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Mark Gallagher, "Cosmosexuals: Screen Acting, Stardom, and Male Sex Appeal" (U Texas Press, 2025)
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Marshall Po
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Mark Gallagher about his book titled Cosmosexuals, Screen Acting, Stardom, and Male Sex Appeal, published by the University of Texas Press in 2025. Now, this book examines, well, as you might suggest, it might expect, male sex appeal on screen and the number of different ways it can manifest. Right. We're going to be talking about what race has to do with it, what national origin has to do with it, what's happened historically, what's happening really very much right now. And this is really intriguing because, of course, sex appeal kind of would imply that it's all about meeting someone in person. And there's, I don't know, pheromones or whatever, but these are people on screen. They're literally larger than life in many cases. They're certainly not people most of us would ever meet in person.
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Dr. Mark Gallagher
And.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
And so how does kind of charisma get translated in that sort of context? What does sex appeal even mean in that context? And why is it important culturally in terms of film success, but also economically for globalization? There's all sorts of things that are bound up together in this book, and therefore, I think, in our conversation. So, Mark, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Dr. Mark Gallagher
Thank you very much, Miranda. I'm really looking forward to our conversation.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I am as well. Before we get too far into the details, though, can you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
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Dr. Mark Gallagher
Okay, sure. I'd be happy to. Could be a long explanation. We will see. My name is Mark Gallagher. I'm basically semi retired. Pre tired I like to call it. I was an associate professor at the University of Nottingham in the UK, where I taught and researched for nearly 20 years. And it's hard to really pinpoint the genesis of this particular project. Certainly living in the UK as an American for so long, that international exposure to British people, European people, people from all over the world, and my students and colleagues really opened my eyes to a lot of different codes around gender and identity and the responses to popular culture and the breadth of popular culture that was out there in terms of gender and masculinity. Just to see and experience all the regional and national variations of comportment and behavior and performance was really novel for me in a lot of ways. In terms of the work I've always worked on, among other things, men and male bodies in cinema and in television. My first major research was about action movies and constructions of masculinity in popular American and Hong Kong action film. And I it got me thinking a lot about the kind of kinesthetic sensations that are relayed on screen, the type of pleasure we take in physical performance in mediated form, in fiction films, in sports broadcasts, in other types of popular culture expression, audio and visual. And subsequently, I've gone on to look at film from a production standpoint. I've worked a lot on American independent cinema. I have a book about the filmmaker Steven Spiel Sorber, excuse me, and film screen authorship and the kind of constructions of authors, of people behind the screen and the type of work that they do and the way that that work is understood in the wider culture. So I think the work on male sex appeal kind of combines some of those interests, certainly an investment in the body and in the way that performance is crafted on screen by actors and by filmmakers and screen producers, and the way that work is received in a range of different cultural contexts, the way that it translates or fails to translate or gets retranslated based on the receiver and includes a relay of all kinds of different cinematic and televisual practices around lighting and sound and staging and camera work, and all these different things that come together to Render certain people, certain bodies, as potentially sexually appealing in different contexts. I certainly wouldn't say that, that there are particular intrinsically sexually appealing figures or performances. There's a number of figures who are widely received in certain ways. And certainly we can look at things and say, you know, wow, that's sexy, or that's really charismatic when we look at a screen image or screen performance, or when we listen to that. But we will find other people who don't share that judgment. So rather than just making it a work of opinion and trying to say, I'm going to show you that this is what sexiness is. A lot of it is in the eye of the beholder. I try to think about reception contacts and production contexts and narrative contexts that shape these activities in different ways. And I think that's significant for a lot of reasons. I've always tried to look at aspects of screen practice that tell us other things, that tell us not just about the thing itself, but about some wider context. So as you said, when you introduced, you know, I wanted to understand something about the globalization of screen industries, about the international circulation of screen texts, about activity behind the scenes, about, you know, what's happening when a particular performance is put together on screen, how actors themselves think about their practice, and how reviewers and publicity channels construct all kinds of different images that they try to circulate or put into being or create kind of brands or takeaways that are easily apprehensible across a body of work. And if you can do that, you understand all kinds of different things about film industries, about promotional channels, about creative practices, about craft, about popular culture in general, and all kinds of different cultural preferences, likes and dislikes. So using actors, using film stars, thinking about sex appeal specifically is a way of, for me, getting at all these larger questions around film internationalization, around the practices of film and screen making, and around the place of cinema and television and some online video in the wider culture, in popular culture, and in social reality in the past and present.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
This is really helpful to lay as a foundation for our conversation because this book is not, as you said, sort of a list of who you personally think has the most charisma or sex appeal. Right. This is looking at what? Well, why are certain stars promoted and received in particular ways? And it's not just a phenomenon that happens now with the film industry being especially internationalized and there being online streaming niches that kind of, back when there was only the main, cinema wasn't really an option. Cosmosexuals are not just a modern phenomenon. Right. How Far back. Can we see them?
