their film. Sure, there have always been scandals around movies (Life of Brian, The Last Temptation of Christ, Basic Instinct), yet these were occasional and provocative works that wished to break boundaries, rather than find themselves on the wrong side of a sensitivity argument. When, in 2025, Louis Chilton looked at what he saw as the 19 most offensive movies ever made (including Forrest Gump, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Last Tango in Paris, Manhattan, American Beauty and Gone with the Wind), we can see that many on the list weren’t deemed offensive at all, or for different reasons, when they were released. Last Tango in Paris was a scandal chiefly because of its explicitness, not its exploitativeness. Many of the films Chilton regards as offensive weren’t so troublesome that it stopped them win major Academy Awards. But today the notion of offence can be manifold, and one of the reasons why publishers have employed sensitivity readers in recent years. Whether that is a good or a bad thing isn’t our point: that it is a thing is our point. It is part of our zeitgeist, and how often are actors functioning a little like sensitivity readers when reading scripts, and choosing what parts to play? It is all to the good that an actor trusts their instincts and realises that a role isn’t for them; it is another to be bullied by your agent to undermine a role you have already performed, all the better to make sure you are deemed on the right side of public perception. It is also one thing that an actor wants to make huge, commercial films, another that, even in the small films they are in, they become hugely conscious of a viewer’s expectations. In that blockbuster, a lot of money is riding on it, and the actor may shrug their shoulders and believe it might be seen by some as rubbish, and others as a fun couple of hours and nothing more, but that is the price they are paying to be part of what might make a very large dollop of cash. However, if actors are taking roles in smaller films and spending much of their time fretting over how their indie viewers are responding to specific moments concerning the character’s musical tastes (is this musician in danger of being cancelled?), clothes they are wearing (is this brand deemed ethical?), and whether they have friends who are ethnically mixed enough, these can become pointless and peripheral questions, ones that say more about the audience’s expectations, than the character’s integrity.
Much of the controversy over Elordi in Wuthering Heights rested on casting a white Australian as the dark-skinned gipsy of the novel, with Elordi saying ‘‘This is Emerald’s interpretation of the text, and Emerald is an artist that I respect and admire, and I think her work is really important….’’ He reckoned his purpose was to "serve the truth of the screenplay that I’ve been handed.’’ (ScreenRant) This seems a very passive approach, one more interested in fending off criticism than defending his interest in the role. If Elordi had said he saw Heathcliff as a looming presence, as someone larger than life despite his lowly status at Wuthering Heights, and that as so tall a man he thought he might have been able to bring something new to a character often played by far from small men, but not huge ones on screen, then this would be him taking responsibility for the role without needing to make excuses for it. Equally, if Mescal can explain why he can bring something to gay characters that other actors who happen to be gay might not quite possess, this shouldn’t be seen as the height of arrogance, but the acknowledgement of singularity. Ben Wishaw is a gay actor, but while he could have worked in All of Us Strangers, it might be harder to imagine him in The History of Sound, perhaps because the contrast with Josh O’Connor physically wouldn’t have been strong enough (they might almost have passed for brothers), or that Mescal’s body language could convey better than Wishaw’s a Kentucky farm boy with a gift for music. The actor’s purpose isn’t to tick all the right boxes from a factual angle, but to find in the role the singularity that can allow them to feel that nobody would have been more appropriate for it.
Interviewing casting director Nina Gold, Sophie Elmhirst says that Gold believes ‘‘acting outside your natural class is unbelievably hard, as the actor isn’t in automatic possession of the array of tics and expressions that betray background. And while you can act up a class, you can’t, or at least shouldn’t ever, act down.’’ (Guardian) We would generally agree with Gold’s remarks, and who would wish to see privately-educated people playing working class when there are many from poor backgrounds who would comprehend better the role? Except that working-class actors are in the minority. ‘‘Research confirms this with only one in 10 actors said to come from a working-class background. Further reports show that an overwhelming 73 per cent of existing British actors are firmly middle class. (ShoutOut) There are two ways this can work: either middle-class actors stay in their lane, and we have chiefly stories about the middle classes, or they take many of the working-class roles. Ali Rashley says, ‘‘middle-class actors are often chosen for working-class parts, “but it doesn’t work both ways, does it? That’s really frustrating and it’s just so unfair.” (Guardian) Yet it is also inevitable,such is the nature of the industry.
