<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"FacebookPinterest\n\n The ten highest-grossing movies  of 2012 included the following:  Three adaptations of young-adult novels. Three  adaptations of comic books. Two cartoons. One  installment in an action series. And one original,  non-franchise, live-action movie that was,  technically, aimed at adults. \n\n Nine of the ten movies were, or were  intended to generate, sequels. The movie  aimed at adults was about a man whose  teddy bear talks to him. None of this is news.  We're all pretty familiar by now with the  not-so-brave, no-longer-so-new world of  franchises and the adult children who make  them. What's most jolting about this list is  what's missing from it: movie stars.\n\nI don't mean that they're literally absent:  Recognizable men are cast in lead roles.  What's missing is, rather, the value stars  bring to a movie\u2014a quality long thought  to be one of the most reliable and precious  commodities in Hollywood. The twenty-first-century movie business, judging by  this list, appears to be one in which Skyfall's Daniel Craig counts for neither more nor  less than Twilight's Robert Pattinson or The Hobbit's Martin Freeman. It's a business in  which you can get to $200 million or $250  million by hiring Andrew Garfield (for The Amazing Spider-Man) or David Schwimmer  (for voice work on Madagascar 3). And notably, it is a business in which you will not get  to that top ten on the back of someone like  Johnny Depp or Brad Pitt, unless they get  there on the back of something like Pirates of the Caribbean 5 or Ocean's Whatever.\n\nIt's hard to escape the logical conclusion: Movie stars just don't matter anymore.  Financially, sociologically, culturally, they're  either obsolete or doing a damn good job of  pretending to be. Whether it's because they  stopped doing what movie stars are supposed to do or we stopped wanting them to  do it, here we all are, apparently, in a post-movie-star universe in which the movies  seem to be doing just fine without the presence of an entire category of people who  have been, for the better part of the past century, the main reason a lot of people went to  the movies. And we shouldn't be surprised.  If, in 2013, our primary allegiances are to  genres and concepts and properties rather  than to people, if our biggest modern movie  stars are Batman and Bourne and Wolverine  and James Bond, and if the most a flesh-and-blood actor can hope is to be chosen  to serve as the temporary avatar for one of  those characters, then what meaning can  the term movie star possibly have?\n\nPlenty, it turns out. We still need movie  stars. And perhaps more surprisingly, we  still have movie stars\u2014lots of them, and  arguably a more talented and interesting  variety than at any time in the past thirty  years. But they play by new rules, and they  have to navigate an industry that often  seems hostile to their very existence.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nTo make sense of the new movie star universe, it may help to acknowledge  that the very words movie star now seem  like kryptonite to half of Hollywood's A-list  (and A-list aspirants). From Johnny Depp,  who is, lest there be any doubt, a movie star:  \"That 'movie star' stuff, I just don't buy it; it  just doesn't make sense to me.\" From Steve  Carell, who has worked very hard to try to  become a movie star: \"I don't think of myself  as a movie star... I'm an actor, and I love  my job.\" From Armie Hammer, the star of  the hugely expensive big-studio franchise-wannabe The Lone Ranger: \"I personally  don't see myself...as a movie star.\"\n\nThis may all come under the heading of  protesting too much\u2014the way the second  somebody says, \"I don't consider myself  wealthy,\" you know they're a lot closer to  it than you are. But you can't blame actors  for running away from a term that reeks  of greed and compromise. Ever since the  Reagan-era Wall Street boom infected  Hollywood with a bigger-is-better aesthetic  and box-office performance became a routine part of plugged-in chatter, the industry and the press have welded the idea of  stardom to money so completely that it has  been dumbed down all the way to the level  of elementary-school math. According to  Hollywood and its observers, a star is someone who can open a movie.\n\nBut to equate stardom with mere bank-ability ruins the fun\u2014unless your definition  of fun is long and tortured analytical discussions of whether Tom Cruise is \"still a star,\"  even though nobody wanted to see a man  that short play Jack Reacher or, for that matter, see a movie titled Jack Reacher. Beyond  that, it misses the truth. For one thing, some  actors can indeed open movies every single  time and yet are not what we think of as  movie stars (specialty acts like Tyler Perry  and single-niche performers like Jason  Statham), just as there are actors whose  box-office records may be spotty but whose  stardom is indisputable (Pitt, for one).  