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Dr. Mark Gallagher
Well, my. My work just really traces the phenomenon from the be around the beginning of the 20th century. Certainly we can see previous historical iterations of constructions of physical beauty and cerebral capacity, intellectual beauty. We might say, digging across, you know, the history of literature, really, you go back to Shakespearean romance sonnets to find that you can go much farther back to any number of artistic traditions that involve the physical form and that involve, say, classical ideas of beauty. The birth of photography in the 19th century really makes possible different types of image circulation. And the birth of what we might call a kind of celebrity culture in the 19th century continues that with popular stage performers talked about and eventually circulated through things like trading cards in the Victorian era. And by the time we get into the 20th century, we have the emergence of the film medium by really the early years of the medium. By the early 1900s, you do get film stars. You get people who had been often stage stars who then were rendered on film. People like the famous strongman Sandow, who did performances with a lot of, you know, bodybuilding and muscle flexing. Popular stage performer who made his way into film. Or the female performer known as Annabelle, who did a dance of the veils that continues to circulate as one of the early silent short film spectacles. So early on, the body and the bodily movements was constructed as something spectacular, as highly worthy of and meriting cinematic representation, and also with something alluring that could be looked at and taken in as an object of desire or aspiration or awe. So right from the beginning of the medium, as soon as we get past just strict images of any motion whatsoever, train arriving at the station, we get the human body. Humans like to look at other anthropomorphic forms. And so we get a kind of culture of stars being something that appear in cinema. And then by the 1910s, we really see the kind of internationalization of film industries and stardom. So certainly, sex appeal, cosmosexuality, not at all a modern phenomenon, unless we understand modern in the sense of modernity, the emergence of industrial production and mass culture. So by the 1910s, you have a number of film stars who are, because film is silent, whose images and popularity are circulating among different countries. People like Pola Negri, people like, eventually, as we move into the later teens, eventually in 1920s, Rudolph Valentino, all kinds of different people. People like Sasui Hayakawa, a big silent star of the American screen, despite being Japanese in the 1910s. So we start to see people circulating internationally, or we see a lot of that and we see people understood and received in the popular press in terms of sex appeal, with a lot of accounts of, you know, male screen stars whose images will leave women fainting in the aisles and whose occasional public appearances will be covered as near riots. So we see a lot of that happening in the teens and certainly by the, you know, with the industrialization of cinema, the formation of film companies, the efforts of screen producers to present something distinctive, to show something that other films or other companies are not able to show. Very early on, by the 1910s, we had the establishment of star systems in different national and transnational industries. And we get different kind of cultures and cults of personality that take shape around those people, often in terms of sex appeal as well as sometimes in terms of physical performance, in terms of things like action. But I think that particularly in the teens, the potential of silent film to render characters, people in close up on comparatively large screens and as we moved into the picture palace era of the 1920s, on extremely large screens meant that sex appeal really mattered, even if it wasn't something you could specifically quantify because that's not how genres were necessarily categorized. Certainly romance would be one generic descriptor, but, you know, the sexy film was never specific generic category for a lot of different reasons, because of cultural morality. Even as terms around sex and sex appeal start to proliferate. And as I note in the book, as far as I found, and based on changing OED entries, the first reference to sexiness is in. In a popular newspaper is in relation to a male film star, Rudolph Valentino, not, as you might imagine, to a female star of film or some other popular performance medium such as stage drama. Although the various words used to describe sexiness, not just the word sex, but words like sexful, which was kind of an earlier term that has now fallen out of favor in use different spellings of sexy. S, E, K, S, Y, and so forth. The use of sex itself as an adjective, all these kind of things accompanied some female performers coterminously or prior to the use of sexiness in early 20s to describe Valentino. So I think it's pretty interesting and significant that, you know, we don't specifically associate this. It's not just a female phenomenon. Often if we think, you know, name a sexy film star, you. Your mind might go to a female star historically, someone like Greg Garbo or Brigitte Bardot or a number of different, say, European women for a long time. But really they're the same kind of activities, the same kind of practices, the same kind of discourses are apparent for men as well, just with a, you know, different kinds of cultural baggage, different kinds of opportunities and limitations and also different, different stakes. Certainly, you know, there's a great deal less danger for men in being named as sexy. They don't face the same kind of physical threats or sexual violence anywhere near the rate of women. But at the same time, being named as a pretty boy, for example, is to, to an extent historically and certainly as we move in different cultures across the 20th and then the 21st, that is, you know, sometimes valued and sometimes seen as problematic as a sign of in inauthenticity, of superficiality and of course of feminization. So there's a lot of wrestling over that term and that designation that is not entirely positive for men as well as for women. Well, the holidays have come and gone once again. 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Dr. Miranda Melcher
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Marshall Po
See terms.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's definitely interesting to think about the ways in which it might seem on the outside. Like of course it's a good thing to be called this if you're a mo. But actually there's nuances to it as well. But of course your book doesn't just cover the sort of historical 20th century or early 20th century. You also look at some very current cosmosexuals. So which ones do you focus on and why these?