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If class is rubbing people up the wrong way in Britain, the nepo baby is often the cause for consternation in the US, even if some of the actors come from European mums or dads. New York magazine offered an extensive taxonomy that named names: Lily Rose Depp, Dakota Johnson, Katherine Waterston, John David Washington, Alexander Skarsgaard, Scott Eastwood. There have always been nepo babies: Michael Douglas, Jane Fonda and Jeff Bridges. But the number seems to have greatly increased, and yet at the same time, few seem capable of defining themselves with the authority of Douglas, Fonda and Bridges, who more or less matched or surpassed their parents’ abilities. In listing hundreds of nepo babies, Nate Jones says, Which ones are actually talented? According to family and friends, all of them?’’ (New York)
Whether in Britain or the US, there is an assumption that some people have it easy, and are either appropriating roles that should be going to others, or are more broadly occupying a cultural space that is becoming too narrow. This isn’t to tar all middle-class actors or nepo babies with the same broad brush. But if we note that Douglas, Fonda and Bridges were fresh presences in film, rather than stale products of nepotism, it rests on what we can call territorialisation over appropriation. If Gold is right that actors usually can’t capture the behavioural specifics far removed from their class and circumstance, then to justify taking roles outside their behavioural bandwidth rests on possessing a quality that can make a part their own despite other limitations. We have noticed it in Connery playing Bond, and Mark Rutland in Marnie. The most important quality in each role was a latent aggression that Connery had little problem in conveying. Wuthering Heights potentially could have given a twist on the title with Elordi’s own magnitude, but he struggles to convey animal force: he lacks a fundamental feature of territorialisation as Deleuze and Guattari describe it in A Thousand Plateaus. They say that when Virginia Woolf found herself asked questions specifically about the idea of writing as a woman, she was appalled. They say, ‘‘the question is not, or not only, that of the organism, history, and subject of enunciation that oppose masculine to feminine in the great dualism machines. The question is fundamentally that of the body – the body they steal from us in order to fabricate opposable organisms.’’ Deleuze and Guattari talk about kids being brought up to act appropriately: to stop acting like a tomboy, a sissy or whatever it might be. Some might say these roles are no longer so set; that boys and girls have more freedom in forming their identity than they did fifty years ago. But that would be to miss the point. When Woolf resists being seen as a woman novelist, it rests on the complexity of affections and perceptions, feelings and thoughts, that cannot be reduced to broad categories. In this sense, it isn’t that an actor cannot play outside their class, their gender, or even their race, but that all things considered, why would they do so? What intensive force can justify this appropriation that instead takes on the form of territorialization?
