Piggyback pop culture post: modern actors I actually like

Polly, who has once again demonstrated her essential wisdom and unfailing good taste, has inspired me to look on the bright side of Hollywood. I don’t even know the names of most of the flock of pretty boys running rampant through films in the last ten or fifteen years; our embarrassingly immense DVD collection is at least 95% pre-1970, and probably 70% pre-1955. By temperament and conditioning, I am no expert on younger actors.

Further, I don’t really understand the concept of having a “crush” on an actor; I appreciate male beauty as much as the next woman gay man transgendered whoever, but looks have never been much of a factor in my somewhat eclectic attraction process. Funny, screwed up, compatibly perverse… these are the qualities that push my buttons. I don’t know any of that about a face on a screen; all I know is the character he’s playing.

That said, there are a few actors who consistently play roles I find compelling; characters who, to be blunt, make my girl bits tingle (still, I have no real desire to follow their lives off-screen). Gabriel Byrne comes to mind, as does John Malkovich – Miller’s Crossing and Dangerous Liaisons are two near-perfect films, in my book. But the man who has played more disturbed, perverted, obsessed, incredibly sexually intense crazy people than anyone else, the actor whose films I generally cannot watch with my husband in the same room, is…

… this man.

Jeremy Irons.

The Mission almost killed me; I can only watch it every ten years or so. Damage made me hate Juliette Binoche. Dead Ringers, in which he plays seriously-fucked-up twin gynecologists, contains a threesome scene in which the two men are both Jeremy Irons. I don’t remember the rest of the movie… To my intense shame, I had to keep reminding myself during Lolita that he was a pedophile because they shot him like a sepia-toned god.

Then there’s Brideshead Revisited. I only recently watched this after getting it on DVD; possibly the most depressing fiction ever committed to film, it goes on for hours getting more desolate by the moment. But for the love of all things sacred and profane, the sexual tension between Anthony Andrews (who aged badly, by the way, but was in his prime here) and Jeremy Irons caused my girl bits to approach nuclear status. I don’t give a rat’s ass what Evelyn Waugh says about their intended relationship; if there is any justice in the fictional world, those two had to have gone at it. They did in my mind, anyway, and I don’t even really care for gay porn. Sigh.

Short list, huh?