One of monoculture’s final touchstones reared its head this week, maybe for the last time: People’s Sexiest Man Alive.
The award has long functioned as a proxy for the location of common taste that makes you go “wait, what?,” then “sure, I guess.” Some choices make more sense than others. Dwayne Johnson got it in 2016, right after he voiced Maui in Moana and just before he confessed his presidential aspirations to GQ. The Voice judge Blake Shelton got it in 2017, the year he featured on his new girlfriend Gwen Stefani’s Christmas album and his own country-album hit No. 1. But if I gave you three guesses, would you actually remember that Paul Rudd nabbed the title in 2021 for being fifth billed in a dark Ghostbusters sequel? Or that Patrick Dempsey, who was killed off on Grey’s Anatomy eight years earlier, then drove a car in Ferrari, won in 2023?
It’s long been established that we live in an increasingly decentralized world where we each get to live in our own little spheres of influence and aesthetics — including around sexiness — and that’s exactly how we ended up with 2024’s Sexiest Man: John Krasinski. By now, we are used to a familiar if not out-dated face gracing the cover of the People issue. (Idris Elba had little beyond Cats cooking in 2018, and no one disputed his universal appeal.) But Krasinski’s announcement drew a particularly contentious response, exemplified by the fine people over at Who? Weekly: “You’ve gotta be fuckin’ kidding me.” The reaction has been so mixed that Krasinski’s co-star on The Office Kate Flannery felt compelled to issue a defense.
When it first kicked off in the late ’80s, the Sexiest Man Alive award was a culturally meaningful project. Leading men of the time were mass-market curiosities and genuinely unapproachable through other means; the space at the top of culture was still fairly small, and people were hungry to gaze at it. And it made sense that George Clooney (twice), Richard Gere, Patrick Swayze, Denzel Washington, Matthew McConaughey, Pierce Brosnan, and Brad Pitt (twice) were picks in the ’90s and the 2000s when the Hollywood star system was still all-consuming. These days, with culture so much more diffuse, you can sense the magazine grasping toward some idea of the Great Average Middle in its picks: that is, men who possess a kind of uncomplicated sexiness but are not teetering at the top of some unapproachable peak (see: Dempsey, whom my colleague Jason P. Frank believes People had been keeping inside a glass box with the words “break in case of emergency” since McDreamy’s death).
And what is an average if not bland? That blandness feels extra dissonant in the post–Internet Boyfriend era, when fans simply anoint sexy people themselves, choosing Pedro Pascal one week, Paul Mescal the next, Dev Patel, Jharrel Jerome, Steven Yeun, Austin Butler, and so on. What does someone like Timothée Chalamet stand to gain with a People cover when he has this? There have been reports as far back as 2014 that Ryan Gosling, prodigiously sexy, turned down the award multiple times. In many ways, the right man for the job at this very precarious point in time is the adopted son of Tom Cruise (1990’s Sexiest Man Alive), Glen Powell, an actor who has been steadily and studiously developing his assets (megawatt smile, conventionally hot bod, vaguely southern charm) toward the goal of old-school, cross-over, bipartisan stardom. But there are reports that he (along with Pascal) turned down the award this year.
Instead, we got Krasinski — the guy who tried to keep things light and happy on YouTube during the pandemic, who starred in some moderately conservative-coded movies and TV shows like in Prime Video’s Jack Ryan, who is now a certified family-man director of A Quiet Place and the equally terrifying IF (starring 2010’s Sexiest Man Alive, Ryan Reynolds) — who hasn’t been Jim from The Office since 2013. Sure, I guess.
So is it time to put the Sexiest Man Alive out to pasture? Call me a hopeless romantic, but I say no. Because, as we’ve established, making cool and interesting picks has never been quite the objective of People’s Sexiest Man Alive. It’s a cultural project aimed at figuring out the true modern realization of mass-market hotness. (Or at the least, who has the most old-school publicist in the industry.) And if People doesn’t illuminate that, who will? A Substack? C’mon now. Our fractured nation deserves for the award to stick around long enough for Travis Kelce to give the minivan majority what they really want.
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