Over on The Squawk, Lainey is handicapping next week’s Sexiest Man Alive announcement, and both Daniel Craig and Paul Mescal appear on the list, so subscribe to The Squawk if you haven’t already and get in on the odds making.
Speaking of Paul Mescal and Daniel Craig, though, both men are currently on press tours, for Gladiator II and Queer, respectively, and both men are contenders for what is still a wide-open Best Actor race.
Going into the fall festivals, where Queer made its debut, we expected Daniel Craig to play the “it’s his time” card and come out fronting the Best Actor race strong. Instead, he’s kept a relatively low profile, and the “it’s his time” narrative is (slowly) coalescing around Ralph Fiennes. But now Craig is promoting Queer ahead of its November 27 release date (I reviewed it out of TIFF).
He and co-star Drew Starkey cover this week’s Variety, an established Movie Star and young up and comer duo (He’s also in Variety talking about Knives Out 3 and how Netflix should release it in theaters longer than a week, I SWEAR they all think they’re going to be the special star that convinces Netflix to throw their entire business model out the window, and they will not be. Netflix is not in the theatrical business, full stop.)
Over on the Gladiator side of the fence, Denzel Washington joined his co-stars for a press stop in Japan, making him the Movie Star to Paul Mescal’s young up and comer (to be clear, though, Mescal is more established than Starkey). These intergenerational screen partnerships suddenly seem to be everywhere—don’t forget Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson in Babygirl, or Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley in The Substance—and I legit wonder if it is at least in part due to the runaway success of Top Gun: Maverick, that there might be a feeling that breeding the new generation of capital-letter stars requires a boost from the established generation. Food for thought.
As for Craig and Mescal, the Best Actor hopefuls, Mescal is, so far, playful and flirty and fun on his press tour. Daniel Craig is Daniel Craig. His appeal has always been gruffer, though he can be fun when he wants to be. “When he wants to be” is the key, though. If he doesn’t want to engage, he just doesn’t engage, and it sort of looks like he doesn’t want to engage with the Oscar machine. At least so far, he’s made no real effort. Will that change in the next few weeks, as Queer prepares to hit cinemas? Will Daniel Craig come out to play?