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Dr. Mark Gallagher
Yeah, so if I'll just mention historical cases briefly. So mostly the, the book is focused on living, working actors, which is both a pleasure. It gives me a huge amount of material to work with and also kind of a curse because the problem with people who are alive and working is they continue to produce work. So there's always more to talk about and more to fit into your research corpus where the good thing about people who are retired or deceased is they're not going to be producing any more work unless it's work that has never circulated previously and then is unearthed. There's always more to say about historical work. The past is never finished, but there's, you know, it's more of a finite corpus in different ways. So I try to trace some different trajectories to kind of establish the internationalism of this phenomenon. I start with the German actor Conrad Veitz, who had a remarkable career spanning from the 1910s to the 1940s. A huge number of German films in the teens, a lot of American films in the 1920s and British as well. Probably best known to cinephiles as the somnambulist, the sleepwalker, the hypnotized character in the German expressionist film the cabinet of Dr. Caligari from 1920. And probably best known to popular film fans with kind of a bookend role in his career as the evil German Major Strasser of Casablanca. Kind of the. The German villain of the film. So he played in huge number of German films, came to the US for a time in the 1920s, played in a lot of Hollywood films, early Hollywood. Went back to Europe in the 30s, played in some German films. By the time of the rise of Nazism he relocated to Britain, became a British citizen for a time, renounced his German citizenship and was always playing these kind of weird in. In German films as well as other countries films. Weird mysterious characters, suspicious Nazi adjacent types or occasionally sympathetic mature figures who had kind of a paternal sex appeal. So he's got a fascinating career that bounces around different industries partly as a result of politics, partly as a result of industrial developments. So he's a great early case for me. Certainly someone who if you look at today, people may not necessarily find him sexually desirable. He looks old even when he's young. He's got a receding hairline, he plays very mannered characters but had huge fan clubs surrounding him. I next look at the Egyptian actor Omar Sharif. Popular, huge star in the 1950s in Egyptian film, worked with and married at the time Egypt's biggest female star. Fateh Al Hammami. Converted to Islam. He had been raised as Christian, eventually moved to international context. You moved out of Egyptian cinema famously to play in Lawrence of Arabia, perhaps still his most celebrated supporting role. Eventually played in a number of Hollywood films throughout the 60s and 70s and a huge number of European co productions. Never really went back to Egyptian cinema. Made a couple more films in Egypt later in the 1980s. But for a long time he too moved around among different industries, cultivated a reputation as an international playboy, had on and off screen romances with many female stars. Caused a big controversy in the late 1960s when during the making of Funny Girl, the Barbra Streisand musical, he and Streisand dated this during the six day Arab Israeli war. Was seen as not a good look by some people when he came out and said, well, when I date a woman, you know, I don't, I don't look at her passport. A kind of famous statement of his about his internationalism and his perspective on the world. His star power fizzled out a little bit later, but he enjoyed a long and really varied career. I also look at Alain Delon, who died just about a year ago. Really well known French actor who we associate in a lot of ways with a certain kind of French cinema and French sexiness, but who most popular roles are as Italians and as Americans. As Italian in his breakthrough film Rocco and his brothers from 1960s as American in the film Plan Sale or Purple Moon, the first adaptation of the Talented Mr. Ripley where he plays an American shape shifting con artist. So he too played in a range of different contexts, made a number of American films in the 1960s, a lot of continental European co productions. Even worked in Soviet Cinema in the 1980s before moving around a lot of different ways. Had some complicated and straight up right wing politics that affected his image in different ways. But in a lot of ways there's certain kind of transcendent, stern, silent, sexy masculinity was something that carried his career in a lot of ways. Really well known for a film called Le Samurai, French crime film from the late 1960s from the director Jean Pierre Melville that was huge internationally and really helped cement his iconicity, his reputation in of all places, East Asia. He was huge in Japan and Hong Kong. And I've still never quite been able to parse that perhaps as a result of distribution systems or his particular kind of lean physicality that may have translated well, but became a big international icon. So we have people moving from the teens through the 