If we believe that the previous generation (Fassbender, Phoenix, Isaac, Edgerton) is stronger than the younger one, it rests partly on the sociological, but also on the ontological. The sociological question would be the question of appropriation and justification that surrounds so many actors taking parts now, as though much of the work goes into damage limitation exercises: fretting over whether they have been working with someone who might be deemed a liability by the time the publicity machine starts grinding its gears. Presumably, Chalamet was okay working for Allen while he was on the set of A Rainy Day in New York, but by the time the film was due for promotion, Allen had been so severely relegated that Chalamet had to do inverse publicity, insisting he wanted nothing to do with the film. One might say that Chalamet proved himself the perfect Allen stand-in by showing some of the same prevaricative, self-justifying qualities we often expect from a Woody Allen character. At the moment that he was most resistant to having anything to do with Allen’s universe, he began to fit right in. If this sounds facetious, it is also, nevertheless, purposeful if we see that Chalamet is an actor whose superficial qualities are his strengths, just as in Mescal, we can only take so seriously the depth of his characters’ pain when he is better at expressing sensitivity. And hence the ontological question, a question of being. This is a set of feelings closer to the surface and might not need to register pain at all, but instead hurt. Obviously, pain and hurt are closely associated, but someone looking pained is often different from someone looking hurt. Children often look hurt more than pained, as though there is a temporal texture to pain missing from hurt, and that Mescal is rarely miscast as an actor when playing gay, but might be when expected to access pain. Both Aftersun and The History of Sound are pained roles, in this sense, and any problems we may have with him in the parts needn’t rest on Mescal being neither Scottish nor from Kentucky, but that his being is asked to access a deeper response than his persona lends itself to registering. Actors including Phoenix, Brando and Day-Lewis have this temporal texture, and suggest layers of hurt that can become sedimented into pain. Certainly, age can help this along, but it isn’t a necessary condition for it. Phoenix could play pained in his early thirties, even it might also be the case that actors grow into emotions they couldn’t quite convey in their younger years. Yet it seems chiefly dispositional, which is why Tommy Lee Jones could show it, while in his thirties, and Tom Cruise cannot do so, even as he approaches his mid-sixties.
Fassbender is a great actor who can register a feeling close to pain, but perhaps closer still to suffering and, within this, can offer emotional ambiguity. In Hunger and Shame, suffering is central; in Fish Tank, The Killer and Black Bag, ambiguity is more pronounced. Could we say the same of Elordi, Mescal and others? Josh O’Connor is a good actor and has chosen well recently in La Chimera, The Mastermind, The History of Sound and, yes, Wake Up Dead Man. But when we think of the presence of pain, suffering and ambiguity, they seem to have been relatively absent, no matter the ambiguous aspect on the narrative level in La Chimera. While director Rorchwacher has acknowledged the influence of Pasolini, we can see that Terence Stamp in Theorem brings to the role a variation of the ambiguous (the enigmatic), while O’Connor looks just a little like he has wandered off The Challengers set (directed, of course, by another Italian filmmaker, Luca Guadagnino), and found himself in Rorchwacher’s film. O’Connor gives the impression of a mind mildly befuddled and often confused. It is a comedic persona that he offers in serious drama, and this might not be negligible, even it can seem insubstantial next to the best roles of Fassbender, Phoenix, Edgerton, and others a little older.
When an actor plays a role, they are performing a scripted part, colliding with societal expectations, fitting into production demands, negotiating a star system their agents will be well aware of, and are blessed with a face and body that they can shape and sculpt to varying degrees. But it is one that, in doing so, risks creating a uniformity we may see in the various Chrises as they would offer bulk, and in certain actors and actresses who have transformed their features but have risked losing what made them stars. O’Connor comes across naturally, and we don’t offer this as a judgment on his real-life personality; only on the body and face he presents on screen. He is skinny without being sinewed, and scruffy without being rugged, and this can give him an unassuming quality that may remind people of an earlier generation, with Elliot Gould sometimes invoked. As Kyle Wilson says, ‘‘Josh O’Connor certainly isn’t beating the Elliott Gould comparisons in this one.’’ (Oscar Chaser)
Looking at O’Connor, Mescal, Elordi and others, it might seem that we are asking for a return to a more traditional masculinity, one that Connery, Eastwood, McQueen and others practised. But that isn’t it at all – and nobody would be likely to see Phoenix continuing in that tradition, and even Fassbinder (an actor who can play an IRA figure in Hunger, an assassin in The Killer, the regicidal Macbeth, and a ruthless counter intelligence operative in Black Bag) carries, within his capacity for immense aggression, a tender fragility brought out in different ways in Hunger, Fish Tank, Shame and Jane Eyre. None of the actors above could easily have played these roles, though Fassbender could have played many from films of an earlier generation, especially some of Laurence Olivier’s: an actor whose mannerisms he surely played up and exaggerated in Inglouirious Basterds.
