Two of the biggest movies this summer are Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning and F1, starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, respectively. The two movies have something interesting in common — both are star vehicles for men in their sixties. Brad Pitt will be 62 later this year, and Tom Cruise just turned 63 last week.
Pitt and Cruise aren’t exceptions, either. The biggest male movie stars are all aging. Clooney is 64 and McConaughey is 55. Ben Affleck, also out with a big action film this year, is 53 next month, and his buddy Matt Damon turns 55 later this year.
Just a few decades ago, it would have been genuinely hard to imagine that our most viable male movie stars would be so old. Sure, there are notable exceptions from the past — Clint Eastwood remained something of a viable star into his sixties and beyond. But by the time a 63-year-old Eastwood was starring in 1993’s The Line Of Fire, his age, and the fragility that accompanied it, was a part of the film’s plot. By contrast, Cruise’s Ethan Hunt seems ageless, and while Pitt’s character in F1 may be a grizzled racing vet, his character outperforms everyone else decades younger in a mentally and physically demanding sport. It helps that Cruise and Pitt are pretty well-preserved for their age, but still …
Moreover, who are the young and up-and-coming stars that can claim the mantle that guys such as Cruise and Pitt are still holding on to? Let me ask this question another way. In 1986, Tom Cruise starred in two movies. Despite some previous success (notably Risky Business and supporting roles in big ensemble films such as The Outsiders and Taps), Cruise’s role in the runaway smash Top Gun cemented his reputation as a box office draw. But that same year, he was also in The Color of Money, directed by Martin Scorsese and cast opposite the legendary Paul Newman, who was 61 at the time. Cruise’s energetic performance in The Color of Money established Cruise as a guy with legitimate acting chops. Cruise had just turned 24, and he had become totally undeniable as a star in the biggest sense of the word, meaning he had both talent and commercial appeal.
What male actor under 40 right now has both commercial appeal and respect as an actor commensurate with Tom Cruise’s career when he was just 24? It’s a short and debatable list. There’s a host of talented younger guys — Austin Butler, Miles Teller, and Glen Powell all come to mind — who have real potential but have yet to establish themselves as bankable stars.
To some extent, it’s not the younger actors’ fault; Hollywood as an industry isn’t doing well, and on lots of practical levels, the star-making machine isn’t functioning as it should. But on a deeper level, you have to ask, does Hollywood even understand what masculine appeal looks like?
Arguably the hottest young actor right now is Timothée Chalamet. He has been in both lots of Oscar bait and starred in two Dune movies. But I would argue that the appeal of Chalamet, who I liked quite a bit as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, is somewhat idiosyncratic and better suited for serious dramatic fare than trying to carry a sci-fi epic such as Dune. It’s very hard to imagine that Chalamet, despite being plenty talented, has the broad appeal to be the lead in a pure star vehicle like F1 or Mission Impossible. Which is a polite way of saying Chalamet just doesn’t have a very masculine persona. They used to say of leading men, “women want to be with him, men want to be him,” and it’s like everyone forgot the latter part of that equation. However talented Chalamet may be as actor, the next Harrison Ford he ain’t.
Speaking of Harrison Ford, last week there were reports that Disney will be doing a complete reboot of the Indiana Jones franchise. And interesting, there was a surprising chorus of responses online to the news: For the love of all that is holy do not cast Pedro Pascal as Indiana Jones, culminating in “has anyone posted a pedro pascal becoming the new indiana jones tweet yet, because i haven’t seen it 500 times in the last two hours already?”
This negative reaction is, in part, simply a measure of the fact that Pascal is extraordinarily overexposed right now, and people are openly talking about it. But I think it’s worth asking why he’s suddenly so popular. Again, he’s not untalented. He rose to fame by stealing every scene in Game of Thrones that he was in. What I fear is that he’s filling the void in Hollywood for whenever they have need of a role for a masculine-looking dude, and there just aren’t that many box office draws to go around for those roles.
The problem is that while you might squint and mistake Pascal’s handsome, slightly weathered face as representative of masculinity, I am hardly alone among my male peers in recognizing that Pascal is not convincingly masculine. In his latest film, Materialists, a sort of darkly-themed romcom, he plays a wealthy womanizer. This role makes some sense in that Pascal, again, seems to be far more emblematic of a woman’s ideal of vulnerable masculinity rather than a man’s ideal of badass masculinity.
Of course, there’s also the matter of Pascal’s off-screen persona, which let’s face it, is a problem. I’m being perfectly honest when I say I always found Pascal’s masculinity unconvincing, long before he became a lightning rod for liberal causes and was publicly attacking J.K. Rowling over trans rights. But increasingly, these antics are what Pascal is known for.
Setting politics aside, there are other, um, issues. I don’t know what Pascal’s private proclivities are, and I don’t care. Cary Grant, Montgomery Clift, and Rock Hudson were all, uh, not conventional heterosexual actors — but they were discrete and convincingly masculine onscreen. I know a big part of the problem is that Hollywood is now dominated by female executives who think that it’s disarming and cute that Pascal spends all his time on press junkets obsessing over the nail polish of his interviewers. But the memo should probably go out that this guy absolutely cannot be, say, the next Indiana Jones:
To some extent, the problem is a broader cultural shift. You don’t see many men anywhere that even look like tough-as-nails male icons of yesteryear, let alone earned their image for being hard men long before they started acting. If they were around today, Lee Marvin, Robert Mitchum, or Charles Bronson would probably be rejected out of hand for poor Q Score potential or something.
But to put this in terms that liberal Hollywood will understand, masculine men are an underrepresented community that is being discriminated against. We deserve representation and we’re not getting it.