60s and 70s who all who redoundingly represent this phenomenon of the internationally mobile screen star who's received as sexually appealing in a number of different contexts and in a lot of cases has a presence outside screen culture in popular culture. Veidt was very vocal about anti Nazism and support for the allied cause. Omar Sharif was, strangely enough, a popular newspaper columnist for many decades writing a column about bridge. He was a competitive bridge player, part of his gambler playboy image in a lot of respects and a land alone off screen with a number of product promotions. He promoted a line of sunglasses for example, promoted some clothing and also for his now understood as fairly toxic but quite in some ways resurgent politics in France with his support for the original Jean Marie Le Pen, starting back in the 1980s. So those are historical cases. And I move on to contemporary male stars in the Anglophone context. Canada, uk, Australia, Latino stars from north and South America, East Asian stars from Hong Kong and exported to Canada, Nordic stars looking at Mads Mikkelsen from Denmark, and black stars looking at the British or Afro British. Idris Elba. So I can go through these cases in more detail, but I did want to mention, okay, I try to be as global as it's possible for me to be, given my language skills, such as they are, my research interests, the availability of certain films and television programs, and the ability of stars to cross international context in their work and in their reception.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's really helpful to get a sense of the geographic as well as time spread that you're covering. And of course, we do want to talk about some of those case studies in more detail. But before we do that, I wonder if we can pick up on a thread that's kind of come up in all of the cases you've mentioned so far, which is the idea that they are all considered sexy or appealing, not just in one place, not even just in two places, but really spread across quite a wide range. And helpfully, you have a term, spreadable stardom, that sort of relates to these ideas. So is there anything further we want to discuss about in terms of that kind of term and what that can look like for a number of these different people before we get into some of them in more specifics?
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Dr. Mark Gallagher
Sure. And I guess I have. I've got two phenomenon, two intersecting phenomenon at work in the book. One is this overarching notion of cosmosexuality, which is, as may or may not be apparent, a kind of portmanteau neologism of the words cosmopolitan and itself a neolism, neologism, metrosexual. So cosmopolitanism is a critical category understood to involve a certain kind of benign internationalism or worldliness, to be not just a citizen of a city, but a citizen of the world, to understand different cultures or to recognize or take interest in different cultural practices, to be able to, you know, not be a philistine in a range of different contexts, to have experiences or interests that predispose them to favorable, we might say, visual communication, audible communication, communication through signs and signifying in a range of different contexts. And I couple that with metrosexuality, a term coined in at the end of the 1990s, really, although with a phenomenon that probably precedes that, to understand a kind of masculinity particularly heterosexual masculinity that is invested in personal style and grooming and looking good, so sexual, but in a metro way, in an urban way. And often this is a way, a kind of category to denote, you know, men can buy hair and skin care products just like women can. It's not something to be ashamed of. It's a market category in some respects. There are a lot of kind of subcategories of metrosexuality or spin off terms from it. And we can think of, you know, a lot of different ways that different contemporary popular culture icons embody metrosexuality. And in some ways, metrosexuality is a way to kind of reclaim male style from gay men. To say, it's not just for gay men, heterosexual men can do this too. We could think of it as a consequence of a kind of homophobia. We can also think about it as a consequence of, say, consumer product companies looking for ways to broaden their consumer base, as well as a way for screen producers to broaden their audience base for popular culture figures to broaden their range of popularity, to be able to do things that would have been seen as prescribed in certain other contexts, to get around questions of morality or of what sexual nervousness, we might say. So cosmos sexuality is about trying to recognize screen internationalism. Cosmosexuality, I would say, is not necessarily phenomenon explicitly tied to film or television stardom, but tries to make sense of different identities that can be received. As you know, the sexual isn't cosmosexual is thinking about things that can be presented or received as sexually appealing across multiple viewing contexts. And to build in a kind of separate but overlapping category. As you mentioned, I talk about spreadable stars stardom to suggest some of the types