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Our claim, though, is that each new generation will offer different modes of masculinity, and yet does the newest one abdicate an aspect of that responsibility because masculinity is itself deemed questionable? Is there a sense that the term toxic masculinity doesn’t involve a modifier but becomes a tautology, as if this is what masculinity is, and one needs to avoid not just the toxicity, but the masculinity itself? Though the term has become popular through taking down figures like Tate, Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan, all of whom, in albeit different ways, want a return to more traditional roles. Certainly, in Tate’s case, this seems a moronic masculinity that frequently falls into the misogynistic. Tate’s bons mots include, as well as those above, "I’m a realist, and when you’re a realist, you’re sexist. There’s no way you can be rooted in reality and not be sexist’’, and “If you want a woman who’s perfect for you, you must build her to be perfect for you. A woman who is understanding and kind and who respects you does not exist unless you force her to be that way.” (The Week) Toxic masculinity ‘‘was coined in the mythopoetic men’s movement of the 1980s and ’90s, motivated in part as a reaction to second-wave feminism. Through male-only workshops, wilderness retreats, and drumming circles, this movement promoted a masculine spirituality to rescue what it referred to as the “deep masculine”— a protective, “warrior” masculinity—from toxic masculinity.’’ Michael Salter adds, that men’s aggression and frustration were, ''according to the movement, the result of a society that feminized boys by denying them the necessary rites and rituals to realize their true selves as men.’’ (Atlantic) Yet the sort of Robert Bly/Joseph Campbell-inflected masculinity, while distinct from Tate and co, still risks falling into established modes of manliness, and Salter invokes sociologist Raewyn Connell, who looks for more nuance than that. ‘‘This claim of a singular, real masculinity has been roundly rejected since the late 1980s by a new sociology of masculinity. […] this school of thought presents gender as the product of relations and behaviors, rather than as a fixed set of identities and attributes.’’ (Atlantic)
If this is so, then cinema can be vital to the shift, offering constantly evolving modes of masculinity, and when we look at the history of film performance, we can see these changes. Gary Cooper, Clark Gable and Cary Grant are very different from Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift and James Dean, and they are very different from McQueen, Eastwood and Connery. This doesn’t mean that each era offers one particular mode, but it might offer an overriding sensibility, and our purpose is to find out what today’s happens to be, and why it might be less appropriating, less forceful, than any before it. By force, we don’t at all mean aggression; more a pulsion, a force that incorporates compulsions and impulsions that represent an advance rather than a retreat. It is one thing for an actor to find themselves subconsciously engaging with the mood of their times, and this is partly what can allow masculinity to shift, and avoid fixed identities and attributes. But it is another thing to try and discover the boundaries of that masculinity through trying to read the virtual room of X, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. Chalamet and Mescal are well aware not just of their image, but their social media image, and this comes through in the comments above about Chalamet agreeing to his agent’s demands over Woody Allen, and Mescal’s comments about the types of characters he can play or not.
Yet what sort of approach should an actor take towards their work, and has Chalamet decided to ditch the diffidence and play up propulsion as superstardom? His roles as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown and the chancer in Marty Supreme are companion pieces, even if the former film concentrates on one of the great modern musicians, and the other on a very competent, self-promoting ping-pong player. Nevertheless, both roles are played with bantam weight vigour by an actor who suggests that ambition replaces purposefulness, selfish energy more prominent than a selfless recognition of becoming absorbed into an art form or a sport. Bouncing between two women and flouncing around in sunglasses in the dark, in A Complete Unknown, this is Dylan at his most superficial, which isn’t the same thing as saying Chalamet’s isn’t a good performance. If Todd Haynes so astutely recognised there were many Dylans as he cast anyone from Cate Blanchett to Richard Gere as Dylan in I’m Not There, Chalamet says there are more Dylans still, and he will play the most lightweight of all. In Marty Supreme, his character is propulsively shallow, constantly working up schemes to make a bit of cash so he can play table tennis. He is, aptly, a fly in the ointment, annoying almost everybody he meets, and, again, Chalamet’s performance