By the numbers, Adam Sandler is a movie  star, but only when he makes an Adam  Sandler movie. His stardom, like Abbott and  Costello's in the 1940s and Burt Reynolds's  in the 1970s, is extraordinarily consistent,  but also dependent on satisfying rather  than challenging the modest expectations  of his target audience. When Sandler tried  to break those chains, as he did in Punch-Drunk Love and Funny People, he won over  critics but lost his base. Stars shouldn't be  constrained by the fact that they do one  thing well\u2014nor should the designation of  movie star be subject to such casual revision  every time the grosses roll in. All stars have  flops; real stars survive them.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nThe reductio ad absurdum of the financial  approach to stardom was exposed when  Forbes, crunching the numbers, declared  that our three biggest male stars are  Daniel Radcliffe, Shia LaBeouf, and Robert  Pattinson. If this is what stardom has come  to, why continue the discussion? Radcliffe,  Pattinson, and LaBeouf carried three of the  last decade's biggest film franchises, but  subtract their signature roles (as you must,  because those sweet rides are over) and  you've got three young actors\u2014average age:  a still-too-soon-to-tell 25\u2014ranging from  very promising to very problematic who are  still working to prove they are more than  the sum of their parts. Nobody ever wants  to be seen as this sort of \"post-movie-star  movie star\"\u2014competent, handsome, and  untroublesome to the corporation bankrolling your franchise. The guys who get those  jobs always feel quickly compelled to prove  that they're not just on-screen because  their costumes fit nicely. Chris Hemsworth  wants to be known as more than the guy in The Avengers people also like, after Robert  Downey Jr., Mark Ruffalo, and Samuel L.  Jackson but before Chris Evans.\n\nSo let's take weekend grosses and franchise successes out of the equation for  the moment and assume that something  remains aside from the usual airy-fairy  horseshit about \"star quality\" and \"magnetism.\" Some leading men come to a pivot  point at which we in the audience stop  thinking, \"Oh yeah, that guy again,\" and  start thinking of someone simply as a name:  Clooney. Hanks. Clint. Jack. Modern male  movie stars\u2014the ones who are more than  just amalgamations of sex and money and  slick catchphrases\u2014have something in common with their forerunners all the way back  to Hollywood's golden age. It's what film  critic Ty Burr called \"the impact of coherent  personalities...behind individual roles,\" that  particular, recognizable quality that doesn't  overwhelm or rewrite those roles but makes  them richer and deeper. To understand  who makes the cut and who doesn't these  days, it might help to have a case study of  would-be movie stars.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nAt the beginning of last year,  there were two particularly strong candidates to become a one-namer: Channing  Tatum and Taylor Kitsch. For one thing,  they were the right age: Tatum is 32; Kitsch  is 31. That works, because, with rare exceptions (Travolta in the '70s, Cruise in the  '80s), we don't usually want male movie  stars to be in their twenties. We'll watch  them, we'll like them, we'll go to their films,  but being handsome (or pretty) and devoid  of life experience\u2014the age at which your  clear, healthy, unlined face is a map of nothing but optimism untouched by personal  history\u2014that's not quite the look of a movie  star. Stardom is something you have to  grow into. The beginning of your thirties is  a good time to make the jump, and it should  be a jump, an ascension, an unexpected  upsurge that makes people feel that even  though they've seen you before, they're now  seeing into you for the first time.\n\nTatum spent the past five years serving  as the most ingratiating element of  unmemorable movies like G.I. Joe: The Rise  of Cobra and Step Up 2 the Streets. Kitsch's  main credit was five seasons on Friday Night Lights. As r\u00E9sum\u00E9s go, these were  modest but promising, the kind of credits  that often precede an official moment, that  tick of the career clock when ecutives  and directors and producers and media  people all start to ask, \"Yes or no?\"\n\nKitsch got to don the armature of two  oversize, very expensive would-be franchises, John Carter and Battleship. About  half a billion budget dollars\u2014serious money  even in a profligate industry\u2014rode on the  bet that he could be the dude at the center  of the trailer. Tatum, meanwhile, worked  in two less costly subgenres\u2014the romantic  melodrama (The Vow) and the TV retread  (21 Jump Street). Besides those lunges  for popular acceptance, each guy took an  ass-baring chance on artistic credibility\u2014Kitsch pounding away atop Blake Lively in  Oliver Stone's Savages, Tatum reprocessing his own past as a stripper for Steven  Soderbergh in Magic Mike.