of content, including star images and performances that circulate most fluidly in global screen ecosystems. So I think we'll find is the vast majority of screen stardom is strictly regional or national. A lot of, say, South American stars are popular in South American countries, and their work never makes it to or crosses over into North American context except through diasporic populations. Some ways this is a result of the fact that things just aren't available. No one is buying distribution rights in countries outside South America to that work, or there's not a platform that will screen those things, or there's not an avid audience for that work. So a lot of, a lot of stardom really does not travel. It stays within its particular ecosystems. But in some cases it really does. And I try to distinguish between what I think of as global stars, people who work in a number of different contexts, and simply international stars, people who are huge around the world without ever really having to go anywhere. There's a number of huge international stars who rarely work in any other country's productions. Tom Cruise is a good example of that big international star. His films can open and dominate box offices in a number of different countries. But he's not gonna go work on a French film. He's not going to appear in a Hong Kong television program. He might have multinational capital supporting his films. As you know, the United Arab Emirates, Germany, India, have all been funders of some of the Mission Impossible films, for example. They just want to put a bit of money into that piece. But he doesn't really need to work in those contexts. And then we have global stars who by design or necessity need to work in a number of different contexts. And in some ways, the thing that makes it possible to work are conceptions of spreadability. And that concept of spreadable stardom is an extension of a concept coined by media scholars Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford and Joshua Green called spreadable media, in which they try to understand what types of factors make possible different types of virality of film and television and online media. And for me, spreadable stardom often involves white people. You can think, you're often spreading a kind of paste. It involves kind of flexible ethnicity and national origins. You'd be surprised how many Caucasian actors, or maybe you wouldn't be surprised, play roles as characters of different ethnicities. It often involves easy territorialization as American characters thanks to a complementary accent or an ability to perform regional accents. It can involve a kind of working in screen contacts that are uninterested in exploring identity. They're willing to take it for granted. But also a breadth of available roles, not restricted to singular character types. It involves circulation by major film and TV distribution networks. It involves having access to promotion and publicity channels worldwide. And it involves conformity to certain templates of male attractiveness and acting talent in different global entertainment media and mass culture. So spreadable stardom often favors white people. But Caucasians are not majority race in most of the world. So there are other figures who kind of escape from the bounds of their national cinemas as well, in some cases, if they're perceived as what to say, either as exotic or as analogous to some existing understood type. So some of the most spreadable stars are white guys, and some. There are a number of other figures who. Who basically hit a wall, a wall of language, a wall of stereotyping and typecasting. That limits their spread to certain regions, or that defines them strictly as exotic, foreign, otherworldly figures outside the regions where their races or ethnicities dominate. So I hope that's not too much. Kind of talking about a couple different things at once. Maybe some examples will help when we get to those.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I'd like to throw in some examples. Obviously, there's a number of things we could pick up there, but I think the first one is this idea of sort of the stereotypes and the barriers and the extent to which cosmosexuals kind of can or cannot break through those. So if we're thinking about some of them, obviously we've got racializations saying that, for example, black actors like Idris Elba can kind of only play certain kinds of characters, or Sima Liu can only play certain kinds of characters. If we look at racializations of East Asian men, those are both, in fact, actors who have spoken, I believe, about kind of those barriers and trying to break through them. And you analyze a number of things they've done in their careers that would suggest that they have, to some extent at least, broken through those kinds of barriers. Is that sort of, I don't know, like, they're so sexy that they can go through, but then the barriers are still there for everyone else? Or is the kind of spreadable stardom that they're having changing or breaking those barriers more generally? Like, how do we think about the sort of interaction between the individual cosmosexual and the systemic barriers existing at the same time?