is not weak. It wouldn’t quite be the word. It feels sketched, as if his characters are drawn as much on paper as drawn from life, a figure caught between animation and live action. It made sense that when Jacob Gallagher used the term ‘noodle men’ to describe actors with sparsely fleshed out physiques and often moppy hair, Chalamet was the star attraction, ahead of Dominic Sessa and Finn Wolfhard. ‘‘Only in Hollywood can you be an elder at the advanced age of 28,’’ (New York Times) he says. Austin Butler, Elordi, and Chalamet might wonder if they aren’t stars doing a bit of sartorial moonlighting, with a dash of advertising here or there, but walking billboards, seeing themselves as part of the attention economy that must be maximised in their favour, and will be mutually aggrandising in the brands they promote. Even if some of the noodle boys aren’t so well known, this doesn’t stop them from securing fashion contracts. ‘’Their safe-harbor handsomeness has also made these stars enticing ambassadors for high-fashion labels: Mr. Wolfhard and Mr. Sessa have appeared in Saint Laurent ads, Mr. Wolfhard with his shirt unbuttoned practically to his navel, showcasing a bare chest and Mr. Sessa looking like a baby-faced Bob Dylan in dark sunglasses matching his dark curls.’’ (New York Times)
Speaking of Jacob Elordi, Hello fashion says, ‘With a helping hand from celebrity stylists Amy Komorowski, Nicola Formichetti, and Zoe Costello, the Brisbane native has single-handedly reinvigorated menswear with his deliciously unbothered street style.’’ Meanwhile, ‘‘Embracing a wardrobe of technical tailoring, bright block colours and big black stomper boots, Timothee Chalamet’s fierce approach to fashion has redefined formal dressing for the modern age. And there’s no sign of him slowing down.’’(GQ) This might seem to have nothing to do with questions over whether to take a role because the person it is based on is problematic, working with a director who some believe has dubious views, or working with an actor who is rumoured to have troublesome practices. It might seem to have nothing to do with feeling that the set isn’t racially mixed enough, or that there aren’t enough women working on the film. Yet in some ways it is all part of what we might call a negative holistic: concerning oneself with all the moving parts rather than focusing chiefly on the role to hand. ‘‘Today, major releases routinely have production costs that are a mere fraction of their marketing budgets.’’ (Forbes) The No. 1 most profitable major studio release is Universal/Illumination animated ‘‘The Super Mario Bros Movie with a $559 million studio net operating profit. That’s from a $100 million production cost and $150 million in P&A marketing. Warner Bros. Pictures’ “Barbie” ranked No. 2 with a $145 million production cost and $175 million in P&A.’’ Actors are no longer just making films, with the odd interview thrown in, they are a vital component of a marketing machine that costs more than the very thing they are ostensibly involved in making. Even the most independent of films are expected to think about the marketing. As Stacey Sparks says, ‘’Here’s the thing - I’ve worked with marketing budget of $15K and $500K (and everything in) for indie releases and YES, more money does help in that you can hire experts to help with a proper campaign and throw more at paid advertising, as well as professional design, visual assets, etc.’’ (The Reframe) While actors in the 70s could ignore publicity and refuse interviews, as Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando did, or at least minimise them, and insist on discussing the work if they did one, now an actor might be deemed difficult or awkward if he refuses to play the marketing game, with the label sometimes thrown at actors like Adam Driver and Joaquin Phoenix. The former walked out of a radio interview with NPR because he couldn’t countenance hearing his voice as the host insisted on playing a clip from Marriage Story. Phoenix has so often been called difficult that James Gray, who worked with him on several films, insisted, defending Phoenix and other ‘difficult actors’, "Difficult for me is you don’t show up on time. Or you don’t remember your lines.’’ ‘’With Joaquin, the ‘difficult’ label comes because he gets very open about his vulnerability and his need to feel safe in a space […] “Joaquin in table reads, when it’s his turn to speak, he’d say, ‘Bullst, bullst, bullst, my line. Bullst, bulls**t.’ He didn’t want to reveal himself there. You know, some people just roll their eyes at that. But actors need to be protected and loved.” (Vulture) Gray makes clear this is about the work, and he likes to employ actors who are demanding. Yet in a world where so much money goes into marketing (even on smaller films), where films are often viewed not as works of art, but as content for streaming services, and the film release is merely an opportunity to promote a work rather than making it available on a big screen, an actor can appear difficult if they do believe it is all about the work.