\n\nIf we're grading these guys, money matters. You can't be a movie star if nobody  sees your movies. But even the stats start  to crumble when you look at them closely.  All three of Tatum's films were hits, not  huge but solid, each grossing between  $100 and $140 million in the U.S. Moreover,  they represented an undeniably efficient return on investment.  (Magic Mike, for instance, was made for just  $7 million.) Kitsch's movies were not hits;  they earned too little domestically\u2014between  $50 and $75 million apiece\u2014and, except for  Savages, they cost too much. But the movies are a worldwide business and, globally,  Kitsch's three pictures took in $669 million,  substantially outperforming Tatum's. What,  therefore, does the math add up to? A wash.\n\nStill, there's no mistaking the outcome.  The dust clears. We survey the landscape.  Channing Tatum is now a movie star. And  Taylor Kitsch is not. How did this transition,  not particularly predictable a year ago, happen for one of them? Why did it fail to happen  for the other?\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nThe thing that breaks the tie between  Tatum and Kitsch\u2014the sense that one of  them beat the system and the other got  beaten up by it\u2014is the key difference between  movie stardom now and movie stardom in  Hollywood's golden age. From the dawn  of talkies to the end of the studio system\u2014roughly the early 1930s to the mid-1960s\u2014MGM and 20th Century-Fox and Paramount  and the like erted some control not only  over who got to be a movie star but also over  the idea of what a star was supposed to be:  a handsome young man plucked from the  crowd and then reinvented from the ground  up. A squadron of professional image-remakers would give actors new names and looks  and voices and teeth\u2014transforming Marion  Morrison into John Wayne or Archibald  Leach into Cary Grant.\n\nThere were always some stars who were  groomed by the insiders and then accepted  by the public (Gregory Peck, Rock Hudson)  and others who became stars despite the fact  that studios initially didn't know what to do  with them (most famously, Fred Astaire and  Humphrey Bogart). You could be a conformist or a rebel, Mr. Nice Guy or a tormented  brooder (or both if you were Jimmy Stewart).  With enough clout, you could lobby for better roles, better scripts, better directors.  But whatever you did, you did it within a  single cosmos defined by the output of a half  dozen studios. And you would never escape  what Jeanine Basinger has called the star  machine, a system designed to identify the  elements about you that worked best for  audiences and to reward you for successfully  retailing them in movie after movie. If you  didn't like it, there was no alternative path,  no indie movement, no Plan B.\n\nStar Power is a Finite Resource\n\n No one is a movie star forever. Here, a look at the life spans of a few of our most iconic leading men and their career sweet spots\n\n1. Robert Redford\n\n Was a movie star from: 33 to 57\n\n Prime: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid ('69) to Indecent Proposal ('93)\n\n Arty movie that proved he wasn't just beefcake: The Candidate\n\n 2. Harrison Ford\n\n Was a movie star from: 37 to 52\n\n Prime: The Empire Strikes Back ('80) to Clear and Present Danger ('94)\n\n Arty movie that proved he wasn't George Lucas's bitch: Blade Runner.\n\n 3. Denzel Washington\n\n Was a movie star from: 35 to now\n\n Prime(s): Glory ('89) to Devil in a Blue Dress ('95); He Got Game ('98) to Flight ('12)\n\n Arty movie that proved he was a better villain than hero: Training Day\n\n 4. Tom Cruise\n\n Was a movie star from: 21 to 42\n\n Prime: Risky Business ('83) to War of the Worlds ('05)\n\n Arty movie that proved he could convincingly deliver the line \"Respect the cock\": Magnolia\n\n 6. Robert Downey JR.\n\n Was a movie star from: 22, 27, 43 to now\n\n Prime: Erratic; possibly The Pick-Up Artist ('87), then Chaplin ('92), but definitely '08 to present\n\n Beefcake movie that proved he wasn't just arty: Iron Man\n\nToday, Plan B is so essential that it's the  name of Brad Pitt's production company.  Actors who are interested in curating their  stardom over the long haul have to do it with  one foot in the system and one foot outside  it, because we as moviegoers crave a kind of  genuineness and individuality\u2014or at least a  simulacrum of it\u2014that isn't consonant with  being a willing corporate tool whose career  is to be shaped by paycheck gigs and studio  needs. (This is what LaBeouf was moaning  about when he recently said, \"If I could give  the money back and get all the credibility...that I'm seeking, I would do it tomorrow. In  a heartbeat.