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Dr. Mark Gallagher
Yeah, good question. I think we have a lot of exceptions that prove the rule. If I think about. When I write about spreadable stardom, the main cases I use, I conceptualize this most in a chapter called 50 Shades of Vanilla about white Anglophone actors. And I look at Ryan Gosling from Canada, I look at the British actor Tom Hardy, and I look at the Australian actor Eric Bana, who, you know, had a kind of temporary flirtation with major stardom by playing the male lead in Ang Lee's Hulk, but in a lot of ways has been kind of downgraded to a B figure in a lot of smaller films. Gosling started in children's television and with the new Mickey Mouse Club, played eventually in popular fantasy series filmed in New Zealand, then moved into American independent cinema. One of his biggest early roles is as what to say a Jewish neo Nazi. Neo Nazi in the Believer, went on to be in a bunch of popular Hollywood romances like the Notebook and eventually Crazy Stupid Love Always went back to kind of strange US Independent cinema at the Same time before becoming a major, major international star. And one of the things that makes him spreadable is that his light Canadian accent, he's from Toronto, was kind of easily disguised as American. He's occasionally played characters with other American regional accents. So he can, you know, he can fit the suit, as it were, he can fit the mold in different ways. And not a lot, not a lot of has been asked of him, but he's been able to do a lot. So there's kind of a fluidity that's allowed to him that is not necessarily allowed to other people. And interestingly, even though I think he's a really clear embodiment of a certain kind of screen whiteness, he's often not understood in terms of race. You know, we don't necessarily. I. Well, I don't want to say we. I think popular discourse does not necessarily, when you, when Ryan Gosling opens a film, does not say another breakthrough role for a white movie star. You know, his race is understood in different ways at the same time. He's done a lot in his work to surround himself with actors of color that both accentuate his whiteness and that complicate it in different ways. So there's been a lot open to him. Tom Hardy, on the other hand, has succeeded in part by being able to play a number of different accents and playing physically eccentric characters, whether they are British or regional American. He too has not been understood in specifically in terms of whiteness. And if he has, it's often in terms of a certain kind of exotic or occasionally savage or primordial whiteness. Eric Bana too, the Australian actor, has mastered a number of regional accents, American accents, so rarely in popular film speaks with his own Australian accented voice. So we have a lot of things available to them and not so many barriers, but because of fluidity of voice. For example, whereas if you're Idris Elba, who has mastered a number of American regional accents, you're always going to be black Idris Elba, and there are very few if any race blind roles for his characters. Most of his roles pick up on his racial identity or his national or ethnic identity in different ways, partly by design, because he's chosen to promote black British and British generally and black African filmmakers and film and screen talent, and partly because of barriers that have been put up. You know, there was well, there's occasionally, but there was a lot of talk about 10 years ago about Idris Elba as a possible James Bond. And we had some pushback about that and some discussion, but really It's a discussion about a kind of provocation rather than about, oh, this guy would, you know, would fit the suit well, as it were. So race is always going to inform Idris Elba. Just like you mentioned Simulu, he's one of my cases, the Chinese Canadian star who's had one huge role in the Marvel film Shang Chi, and other than that, has played in a number of Canadian films and television shows, most famously as Korean in the series Kim's Convenience, popular Canadian comedy, and has occasionally been cast in kind of seemingly race blind bro type roles. But even he has spoken a lot about typecasting and stereotyping and ceiling being put on his career because producers will look at him and think, no, we can't cast you because you're only going to play this Asian or Asian American or Asian North American role. Even as he's been able to demonstrate different things, he had a great role as a foil to fellow Canadian Gosling in Barbie. But, you know, like a lot of characters in Barbie, he's being presented as a representation of a certain racial type. You know, you've got your white can, you've got your Asian Ken, and you've got your Indian can, just like their Barbies of different races. So he's fitting into that even if he's not playing Asian as such, whatever that would mean. So we have people who are able to circulate and not to say transcend, but whose stardom is not seen to depend on qualities of skin color, for example. And then we have others who really are. And then we have people, even Caucasian actors, whose linguistic abilities are such that they will also define them as exotic in different ways or as different. I'm thinking of Mats Mikkelsen from Denmark, who's, you know, pretty Caucasian, but is also understood often absolutely, outside Scandinavia, outside Denmark, as this kind of otherworldly figure, because he just won't. Cantor won't do an American accent. So he's always going to be playing with the Danish or Germanic accent. That tracks differently in different ways and that consigns him to particular roles or gives him a breadth of roles, but also prevents him from playing kind of what we might think of as conventional leading man roles in the United States or in. In American cinema. So he moves around a lot as well. And like a lot of figures that I look at in the book, you know, he's got a very different reputation nationally and regionally than he does internationally. A lot of these actors are. We can think of them in terms of the way their voices Carry and Mats Bickelson speaking Danish in Denmark is going to play a lot differently than Mads Mikkelsen speaking with what he calls his funny accent in an English language context. And that's true of actors of all races and national origins. Certainly true of the Latino actors I look at. Some of whom are really good at doing a bunch of different accents and some of whom are always going to play with a certain kind of accented voice that is gonna blend them distinctiveness in many contexts, but is also gonna prevent them from being in certain types of roles because they might not seem to belong with certain accents. I'm thinking of people like Edgar Ramirez, the Venezuelan born actor who's one of the cases, and Wagner Maurer, the Brazilian actor who's having a real moment right now, but for a long time have been consigned to a kind of second tier stardom in part because of accent, in part because of skin color or he looks pretty white if I may say, but in different contexts can look pretty browner skin Latino. So there's a lot of different things that make screen circulation possible. Certainly having to do with the vagaries of talent and representation, but also having to do with national identity, with regional identity, with language ability and accents or lack thereof, they can be really valuable. I believe I was reading some commentary around Wagner Maurer, who's now an Academy Award nominee for the Brazilian film the Secret Agent, and one commentator said, oh, his, his voice is like his special effect. His particular kind of accented voice and his deep voice with its Brazilian accented, in this case speaking Portuguese. But in other cases in interviews, for example, speaking in English, he doesn't always use that accent. Some of his roles as Americans, he really tones it down. But certainly in Brazilian cinema his voice is probably not understood as a special effect. It may be understood as resonant and recognizable, but it also will be something that is not, certainly not foreign or exotic. So we have different, different things play differently in their own cultural, linguistic and what to say, ethnopolitical context.
