No Take Backs?: A Lippy Male Starlet Handled, With Care

I hardly ever go the movies anymore.

It just doesn’t really do it for me like it used to, and I don’t particularly miss it. Maybe it’s the idiots who can’t stay off cell phones for a whole ninety minutes. It could be that home theaters have made the movie viewing experience much more pleasurable in terms of controlling content and ambiance.

Or it might be that I just don’t really get excited by actors anymore.

I’m finding that I can’t really distinguish the latest discovery-of-the-moment from the incarnation who preceded him. Young actors are starting to all look alike to me — I’m not confident that I could pick James McAvoy, Robert Pattinson, Cillian Murphy, or Orlando Bloom out in a line-up even if one of them attacked me on the street — and there’s always some new Brit, Irish, or Australian import (sultry vamp and nekkid-ass werewolf from Being Human, you get a pass) who seems to miss the boat to stardom before I can manage to get acquainted with him. Stateside, the crop of sloe-eyed domestic actors are all like hypertrophic twelve-year-olds, forever “in search of the right girl” and apparently quoting from a callow ’50s pop ballad. Hollywood comes off, like so many formerly great American institutions, as more desultory and phoned-in than ever; just as I haven’t been buying much in the way of new music because everything is Auto-Tuned to death, I find I’m turning to cultier, more obscure movie fare from previous decades and other countries.

I could almost think that Hollywood is just genetically engineering new stars who have the aggregate physical characteristics of established ones in order to achieve mass appeal, which is why this statement on pansex playtime from one of the current roster of male starlets had me wondering OK, wait — which one is he?:

“Of course I have. I’m an actor for fuck’s sake. I’ve played with everything and everyone. I love the form and the physicality, but now that I’m in my thirties, it doesn’t do it for me. I’m done experimenting but there’s plenty of stuff in a relationship with another man, especially gay men, that I need in my life. A lot of gay men get my thing for shoes. I have definite feminine qualities and a lot of gay men are incredibly masculine. A lot of people say I seem masculine, but I don’t feel it. I feel intrinsically feminine. I’d love to be one of the boys but I always felt a bit on the outside. Maybe my masculine qualities come from overcompensating because I’m not one of the boys.”

When I first read this, I thought it came from the guy from Avatar and Clash of The Titans (an Australian named Sam Worthington), but it actually arrived courtesy of another tan brunet with an accent called Tom Hardy (lookin’ pretty Ed Hardy, opening pic and left) who’s in one of the few creative bright spots in an otherwise dismal-even-by-summer-movie-standards season.

I haven’t seen Inception or anything else Hardy has played in, but I have to admit this is a notably candid assertion on permeable sexual boundaries, particularly given it’s a young male actor — actresses are often happy to resort to lezploitation to promote a feature or garner themselves some shallow “bi” cred — dropping the anvil. Parts of it actually sound as if they were cribbed from my own head, and I’ll admit that he is much sexier than your average wispy Brit heartthrob — interesting how many mainstream male stars could be mistaken for Raging Stallion exclusives as of late — and shut my mouth wide open if he doesn’t come off as articulate. Nuanced even.

His statement actually dates from an Attitude interview from about two years back (the year 2008 B.H.W.F. — Before He Was Famous), and now that he is somebody in Hollywood and in the lead for a retooling of the Mad Max franchise, his publicists were quick to yelp “Undo It! Undo It!” as they leaped in to downplay the interview. Apparently Hardy was “in character” (for a Guy Ritchie project), and given that he related his experiences in the first person, clearly he’s Method.

Granted, this could just be another put-a-hole-in-the-Ozone moment of actorly self-indulgence, and it would be very easy to just focus on snippets of his statement rather than the breadth of it, but for me the significance is not so much the big reveal that many is the hetero-identified man who’s hopped the fence, but how suffocatingly celebrities are handled into listless, mute docility. There are still studio-backed arranged relationships, kids loaned from the prop department, nobody ever does drugs until they do something bad enough that they need to excuse it away, and no aspiring male actors are passed around the agent buffet like they were in the ’50s.

Only two types of specimens have handlers: famous people and performing animals, and that’s a fitting linkage. I don’t frequent zoos, circuses, aquariums, etc. because I despair seeing wild creatures turned into caged take-a-ganders and dancing buffoons. I’m beginning to cringe at Hollywood for the same reason. I’m not sure actors are really that different from dancing chimps or bike-riding bears: trained to mimic human emotion most can only approximate, doped up to keep them malleable, and at some point destined to bite the hand that feeds them.

At some point, most become unable to take care of themselves, end up speaking through empty press releases obviously written for them, and require a team of agents, spokespeople, stylists, nutritionists, gurus, shrinks, money managers, and personal assistants to get them out of bed and on their feet. When they behave badly, they get twenty whole minutes in the clink followed by a stay at Promises in Malibu — then it’s back to Dance, Monkey, Dance!

Hollywood biopics are all the same, chronicling dizzying rises and falls thanks to ego, whoring, and drugs, but rarely are we privy to the tedious meddling, cajoling, and spinning that can take place between stars and their coteries of keepers on a daily basis. Just as character-actor-in-the-body-of-a-leading-man Johnny Depp was for years notorious for driving agents wanting to turn him into a generic pin-up into paroxysms of frustration, Hardy’s reps are going to have their hands full with a burgeoning star certain to be the implied/inferred subject of many a gossip rag blind item.

The former equal opportunity Party Hardy Boy is trying to reinvent himself as both a doting father and fiancé to co-star Charlotte Riley, but the hand slap he’s received for delving into an inconvenient “experimental” past apparently wasn’t sufficient enough negative reinforcement. A recent interview with Men’s Health only muddies the waters and casts further doubt on his straight-and-narrow do-over, suggesting drugs may not be the whole problem: “In a blackout I could end up anywhere. I might wake up somewhere the other side of London, or in another country. Or in bed with someone I didn’t know, not knowing how I got there. Bleeding. This was on a daily basis. And I was going to work. I didn’t want to appear rock ‘n’ roll. I didn’t want anyone to know I was out of control, but I couldn’t hide it. Eventually, the body gives up. My body told me. I was completely kaput. I was lucky I didn’t get hepatitis or AIDS.”

The watchwords for handling a fragile and unruly package of a star:

This End Up.