Leading Men

Screenshot

This episode of Screenshot explores the evolution and enduring legacy of the Hollywood leading man, tracing archetypes from silent-era heartthrobs like Rudolph Valentino to

Key takeaways

• Christina Newland traces the leading man archetype from Rudolph Valentino's silent-era mystique to Tom Cruise's modern action-hero status, noting how studio publicity historically manufactured star personas.
• Casting director Susan Shopmaker argues that social media has eroded the necessary mystery of movie stars, making it harder for contemporary actors to achieve the same mythic screen presence as Cary Grant or Paul Newman.
• Actor Jason Isaacs dismisses the concept of a curated
• as unhealthy nonsense, advocating instead for versatile acting and noting that financiers now prioritize recognizable streaming clicks over traditional box office draw.
• The hosts contrast Denzel Washington's undeniable movie-star wattage with Paul Mescal's acclaimed but less magnetically commanding performance in Gladiator 2 to illustrate the elusive nature of
• charisma.

Main topics

• Evolution of Hollywood leading men
• Cinematic star power vs. acting craft
• Impact of social media on movie mystique

Notable quotes

"A leading man has to have swagger, charisma. They make the audience feel aspirational or more confident or romantic."

Conclusion

The episode concludes that while the traditional leading man has undeniably evolved, the core