- [52:53]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's really helpful to understand. And some of those examples, especially the comparison of kind of how an actor is received in their own country and language versus outside of it are really interesting to think about. But of course we also have actors who where the whole sort of shifting of identity and what does identity and language mean can all happen within the same country. Right. So one of the examples, one of the types of cases you talk about in the book are Latino cosmosexuals and how their careers are part of these conversations going on about what it means to be and look Latino within the United States today. So maybe as a last part of our discussion on the book, can we talk about that?
- [53:37]
Dr. Mark Gallagher
Sure. Where to begin? I'm certainly like getting around Latino ness in the United States is like a career long prospect. Just to try to understand the demographic categories that the U.S. census uses to define Hispanic Latino peoples is quite dizzying and it changes every 10 years with each new census. You can be Latino and white. You can be Hispanic and white. In some ways this is these involve self designated categories. You can be Chicano or Mestizo or Latinx depending on your preference. You can claim identity in terms of a specific nation. You can say okay, I may not be Latino but I identify as Central American or as Nicaraguan and there's no hard and fast rule around these things. A number of Latino actors will shift between a connotatively Latino or South American and connotatively Caucasian roles. Pedro Pascal is an excellent example. He's one of the cases in my book in the chapter on Latino stardom and I think he's a really fascinating case. The Chilean born but American raised actor who's played in a number of different cultural contexts, gaining fame initially in television as an exotic Dornish prince in Game of Thrones where he spoke with the kind of accented My name is Diego Montoya type of accent to represent a fictional country. Gained more fame playing the second lead on the television series Narcos playing a Mexican American DEA agent against Wagner Maurer's Pablo Escobar. Has since gone on to play a number of roles that are and are not understood as Latino, as brown skin or white skinned. The Last of Us would probably be a really good example where he is playing a character. The video game adaptation and popular HBO series where he is or did play Latino character understood if nothing else by the fact that the character who plays his brother was a slightly darker skin Latino. So by design. But also has played these roles as characters who are connotatively understood as white, Caucasian, non Hispanic, non Latino. Like playing Reed Richards, Mr. Fantastic in the Fantastic Four and a number that kind of skirt the boundaries of that in the recent film Eddington. He plays a southwestern mayor Bob who may or may not be Latino, Sometimes designated by surname, sometimes not. And sometimes he'll play with a very sublimated kind of flat American accent. Sometimes he'll use a kind of Texan accent. Not so hard for him since he's partly raised in San Antonio. Sometimes he will add a kind of Spanish language inflection to his speech based on the nature of the role or just seemingly his own personal desire. So a lot of different things going on in there, and a lot of it kind of shows some of the confusion around categories as well as the malleability of those categories in different ways and the way those categories are understood and the way that they're mediated as well. Certainly we can find a lot of cases where production design and lighting help frame characters in particular racialized environments, as well as areas where those cinema practices will strip characters of any racial identity. If you think of the popular streaming series the Mandalorian, also starring Pedro Pascal, you know, he plays a member of strange alien race who happened to seemingly mostly be Caucasian, but for the most part, we don't see him because the code of Mandalorians is to walk around in a suit of armor with a mask on and to never show your face. So there's a lot of vocal performance that's happening there, a lot of physical performance as well, but not involving the face so much. Sometimes involving stunt doubles, very occasionally involving the face. So, you know, is the Mandalorian Latino? Well, in a way, that question goes out the window because we're talking about a Star wars universe which has also had plenty of Latino actors playing who knows what race characters. You know, they never really spell it out. So there's a kind of fantasy space where identity is mediated, but there's also a space of reception where identities are understood and celebrated by different cultures in different ways. For sexiness, for a kind of championing of certain national identities, for talent, for all kinds of different things.
- [59:42]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, which is really interesting to think about, the kind of range of roles there, especially the sort of fantasy and sci fi ones. And like. Well, hang on a second. What actually is going on there? Lots of things to keep thinking about. As you've laid out for us, I think lots of listeners will be looking at current and upcoming things on film rather differently after this conversation. So I would only like to, I suppose, finish our conversation by asking you what you might be working on now that this book is out in the world. As you mentioned at the beginning, this book very much brings together a lot of things you've been working on for a while. Are you continuing in this sort of realm? Anything currently on your desk you want to give us a sneak preview of?