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This might seem naive now, if we accept that, “This generation is one of all-access hyperdocumentation, making the promise of celebrity journalism — emphasising intimate perspective and behind-the-scenes access — largely irrelevant.” (Standard) Just as there is a 24-hour news cycle, so we also have a constant celebrity feed, and the actor isn’t someone who makes a film and then gets on with their lives; it is more that they have a celebrity life, and in between make films. Not only are actors supposed to extensively market their work, but the extra-curricular stuff is part of the performance. As Vicky Jessop says, ‘‘These days, celebs don’t need anybody but themselves to create media buzz. And more than any other celebrity so far, Chalamet seems to have grasped that to be famous in 2025, you just need to master the art of going viral on social media.’’ (Standard) It also helps if the actor has a celebrity girlfriend. There might be nothing new in this. Actors have often dated and married other actors: Paul Newman and Joanna Woodward, Warren Beatty and Julie Christie, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart. And others would date models: Richard Gere and Cindy Crawford, Johnny Depp and Kate Moss, for example. Yet even in the latter instances, this was still in a world where there were economies of difference rather than an attention economy. In other words, even if the actor was married to another actor, it was usually more about the work than the celebrity that came out of it. If Burton and Taylor became synonymous with the famous couple, it was because they were caught in the media circus, with the idea that this wasn’t a curated world of fame, but a leaky boat that was always threatening to sink the pair of them. ‘’The remarkable affair with Elizabeth Taylor was so all-consuming that it nearly did for them both, financially and physically. The long years of loving, fighting, drinking and partying took their toll, while proving beyond a doubt that, despite the intensity of feeling,’’ (Irish Independent)
It wasn’t a marriage made in mediated heaven, but one forged in emotional hell, and hardly one agents would be celebrating. In contrast, most of the new generation are in relationships that could almost have been cooked up by marketing teams and publicists, a sort of arranged marriage without the families needing to be involved. Chalamet has been with Kylie Jenner, one of the Kardashian clan. She has been described as the world’s youngest self-made billionaire at the age of twenty-one. Self-made seems a stretch here, when much of that money would have been predicated on a reality show with your family. Mescal has been dating Gracie Abrams, a singer and songwriter, who is the daughter of J.J. Abrams. Elordi was seeing model Kaia Gorber, the daughter of Cindy Crawford. Austin Butler, not to be outdone, dated Gorber as well. Are all these relationships real, whatever that means? So asked The Independent, and received an answer from a New York dating coach. ‘‘Being in a high-profile relationship is a good way to get people talking about them and the more people talk about them, the more they’re referencing the new project.” It was unlikely anybody happened to be sceptical over Taylor and Burton’s trysts. (They married twice, and still couldn’t sort it.)
