Sex Symbols for the 21st Century

Stars like Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts and Leonardo DiCaprio would be sex symbols in any era. Here are stars who custom-designed to steam up the new century.

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Kevin Spacey

When it comes to forecasting sexual charisma in the 21st century, it's not a crystal ball you need--it's crystal balls you look for. So Kevin Spacey is our man. No smart remarks! There isn't anyone else in the movies now who can juggle with his own sexual atoms and give you the kid grin that says, sure, this is a dangerous game--they really are Tiffany & Co., and they could end up piles of shattered diamonds. Spacey has more nerve and natural authority on-screen than anyone we know. That's what made Jack Vincennes the most intriguing figure in LA. Confidential That's what took London's Almeida Theater by storm early in 1998 when Spacey did Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh. That's what makes Spacey, a wicked mimic, the best interview on TV. No one else is so endearing and so deft at delivering the nasties (as witness Hurlyburly). No one else's way of looking at you is more flat-out carnal. When Spacey is up on the big screen, you don't necessarily know who's going to get fucked, or how or where, but you know that his force of will is inevitably going to take over. Power over people is what interests him. It's his innate confidence that lets a Keyser Soze seem like a humble, limping creep, until....The talk of the town is that Spacey can't carry a film. I don't buy it. He'd have carried The Negotiator if there'd been enough there to carry. He could lift Julia Roberts or Michelle Pfeiffer away--as if he were Dracula.

Drew Barrymore

What you get with Drew Barrymore is a tricky scenario in which the girl next door lives in the house from Sunset Blvd. And since Drew seems to have been around for half a century already, without quite going all the way, isn't it natural to expect that sometime soon in the next century she's really going to get her and our rocks off? What Drew has--and the best glimpse of this was back when she gave Letterman a look at her golden globes for his birthday--is the perilous aura of a girl who might unexpectedly go out of control. That's something Natalie Wood and Tuesday Weld had once, and you saw it in Carole Lombard, too, when she was with Drew's grandfather in Twentieth Century. Drew looks a lot like her grandfather, and she cries out for a rebirth of screwball comedies. That's the genre in which gorgeous creatures go through an insane, self-imposed obstacle course with the energy that we all know will screw and ball once the film is over. This is a truly funny wanton, and sooner or later someone is going to make a madcap throne of a film for her. For the 21st century, why not a remake of Twentieth Century, with Drew doing Lombard and Kevin Spacey in her grandfather's role?

Matt Dillon

Matt Dillon has been making movies since the late 70s. He's had on-screen flings with Diane Lane, Kelly Lynch and Sean Young--none of whom is coming back, alas. He's had two whole decades to make himself "happen." All that time and he finds himself playing the socks-in-bed hubby Nicole Kidman offs in To Die For so she can have more time for Joaquin Phoenix and her media dreams! In other words, just a couple of years ago it looked as if Matt had gone the well-trodden path from ingenue to used-up without so much as a stop-off at Grand Central. But along the way, the dude had started to get a touch of the suave. You saw the gaunt face tighten up. You began to sketch in a whiff of iron gray in the sideburns. And you realized that this just might be a very knowing fucker by 40 or so--a kid who'd had all the other kids on the block and kept it together into middle age by being alert and unsentimental. It was in Wild Things that Dillon first seemed like a guy who could keep the likes of Neve Campbell, Denise Richards and even Theresa Russell exercised, while still running a few other schemes in his busy head. It's just possible that Matt Dillon could be the perfect sexual mentor for all the nymphets Hollywood manages to find in the next decade. He has the wry jaw of the heartless seducer, the mustache to cut young dreams to ribbons. Times are never going to be what they were, but Dillon is a dark horse, maybe getting ready to be our Errol Flynn. And it says everything about modern sex that our Flynn would be a former kid star.

Charlize Theron

She didn't need Woody Allen to clue her in on anything for Celebrity. If you care to believe Charlize Theron on the subject of Charlize Theron, this girl learned the facts of life from her mother after they'd both seen Fatal Attraction together. (It does begin to account for the stunned look in her eyes, and argues that amazement will beat education every time.) But do we really even believe that name "Charlize Theron," much less the whole back story of being raised in South Africa (!) before coming to New York to study with the Joffrey Ballet? Try another one on us, "Charlize"--one in which you, with your honeyed aluminum sleekness, turn out to be the way the aliens we've been waiting for really look (it would work better than anything in The X-Files). Five-feet-nine and 23, Theron is currently the plaything for Mighty Joe Young. Putting a slip of a thing in a slip of a thing and setting her in a giant simian's gaze did wonders for Fay Wray and (eventually) for Jessica Lange, and it's likely that apes everywhere are ready to love Charlize. But the best evidence of her futuristic allure is still the slightly druggy availability (we're talking timing, not intake) she gave off back in The Devil's Advocate. She was the ultimate shock effect of that film, the great coup of which was that we never actually got to see her sex scenes with Pacino. But just look at Al's exhilaration. Why should the Devil have all the fun? Our turn.

Angelina Jolie

"Angelina," said Jon Voight, her father, "has seen with her own eyes my ups and downs and my struggles to do what I thought was right. Hopefully she's learned from the mistakes I've made. I think she's pretty well equipped." Which is putting it mildly. Angelina is so equipped she gets away with a surname that means "pretty" in French. She has already taken on so many different looks in her screen work that Dad might not always recognize her, but men unrelated to her can see--in everything from Playing God (in which she starred with David Duchovny) to TNT's George Wallace to her Rolling Stones video--a pattern involving eyes and breasts that all seem a couple of sizes too large, not to mention a mouth so exaggerated she could be Mick Jagger's moonchild. Add to that her HBO showcase Gia, in which it was hard to tell whether her most uninhibited yen was for the lens or for other ladies. If Jolie really has studied the roller coaster called Jon Voight, she might reckon on hitting stardom now and coming back into her own again at about age 50--that would be 2025. In the meantime, Playing by Heart and Pushing Tin may be the films that will lead her to her Midnight Cowboy. She will or she won't participate in the new cinematic vogueing that involves DNA, but she'll look like the ideal sexpot android in any case. She could do worse than let Chris Carter talk her into the next X-Files film (a sequel is rumored to be due out in 2000), if only so she and Duchovny could develop their rapport. That or something where her eyes look around corners and her breasts eat live guys for breakfast.

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