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:04) Hello and welcome to Screenshot, Radio 4's guide through the ever-expanding universe of the moving image. I'm Mark Speaker 2 (0:09) Kermode. And I'm Ellen E. Jones. Speaker 3 (0:13) Now, one of the most successful movie stars ever, Tom Cruise, is back on our screens in Digger, an awards-tipped satirical epic from Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu. I Speaker 6 (0:24) assume I did not touch you. Speaker 3 (0:26) Back in August, Trade Bible Variety were already predicting a possible first competitive Oscar win for Cruise, whose latest movie has been publicised with a montage reel of highlights from his decades-long screen career, bolstering his standing as everyone's favourite leading man. Speaker 6 (0:42) I feel the need, the need for speed. Speaker 2 (0:49) Meanwhile, we've been promised the new James Bond will be announced by the end of the year. In fact, it might well have happened by the time you hear this. It's a leading man role, which pretty much every young and youngish British actor and plenty of Irish ones too have been in the running for at one point or another. And if you need a reminder of what it is to be Bond, the epitome of old-fashioned masculinity, then you can catch Casino Royale featuring Daniel Craig's first appearance as 007 in cinemas at the moment for its worldwide 20th anniversary re-release. Mark, do you reckon whoever it is who has anointed the new Bond will automatically become one of the great leading men? Speaker 3 (1:25) I think that the Bond thing fundamentally changed with Daniel Craig because I think that was the first time that they cast a great actor in the role of James Bond as opposed to a leading man. And if the new Bond turns out to be the person that we all think it's going to be, I think that will be continuing that tradition because I think there is a difference between... being a great actor and being a great leading man. Then it depends, what do you think of as an archetypal leading man? Do Speaker 2 (1:52) you know, at the time recently, I can think when I started to really question all of this was watching Gladiator 2, right? Yeah. Which nominally starred as its leading man, Paul Mescal. but actually stars Denzel Washington, who just absolutely blows him off the screen with this, you know, world-class movie star power. And it's not at all to say Paul Meskow is an incredibly talented actor. He Speaker 4 (2:14) is. Speaker 2 (2:14) I've seen be absolutely magnificent in many different kinds of films. But to see those two different styles of acting side by side, you really got a sense of what star power is. They Speaker 3 (2:26) gather here to watch this. Strong strike down. There has to be Speaker 6 (2:30) something else. There is nothing Speaker 3 (2:31) else. There has to Speaker 6 (2:32) be another Rome. There Speaker 3 (2:33) is no other Rome. There's a weird thing in that film that even when Denzel Washington just moves the material on his cape, you go, OK, he's a movie star. Whereas Paul Meskel is a great actor but hasn't necessarily got that star wattage. Speaker 2 (2:46) Yeah, I think that's part of what people are talking about when they bemoan the death of the leading man or the lack of leading men in the current generation. But I actually would defend quite a few of them as still having that kind of magical spark of charisma. So people like Josh O'Connor and David Johnson, Riz Ahmed, these are all names that have floated around and often... in contention for James Bond as well. But Speaker 3 (3:05) isn't the sort of top of that tree Michael B. Jordan? Because brilliant actor and also looks amazing and you can't take your eyes off Speaker 2 (3:11) him. Absolutely. How could I forget Michael B. Jordan? So this episode, we're asking what makes The Leading Man? Has that changed? And does The Leading Man even still exist? Later in the programme, you'll hear me talking to Susan Shopmaker, the accomplished and discerning casting agent whom we have to thank, at least in part, for the careers of Callum Turner, Riz Ahmed and Harris Dickinson. And you'll also hear me basking in the megawattage star power of Jason Isaacs, a real life leading man, though he would absolutely dispute every aspect of that description. Speaker 1 (3:41) Well, he Speaker 2 (3:41) is. But you're up first, Mark. Speaker 3 (3:44) So in order to get a sense of the evolution of the leading man from early silent heroes to today's bankable blockbuster stars, I spoke to freelance film critic and broadcaster and screenshot regular Christina Newland. I started by asking Christina what she thinks makes a leading man. Speaker 1 (4:00) A leading man has to have swagger, charisma. They make the audience feel aspirational or more confident or romantic. For better or for worse, leading men are determined by the biggest box office draws. It's why we think of Tom Cruise, why we think of Michael B. Jordan. You can't not talk about Rudolph Valentino when you talk about early Hollywood leading men. He's the first massive heartthrob. He's kind of known as a Latin lover. In reality, he was actually Italian-born, but studio publicity departments would change around the backstories and even the ethnicities of their stars. He was probably most famous for his... power over audiences, particularly female audiences. And for many years, it was predominantly female audiences that went to the movies. Studios started to realize after Valentino and the craze around him, they needed to cater more to female audiences. Speaker 1 (4:52) You have Clark Gable in the 30s who becomes the next in the line of romantic leading men. Speaker 5 (4:58) Sir, you are no gentleman. And Speaker 6 (4:59) you, miss, are no lady. Don't think that I hold that against you. Ladies have never held any charm for me. Speaker 1 (5:06) There's Speaker 6 (5:06) a Speaker 1 (5:06) lot to be said about what was going on around the world, the wars, and the kind of men that ended up capturing the public imagination. Speaker 3 (5:13) Okay, why would Clark Gable or Errol Flynn, for example, be someone who captured the contemporary imagination so well? Speaker 1 (5:19) I think both have a swashbuckling quality, but they also have a salt-of-the-earth-ness. Certainly in the case of Gable, you know, you see him in the early 30s movies. He looks like somebody that can do manual labor. You're talking about the Depression