- [60:27]
Dr. Mark Gallagher
Sure, in some ways. I mean, we'll see. There's so many other male stars who I'd like to work on and who couldn't make it into this Book for a range of reasons, I wanted to do more with the Spanish star Javier Bardem. I'd written about him previously. He continues to do fascinating work in a range of different contexts, mostly American and Spanish. I wanted to look at. You know, I've really been interested in Mexican actors who've crossed over, like Diego Luna, like Gail Garcia Bernal, who've also worked in a number of different contexts, kind of waiting for their careers to take off in different ways. To give me that kind of breadth, I've really been interested in the French star of Muslim descent, Omar Sy, the star of the streaming series Lupin, and who's appeared in a number of American films in supporting roles. I'm waiting for him to make it into the ranks of major stardom simply because it will give him, if he does, a wider breadth of roles that I can look at and analyze. People like Alexander Skarsgard, Swedish actor, have been doing hugely interesting stuff in a range of different contexts, not just playing characters of different national origins, but different sexualities. He's in a really buzzy BDSM gay film right now called Pillion. So he's taken a lot of risks creatively making really interesting choices. Robert Pattinson, British star, has as well. I don't know how he's managed to get such a fascinating career playing in American independent cinema, playing in what to say, blockbuster fantasy like the Twilight films, playing in strange fare like the Lighthouse. All kinds of different stuff for him. But for the moment, I'm putting those on hold. And things I am working on include a project on white Anglophones in American Hong Kong set television. To think about how these kind of fish out of water are constructed as belonging or not belonging, as objects of desire, as agents of action in different ways, both men and women think about. And again, it's a way of like using a group of people, film stars, film care and television characters, to understand some larger phenomenon about cultural representation, about geographic representation, to think about how a territory is constructed through the foreign faces who populate that territory, how stars, actors are used to make places legible for us that would not necessarily be legible outside a certain cultural context. So I'm trying to think about different questions around globalization there. I'm also working on a piece, these are kind of journal level pieces about looking historically, kind of. I like to shake the tree of film and screen studies and see what falls out, what hasn't been studied so much that deserves attention. I'm looking now at 1930s B movie stars and constructions of what we might call a kind of alternate he man whiteness to kind of get around the ways that we might understand figures as embodying a really simplistic, perhaps jingoistic national identity in the way that instead we have characters who represent different types of ethnicities and cultures contained within these familiar templates of what to say, brawny male action. So there's all kinds of interesting stuff happening there that I think is, you know, like a lot of popular phenomenon, certainly more complex than we often give give it credit for at first glance. And particularly if you look historically, you'll find like, wow, there are all kinds of figures who were huge in the past to have been completely forgotten because the way they present themselves just resonated really well, say in the 1920s or 1930s. But that resonance has not necessarily persisted. So it's really fascinating to learn about kind of different codes of popular entertainment, about different studios, key figures, how they were promoted and understood, about the way that a certain type of cerebral masculinity was sometimes seen as sexy, a kind of noble masculinity that is patriarchal, but also other things. And the way that some of those images fell out of favor. I'm thinking of responses to globalization and then counter responses as well. So what happens when, say, World War II and the lead up to World War II leads to all kinds of different racial animosities around the world and the closing down of film industries? What emerges to take its place? What happens when there's no Valentino and when Sasui Hayakawa, now, because of his Japanese origins, is not going to be a big Hollywood star anymore? What replaces him? So that's what I'm looking at. A bunch of different things around man, a bunch of different things around globalization and screen practice that I hope are at least partly as interesting to others as they are to me. To understand these different phenomenon that can be really hard to get our heads around and certainly really hard to come up with a kind of, if not empirical, at least consistent standard of, if not judgment than understanding and analysis.
- [67:21]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, it certainly sounds like you will have plenty to keep you busy. That all sounds very intriguing and definitely has a lot of related threads to the book we've been discussing. So for any listeners who want more, the book is titled cosmosexuals, Screen Acting, Stardom and Male Sex Appeal, published by the University of Texas Press in 2025. Mark, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [67:42]
Dr. Mark Gallagher
Thank you very much, Miranda. I'm really glad to have this opportunity. It's great to find someone to talk about the book with. I thank you for their excellent questions. That got me thinking in a lot of different ways. And I hope that, you know, I'm glad you're doing this service for authors, for readers out there, for publishers as well, to help bring attention to our work that I hope, rewards that attention for people who take a look at it.