Ultime da Hollywood: gli attori orgogliosi di farlo vedere

Bradley Cooper, Benedict Cumberbatch and the Golden Age of Nude Men
Hollywood’s male stars aren’t scared of full-frontal nudity anymore

By
Ellen GamermanJan. WSJ

The latest costume for Hollywood’s leading men: Nothing.

Male full-frontal nudity, once the stuff of art-house films, is going mainstream. Bradley Cooper and Benedict Cumberbatch are trouser-free in Oscar contenders and Sebastian Stan bares it all in a coming Hulu miniseries. The sight of naked male stars can shock in ways that female nudity no longer does, making for the kind of edginess that Hollywood loves.

Pantless footage—featuring actual private parts or a prosthetic—is being used for comedic effect (like the fake anatomical item issued to Evan Handler on the HBO Max series “And Just Like That...”), or to underscore a character’s vulnerability ( Paul Mescal in Hulu’s “Normal People”). Sometimes it serves the plot ( Steve Zahn —really a stunt double with a prosthetic—panicking over a health scare in HBO’s “The White Lotus”) or delivers artsy realism (Oscar Isaac in HBO’s “Scenes From a Marriage”).

Full-Frontal Man reflects several forces overtaking Hollywood right now. He represents a cosmic rebalancing of the scales as the entertainment industry attempts to address sexism. He’s an argument that streaming platforms, largely free from ratings rules, can play to male and female audiences with new abandon. And he’s a path to free publicity with the potential to light up social media, as happened when Mr. Cooper’s comments about his nude bathtub scene in the film “Nightmare Alley” went viral.


Bradley Cooper has a nude bathtub scene in ‘Nightmare Alley.’PHOTO: 20TH CENTURY STUDIOS

Engineering a nude scene in a movie or series involves conversations between stars, directors, producers and intimacy coordinators around issues like room temperature and the destruction of outtakes. Movie stars appearing nude include Mr. Cumberbatch in the Netflix drama “The Power of the Dog,” but lesser-known actors do it, too, like in recent episodes of HBO’s “Euphoria” and “The Righteous Gemstones.” Nude shots can be so fleeting some viewers don’t even catch them, though their mere presence allows filmmakers and showrunners to claim points for subversiveness.

In “Pam & Tommy,” a Hulu miniseries out next week, Mr. Stan plays Tommy Lee, the Mötley Crüe drummer married to actress Pamela Anderson. Tommy’s private parts appear in close-up—the production used a prosthetic—and in a surreal twist the anatomy even has a speaking role.