\") A George Clooney who made  only neo-Rat Pack movies would look like a  lazy underachiever despite the films' success,  but a George Clooney who makes those movies in order to gain the power to traffic in the  serious, the small-scale, and the adult (Up in  the Air, The Descendants, etc.) looks like the  master of his own fate and a shrewd player, a  man who knows how to navigate the realms  of both commerce and art.\n\nThe modern male movie star needs to be  fluent in the ways of Hollywood\u2014but as a  second language, the first being his own  passions and convictions and interest in his  craft. When Christian Bale finally came to the  cowl and cape in the Dark Knight trilogy, it  was as a visitor to the mainstream, not as a  product of it. And when he chose The Fighter and a Terrence Malick double-feature as his  non-Batsuit projects, it seemed personally  and professionally in character for an actor  who pours what seem like barely containable  levels of rage, defiance, charisma, and commitment into his work; one reason Bale was  such an ideal Batman is that, in Christopher  Nolan's hands, the character is constantly  struggling to hold onto his integrity despite  having a split identity.\n\nAll stars, to a degree, end up playing brand  extensions of themselves. Look at Robert  Downey Jr. in his current post-Troubled  Genius phase. Whether as Iron Man or  Sherlock Holmes, the fast-talking, fast-thinking, cocky, damaged, preening, never-quite-fulfilling-his-potential guy he plays is proof  that movie stars can turn even franchises  into meta-autobiography. More than any  other A-lister, Downey seems to suggest that  he's winking at the mainstream even while  making sure the check always clears. Michael  Fassbender, only 35 but craggy and worn  and already a little roughened by experience  from the day we met him, is someone who is  equally mesmerizing whether he is walking  toward the camera titanically, confrontationally naked in Shame or uttering the precisely  clipped syllables of a disembodied robot  in Prometheus. That constant awareness  of how to calibrate your performance up or  down, a knowledge of how to break through  the clutter or to own the quietness, is a sure  mark of stardom. It is evident in the work of  Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who won raves in The Dark Knight Rises for forcing a huge movie  to meet his gentle, unforced, human-scale  performance halfway. And it's even there in  the career approach taken by James Franco,  who can, depending on the project, seem like  a movie star, a movie star in air quotes, an  actor tapping into his inner movie star, or a  grad student doing a doctoral thesis on the  idea of stardom.\n\nPlaying the game without appearing to be  a pawn within it is hard. So hard that a number of very good actors bend over backward  to avoid any choices that could suck them  into the movie star maw. Joaquin Phoenix\u2014  who, of course, made I'm Still Here, a nervous breakdown of a meta-documentary  about the grotesquery of celebrity\u2014is as talented an actor as any in his generation. But  when he makes a studio movie like Walk the  Line, it feels like it's only because whatever  fascinates him happens to intersect briefly  with the mainstream. One reason Phoenix  is so mesmerizing in The Master is that the  character's violent, wounded, animal qualities are so in line with what we as moviegoers feel about the actor\u2014he's emotionally  naked but at the same time impenetrable.  That's part of the reason Oscar voters went  ahead and nominated Phoenix's performance even after he called the whole awards  process \"total utter bullshit\"; if you're an  actor whose entire public persona is built  upon being almost defiantly true to yourself,  you don't get penalized for it.\n\nIt's not an easy needle to thread. Nobody\u2014despite all of their protestations and demurrals\u2014ever becomes a movie star without  wanting it. But appearing to want it too much  can also endanger you. Jeremy Renner's  2010 Oscar nomination for The Hurt Locker brought him right to the edge of the main-  stream. Renner isn't typical movie-star material\u2014Paul Rudnick brilliantly described him  as \"Daniel Craig with the mumps,\" which is  a brutal but not inaccurate reminder that  hotness matters; being not very tall, slightly  squinty, and squashy-featured is no impediment if you at least look like sex incarnate  when you emerge from the surf in skintight  swim trunks. Still, all stars are, in some way,  exceptions to the rule, and Renner's compactness and physical grace give him a center of gravity that makes every shot feel as if  it's designed around him; his watchfulness  makes you lean in. But when, following stints  in Mission: Impossible\u2014Ghost Protocol and  The Avengers, he stepped into the Bourne  franchise last summer, The New Yorker's David Denby was moved to ask, \"Is Renner a  star? I'm not so sure... We rarely know what  he's thinking; we don't feel close to him.