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.
Vince Vaughn
Vince Vaughn has that snarly mouth with the kiss branded into the upper lip--or is it some private mark of Cain? Whatever it is, it tells us that V-V-voom is not a day's drive from the wind-blasted stretch of desert highway where sex is a dangerous thing, my pretty one, especially when your car has let you down and this hunk here--the one taking off his shirt--is the only trucker who's ready to stop. There's something about Vince that goes back to the American dream of violent sex gods who could break a butterfly's wings--like Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, like the young Mitchum, like any Tarzan just a loincloth away from the jungle. Vaughn can be really nasty (in the back room of your gentle imagination), and he has a way of looking at you that won't move an eighth of an inch to be reassuring. Swingers and Clay Pigeons show how well he's magnified that uncertainty into something very of our own tabloid time. There have been attempts to tame Vince: Spielberg gave him a dumb chance in The Lost World: Jurassic Park--as if trying to obliterate the deep, dark chemistry V.V. had set off with Spielberg's wife, Kate Capshaw, in The Locusts (check that one out). The new Psycho should put an end to any notion of chilling Vince out, now that Norman Bates is Norman Baits.
Ashley Judd
If there's one thing 20 minutes in Hollywood teaches you, it's that deliveries of prime, gorgeous female flesh (with attitude and agents attached) are more frequent than those for any other product. There's no end to the list of dream babes we once thought were forever, but who came--came several times in a row--and then went so completely you can't be sure the obits will even spell the name right. Years from now, will they ponder "Ashley Judd ... or just plain Ashly?" Too many more Kiss the Girls could pull the curtains closed, no matter that this is a legendary body with a Phi Beta Kappa mind and one of the most luminous screen presences since Frances Farmer (look what happened to her). What argues best for Judd's survival is the scene near the end of 1995's Heat where, with just a slight wave of her hand and some inner aging of the soul, she tells Val Kilmer to be somewhere else. Of course, that was Michael Mann, and there aren't many people who can make the way men and women look at each other so erotic. But even Michael Mann has a way of giving his actresses just one smoldering glance while going on and on with the way guys talk. Next century, could we have some directors sufficiently interested in sex for its own sake to give us a couple of hours of just looking at Judd and--by all means--letting her come and come again, until no one questions that she must stay? And stay hungry. And it's Ashley.
Cameron Diaz
When Julia Roberts first sees Cameron Diaz in My Best Friend's Wedding, she seems to age five years in an instant as she realizes she's suddenly in a real struggle, not just a frothy exercise. What Julia's grave eyes note is that Diaz is terrific, flawless, cool and so decent that no one can attack her without making themselves seem like a creep. Diaz has a happy habit of being in hits--Wedding, her debut film The Mask, last summer's There's Something About Mary. Of course, she's done a lot that passed by in the night, too. But she works hard, has luridly bad hair days and generally seems ready for future shock (e.g., Very Bad Things). For all her willingness to be off-the-wall, she may be a little too eager to please to be a world-class sexpot. She should recollect that Julia Roberts wouldn't be what she is if it hadn't been for that one film, Pretty Woman. Diaz could use the same thing: a project in which she has an older costar and a director who'll tell her to close her eyes, breathe deep and know that she has the nicest smile in the world--so that she'll wake up, take charge, and give a performance that will send men, women and children shambling into the 21st century, aching for her.
Rupert Everett
In the next century, Englishness--as opposed to Britishness--will, I believe, come into its narrow own as the repository of sexiness (and nothing else). How valiantly, over the centuries, the English have seemed preoccupied with the white man's burden, the obligations of empire, the industrial revolution and the world's wars, to say nothing of cricket, crumpets and living in a mist. But now with Britain part of Europe, and with Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland thoroughly devolved (or whatever), all that nonsense can be set aside. The English can turn to their true genius, pursuit of sex and the glorification of the dirty mind. Hence, Rupert Everett, a perfect example of English libido liberated, eyes unclouded with thoughts of anything except sex and sexual presence. His mind is like private parts being dissected on a black velvet table. He's thoroughly cocked, like a gun, and ready for all blood sports. The "coming out" of Sir Rupert, the admission of gayness, is really just a mask for this deeper masquerade, and his eminence in bi- and tri-sexual romantic roles in the next century can be predicted with confidence. He's already played, in the The Madness of King George, the Prince of Wales who became King George IV (designer of his own royal pavilion). He'd be perfect as any number of lascivious aristocrats, or as a faun in an Aubrey Beardsley salon. Everett is the actor who, above all in the next century, might begin a tasteful exploration of Decay and Decadence.
Jennifer Lopez
Sitting on it fools nobody. Most of the time, Jennifer Lopez seems to be saying--or is she just sighing?--"Hey, what's with you all?" Her stare tossed back over the shoulder along with her hair, she looks down at the sneaky camera that is trying to keep her bodacious, rococo and slightly implausible ass (its only modern rival is Jessica Rabbit's) in frame. Lopez may not care, but the pose is very like that of Betty Grable in World War II pinups, gazing back at horny GIs dreaming over the open parentheses of her inviting legs. Of course, Jennifer's self-possession and Latina allure are all of a piece, and like the Hispanic vote in California, this power is about the future. The nicest thing about Jennifer is the wicked, yet tolerant look in her smoky eyes, as if she can't help wondering whether we're going to believe in her or strip off her paint-tight clothes and stick in the proverbial pin. She has survived tough training-- being Selena when Selena's fans held the real thing sacred; standing up loyally for old man Nicholson in the gloom of Blood and Wine, hoping the Viagra would kick in; doing saucy candor in her magazine interviews. Out of Sight was the payoff, and the clear proof that she could do grown-up, smart and emotional in-your-face--if only to keep from falling backwards.
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David Thomson is the author of Beneath Mulholland: Thoughts on Hollywood and Its Ghosts, now published in paperback by Vintage.