era, right? Valentino didn't. A decade back, you're looking at a much more romanticized, wannabe aristocracy thing. Speaker 2 (5:38) And Speaker 1 (5:38) then you fast forward past the Depression, and people want somebody who feels tactile. Speaker 3 (5:44) So when we talk about looks like they can do manual labour, there is a difference between that and the great everyman actor Jimmy Stewart. Where does Jimmy Stewart fit into this whole map? Speaker 1 (5:54) Jimmy Stewart did such an amazing heel turn where he played such apple pie, wholesome Americana in the 30s and, you know, Capra films. You want the moon? Speaker 6 (6:03) Just say the word and I'll throw a lasso around it and pull it down. Hey, that's a pretty good idea. Speaker 1 (6:09) And then you get to the 50s and he starts showing up in these really nasty westerns or the Hitchcock films, Rear Window, Vertigo, where he plays somebody much darker. You can almost look at Jimmy Stewart and look at the trajectory of the darkening of the American male psyche. Speaker 6 (6:23) Judy, it can't make that much difference to you. I just want to see what you know. Speaker 1 (6:26) No, I don't want any clues. I don't want anything. I want to get out of here. Speaker 6 (6:29) Judy, do this for me. Speaker 3 (6:30) Here we are. Speaker 6 (6:32) No, we'll take it. Speaker 1 (6:36) Really big movie stars become things for us to project onto culturally and personally over years. And talking about real life personas, you talk about Jimmy Stewart, where he flew, I can't remember how many missions over Europe during the Second World War. What could be more kind of amazing and heroic for this all-American guy to be an actual war hero? So the war happens and then we have the psychological fallout of that. All of these things start to pick away. at whatever very simplistic maybe ideas we have about gender or what men should be. Speaker 3 (7:08) Tell me about Marlon Brando. Marlon Brando is demonstrably pretty in The Wild One. He's amazingly aggressive but attractive in a vest in Streetcar Named Desire. He is credited with having changed the nature of what being a leading man meant. Speaker 1 (7:24) You have the rise of the Method School of Acting and the Actors Studio, which is the main proponent of the Method. And it becomes the place for actors who want to be serious and psychologically based in their craft is very much about pulling things from out of yourself. Brando wasn't the first. You have people like Montgomery Clift. After Brando, you have James Dean. And effeminacy was the accusation that was leveled at those actors because they combined feminine qualities with masculine qualities. And they were pretty in a very particular way. I Speaker 6 (7:52) could have been a contender. I could have been somebody. Speaker 6 (7:57) Instead of a bum, which is what I am, let's face it. Speaker 1 (8:02) There's something so real about Brando. This is somebody who's mumbling and bumping into stuff and sweaty and taking his shirt off because he's just coming from a day's work. There is something just very realistic and gritty. And this combination of this kind of feline beauty and this quite old school, you know, he's playing a longshoreman, he's playing a biker, he's playing very macho parts. Speaker 3 (8:26) We move to somebody like Dustin Hoffman, you know, has the same approach to the method and taking it seriously and internalizing it. From the outside, he does not look like leading man material. Goes on to be one of the biggest stars of his generation. Speaker 1 (8:39) People talk about the 70s leading man as being this new generation of kind of rangy, dynamic. They were shorter. They didn't look like the Cary Grants. They looked a lot of times more Jewish, more Italian-American, like Al Pacino. Speaker 3 (8:50) Yeah. But Speaker 1 (8:50) there's something so interesting about Hoffman because... You have a Hollywood which has been built almost entirely by Jewish Americans, and yet a hesitance for so many years to allow their leading men to have those names. You know, John Garfield was a great 40s actor. His name was Julius Garfinkel. So Dustin Hoffman is pushing the boundaries of the type of actor we see on the screen. Of course, you have actors before that in the Jim Crow era, like Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier. It's always been going on to an extent. Speaker 3 (9:17) The difference is that Belafonte and Poitier are incredibly handsome. Speaker 1 (9:20) That's also true. Belafonte was another huge heartthrob. He always wore kind of very unbuttoned shirts and appealed very much to white women as well. This was in 1956-57, considered controversial. Speaker 1 (9:38) But Hoffman in particular got a lot of stick when he first was auditioning for and eventually going to be in The Graduate. He was told he was ugly. The famous story about that was they were going to cast Robert Redford in that role, right? And that would have been extremely different. Speaker 3 (9:51) Because the argument against casting Redford, as I understood it, was I could throw a stick in Hollywood and hit 50 people that look like Robert Redford. Speaker 1 (9:58) Yeah, I think what's so interesting about that. period for me is that there seemed to be room for all manner of stars. Gene Hackman, who looks wise, nobody would say he looked like a leading man, but he's an incredible actor. But Redford is a really interesting, almost exception to the rule of all those dynamic actors who are like very anti-WASP. He is like the Ur-WASP. And he leans into a lot of like star vehicles that are old school. Like the Sting is set in the past. The way we were the great Waldo Pepper. They're all set in the past. He is almost doing this throwback thing. Speaker 6 (10:29) You're going to put highways in the sky along with airlines and airmail and there's going to be big money in it too if you're smart. Well, I'm no chauffeur and I'm no mailman. I'm a flyer. Speaker 3 (10:41) So then we move into what is now known as the age of Tom Cruise. Now Tom Cruise seems to focus pretty much on being the great action hero of his time. That wasn't always the case, was it? Speaker 1 (10:52) I think in many ways, when you think of early Tom Cruise in the 80s, he's never been a star who's afraid to play a douchebag. And you see the douchiness start to come out pretty early with Cruise. He's kind of a little bit of like a jumped up. character in The