\"\n\nThe ability to connect with audiences that  way is certainly one component of stardom  (and always has been). But I think what Denby  was reacting to was the fact that Renner leapt  perhaps too quickly at roles in three franchises without one moment in any of them  in which he played an actual human being.  Given the chance to play a cipherlike action  hero, he cast aside much of the particularity,  nuance, humanity, and power of his earlier  work in order to run and jump and shoot and  scowl, and what's left is...a cipherlike action  hero. This doesn't mean Renner isn't a movie  star. But it might mean he doesn't know his  own strengths\u2014and that's one quality that  separates the top tier from the ranks of the  almost-there. Can the definition of movie star be broadened so generously that it includes  Bale and Franco, Phoenix and Renner, or are  they just, you know, good actors?\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nIt helps to remember that stars are not  born but made. To some degree, self-made:  Their talent, skill, looks, and instinct about  exactly what it takes to break from the pack  all matter, and sometimes, when those qualities coalesce perfectly, an actor can will himself to transcend the merely appealing, the  just ordinarily likable, and become one of the  elect. From then on, we're invested in their  journey through years and even decades.  We're excited or touched or even moved by  the possibilities they show us. Their lives,  on-screen, seem to tell us an ongoing story in  addition to the story we happen to be watching at that moment. Calling someone a movie  star is a kind of confession, a way of admitting  that there are certain people on-screen we  don't just watch but actively follow.\n\nWhat do those guys have that the others  don't? Here's the list. This is what it takes.\n\nThe right balance of relatability and mystery. It's the Renner Conundrum (to put  it Ludlumesque-ly): Movie stars need to  seem like people you could know and, at  the same time, people you could never fully  know. Matt Damon looks like somebody you  knew in college, or maybe the dad of the kid  with whom your kid rides the bus, but his  reserve suggests a personal moral code and  an ability to keep things close to the vest\u2014a privacy that can make him read as both  ordinary and unknowable; his Bourne was  the perfect mating of character and actor.\n\nOverexposure\u2014a constant hazard in an era  of omnivorous media coverage\u2014destroys  mystery, which is why so many celebrity  profiles you read are ercises in evasion.  But too much caginess, or worse, public  grievance about the fact that people are curious about you, destroys relatability.\n\nPerformers who project relatability but  have nothing elusive about them do better as  network-television stars, or maybe morning-show anchormen. (Exception: Hanks.) On the  other hand, if all you're capable of projecting  is mystery and you're a quart low on relatability, you are probably a douchebag. (Exception:  Fassbender.) You can tilt heavily in one direction: Channing Tatum is unquestionably  more everydude than enigma, but his performances still suggest there might be a thing or  two about him you don't know yet.\n\nSex appeal. Movie stars have wide latitude  in this area. You don't necessarily have to be  hot, or handsome, or muscular, or young.  It's amazing how little any of those things  have ever mattered when it comes to movie  stars. You don't have to swagger in a way that  suggests your between-the-sheets r\u00E9sum\u00E9  involves several pages of single-spaced typing. You don't have to make love to the camera  (and probably shouldn't try). You can even, if  the movie and the moment are right, expand  America's definition of sex appeal to include  you, the way Cagney did, the way Bogart did,  the way Dustin Hoffman did. But you've got to  have something.\n\nThere's a complicated corollary to this,  which is that male movie stars have to appeal  to straight men, too, not just women and gay  guys. And there is a straight-guy equivalent  to Date/Marry/Shag, which is Someone You  Could Have a Drink With/Someone You  Could Cry in Front of Who Wouldn't Bust You  for It Later/Someone Whom You'd Want on  Your Side in a Bar Fight. Men offscreen relate  to men on-screen somewhat skittishly; we  want them to be like us, but also better than  us; we want them to convince us that they're  the people we could be if we just worked out  some of our issues and went to the gym a  little more often and didn't have lower-back  problems and were taller and handsomer  and...you get the picture.