If we have included Jeremy Allen White and Harris Dickinson, this isn’t because of their abundant dating history. They were both with women they met in high school. The women may also be in the entertainment industry (Dickinson’s partner Rose Gray is a singer-songwriter; White’s ex, Addison Timlin, is an actress. But it is unlikely that an agent engineered these. (White is now with Spanish singer Rosalia) Yet in other ways, they may be caught in the epoch, obliged to offer certain positions that go beyond the needs of their professional obligations. Portraying the Boss in Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, during the period Bruce wrote the Nebraska album, White said he asked Springsteen What’s that panic about? You know, what is that fear inside of you?’’Springsteen said: ‘I had this moment where I felt like an outsider and observer in my own life.’’ In turn, White is asked by the interviewer, “Have you ever struggled with mental illness yourself?” “Yeah, of course.” (Far Out Magazine) Travis Bickle has a few issues in Taxi Driver, The French Connection’s Popeye Doyle has a drink problem, and Scottie Ferguson is phobic in Vertigo, but would it have seemed appropriate to ask the actors about their own mental health because they played characters who were messed up? Certainly not with the expectation evident now. Equally, while we might admire Dickinson’s position on trans rights and Palestine, as he signed petitions for both, there is the risk in so polarised a 2020s that such a stance impacts on an actor’s career as a demographic gamble. The actor knows their market in a much more acute and mediated way than fifty years ago. Someone like Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson was probably aware that their core audience wasn’t going to be the college crowd, but that wasn’t a mediated attempt at finding their market and alienating the rest. It was a byproduct of the sort of masculinity they projected and the roles they ended up almost inevitably playing. Sensitivity wasn’t really their thing (though Eastwood showed it wonderfully in directing Breezy), but their position was implicitly rather than explicitly political. Obviously, there were actors who were expressing strong political positions, and nobody more so than ‘Hanoi’ Jane Fonda, as she was very actively against the Vietnam War. While Fonda’s decision made her a reviled figure amongst conservatives and war hawks, it still functioned differently from what might seem the virtue signalling of many a contemporary actor. The term virtue signalling is a good term, one we have already adopted, uselessly applied – usually offered as an insult rather than addressed as a question of intent. It is understandable that actors who have the megaphone of fame might wish to use that megaphone, but it risks leaving an actor with this demographic bias, playing to a given crowd rather than uniting a broad audience. Whether vociferously defending Israel or insisting on a Palestinian genocide, whether defending trans rights, or insisting trans men should stay out of women’s sports, whether believing an oppressive regime needs to be toppled, or that regime change is an act of imperialism, there are many issues actors can attach themselves to, aware that they might lose part of the audience, but gain a bigger share of another one.
This needn’t at all be cynicism, but it can be a calculation, and risks turning the political into the performative, within the economic. Actors are unlikely to come out and say they are supporting a given cause because it would be good for their career, but many were mum about the abuses taking place in Hollywood. This was until Me Too became enough of a groundswell that, to keep quiet about it, or question it, became tantamount to risking damaging one’s own reputation, just as years earlier, to have spoken out would have been detrimental to getting parts in Hollywood. As the story broke, the Guardian contacted numerous actors, including George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio and Bradley Cooper, and received no reply. There would be various reasons for this (including resisting too hasty a response, even though numerous women had already commented on the allegations), but could we accept that none of the reasons would concern their careers? In time, most of the actors and directors did make statements condemning Weinstein, with Clooney, for example, saying that, after accepting the truth of the claims, it was ‘’indefensible’’ while defending himself. ‘’We’ve had dinners, we’ve been on location together, we’ve had arguments. But I can tell you that I’ve never seen any of this behavior — ever.” (The Wrap)
Understandably, everyone wanted to distance themselves from Weinstein when the risk was contagion rather than career advancement. Whatever they really felt, knew or believed, it was important that they spoke out and condemned Weinstein’s actions. It had a performative function, and it is this aspect that has fed into the profession, as actors seem never simply to be playing a role (was it ever thus?), but where the role played, the dynamics between actors, the issues that are brought up (perhaps what before would have been buried within the theme), all feed into a mediation so much greater than the film itself. Yet we might prefer to see in Dickinson’s fine performances in Beach Rats, Triangle of Sadness, Iron Claw and Babygirl, and his own role in his debut feature Urchin, an arrested masculinity, and wish that any political statements become absorbed into the work. It would allow performances to return to their centripetal purpose, rather than attending to a centrifugal pertinence. When Dickinson believed that, ‘‘and I’m constantly battling with my own understanding of adulthood and maturity and masculinity and how to move through the world in a way that feels ‘correct’’’ (Empire), this might be an honourable sentiment. But it may not always be so useful when it comes to exploring the givens of a character. Beach Rats and the others are all good to excellent films, and maybe Dickinson, more than Chalamet, Mescal and Elordi, has chosen well. But his comment, which could be echoed, one feels, by others of his generation, risks becoming part of this performative maleness we have thus far explored, and to which we have given the clumsy neologism, mescalinity.
© Tony McKibbin