\n\nA sense of humor. There are very few characteristics that can be described as vital for  a male movie star. This is one. An actor who  comes off as so unironically alpha that he  makes you feel worse about yourself is never,  over the long haul, going to be a true movie  star unless he can wink at his own macho  shtick a little and demonstrate that he gets  the joke. When Ryan Gosling went on MTV  and consented to do some dramatic readings of the \"Hey girl\" Internet meme seen  on Tumblr (\"Hey girl, sometimes I get so sad  when we can't watch Golden Girls together\"),  he demonstrated a kind of humility that, even  if it's carefully stage-managed, is essential.  If you're incapable of presenting yourself  on-screen in a way that suggests you find  anything funny, ever, you are probably Vin Diesel too self-protective to be a movie star.  Or maybe you're just stupid, which is not an  ideal long-term professional asset, either.\n\nThe ability to keep surprising people. There  was a time when stars stayed stars by doing  the same thing over and over again\u2014Bob  Hope and Bing Crosby and Roy Rogers probably never lost a night's sleep over their desire  to show greater range. But for most modern  movie stars, shaking up public expectations is  the job that never ends. It requires self-knowledge, because in order to surprise people,  you have to know not just who you are, but  who they think you are. It involves arrogance,  because you have to believe that you can do  something nobody yet knows you can do,  and then keep finding the next thing that fits  that bill. And it takes an ability to recognize  your own perceived deficits, because the most  effective surprises lead audiences to say, \"I  didn't know he had that in him.\"\n\nBeing a movie star requires maintaining a  complicated balance between the unchanging (that recognizable identity that you carry  from role to role) and the elastic (the ability  to reshape yourself for each new part without completely vanishing). Channing Tatum  did not become a star in The Vow, in which  he plays a love-struck husband so dumb he  decides that his amnesiac, brain-injured wife  would probably enjoy a surprise party. That  role cemented a certain image of Tatum as  a guy who can play well-meaning, jockish,  hopeless dolts. We already knew that. Instead,  Tatum started to become a star in 21 Jump  Street, because he played a well-meaning,  jockish, hopeless dolt who was also a narcissistic tool, and he did it with a kind of charm  and modesty that let us know he was completely in on what we thought of him and one  step ahead of us. Surprise! We didn't know he  had that in him.\n\nSimilarly, think of Bradley Cooper, who  for years has seemed to live right on the edge  between movie star and not. On an international promotional tour for The Hangover II (which was not, in any way, going to push  him over the top), he busted out some fluent  French in a couple of interviews, and the  Internet collectively fainted. That YouTube  video and its effect served as a kind of ideal  dress rehearsal in miniature for the impact of  his Oscar-nominated performance in David  O. Russell's Silver Linings Playbook. His  work in that film served to quiet skeptics\u2014  particularly those who had conflated him  with his characters enough to file him under  \"handsome jerk.\" \"Handsome jerk\" is a niche;  \"handsome funny vulnerable jerk\" is something it usually takes a movie star to play.  Showing up naysayers isn't enough to get you  all the way there, but it's an essential career-building step.\n\nThe intelligence to recognize your  moment\u2014even if that means waiting for  it. Every male movie star has a different  magic number\u2014an age at which his attractiveness and ability and maturity all come  together. Before that, a star may not feel fully  formed; after that, if he has talent, he seems  to become more assured, complicated, and  real with every passing year. Tom Hanks's  ideal age was about 36\u2014when he made  Philadelphia and Forrest Gump. How can you  tell, besides the two Oscars? Because, for one  thing, Hanks looked 36 when he was 26, and  he looked 36 when he was 46. Once he found  himself at the crossroads where his age linked  up with how we felt about him, he hit his  stride and, some bad choices notwithstanding, has never really lost it. Once we knew  who he was, we were in for the whole ride.\n\nSometimes, you have to ripen. Stars evolve  on-screen at about the same pace as we evolve  offscreen. So in many ways, the later you  peak, the better for the fragile egos of your  audience. Clooney's ideal age seems to have  been about 45\u2014the Syriana-Michael Clayton period. He needed the gray hair and extra  years because his whole \"I've done things  with women you only dream of\" vibe required  some visible baggage\u2014creases, texture, a little  sag. Clooney, it turned out, was much more  interesting as a guy too old to be Batman than  he was as Batman. Middle age suits him, and  he ennobles it.\n\nTom Cruise is about Clooney's age; unfortunately, Cruise's ideal age was about 25\u2014the  Top Gun-Color of Money moment of maximum cocksureness. I don't mean to suggest  that it was all downhill from there\u2014Cruise  is a much better actor now than he was then  and, several cubic tons of personal history  notwithstanding, a more connected screen  presence. But we, as moviegoers, are less forgiving of stars who peak young\u2014for whom  aging can read as erosion\u2014than we are of  stars who make us feel a little better about  the passing years. Cruise's refusal to age on-screen\u2014the carefully managed news drops  about doing his own stuntwork, the \"can-  did\" photos showing off his trainer-chiseled  torso\u2014has come to seem distancing, even  alienating. When he turned 50 last summer,  it felt like a prank someone played on him.  When Clooney turned 50, by contrast, a lot of  guys thought, \"I hope I look that good when  I'm his age\" (or, \"I'm his age. Holy crap, where  did I go wrong?!\").\n\nIndispensability. This is it. The final dividing line. The quality that separates actors  we like, or even love, from those we feel are  irreplaceable. A star convinces us that he's  filling a void we didn't know was there; he  makes us believe that until he came along,  the movie world of which he is now at the center was somehow incomplete. Which  brings us back to Taylor Kitsch. Leading-man  gigs in expensive films that are designed to  be blockbusters are, for emerging stars, the  devil's temptation. Last year, Kitsch won  two of those roles, and then discovered that  a big opportunity is not the same thing as  a good part. As fans of Friday Night Lights can attest, Kitsch isn't just good-looking;  he's a talented actor with a specific set of  gifts behind the dreamy eyes and the baked,  Costner-ish drawl. No, he's probably not the  first guy you'd cast as Wernher von Braun,  but he was born to play the redeemable  bastard, the near bum who might or might  not\u2014depends on the role\u2014summon the  moral courage to do the right thing (a quality Savages tapped into nicely). The soulful  loner who gets in his own way: If you don't  think that's a rich vein for a movie star to  mine, go take a tour through the fifty-year  career of Paul Newman.\n\nBut movies like John Carter and Battleship pull an actor away from the specific and  toward the generic. I don't know where  Kitsch ranked on the casting wish lists for  those parts, but the point is, those lists very  likely existed, and they probably weren't  conceived with much attention to anything  but physical fitness, youth, nice bone structure, and the ability to form words. The lead  role in that kind of movie is the Guy, just like  the other roles are the Girl, the Bad Guy, the  Sidekick, the Crusty Guy, and the Funny Guy.  The Guy is a terrible thing to be. Nobody  becomes a movie star by playing the Guy,  because there are lots of guys who can play  the Guy. You don't want people leaving your  film, even if it's a hit, feeling that you were  interchangeable with half a dozen other people on the posters in the multiplex lobby. You  want them to believe that anyone else in the  role would have represented a disappointing compromise. There's your litmus test: If  they want you, and they can't get you and,  as a result, they have to rethink the part,  you're a movie star.\n\nWhich brings us back to Channing Tatum,  and Magic Mike. (Remember the other guy  in the movie? You know, the young guy who  played...you know, the Guy? What was his  name again?) If Tatum ends up being someone we're still writing and talking about  thirty years from now, then this movie, in  which he played a young, decent guy who  didn't mind temporarily retailing his body  on his way to bigger and better things, may  be seen as his Rocky. In the film, Tatum did  the whole movie-star job: He gave us a piece  of who he was while making it clear that it  wasn't the only piece. He took a chance. He  wove something about himself into the work  without ruining its shape. He not only risked  ridicule, he owned the risk. He commanded  the screen but played well with others. He  exposed himself in new ways while making  sure to hold something back for later. He  laughed at himself and made you laugh with  him. And he made it clear that nobody else  could have done the job quite the same way.  Well done. Now let's see what his long game  looks like.\n\nMark Harris the author of Pictures at the Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/the-new-and-improved-leading-man-march-2013?currentPage=5>