The five sexiest actors in cinema history, according to Walton Goggins: “Who speaks to your loins?”
Having spent most of his career quietly flying under the radar as one of the best character actors of his generation that nobody really talked about, Walton Goggins is finally a star. Not only that, but he’s become a sex symbol, too.
As strange as it is to consider a man from Alabama called Walton becoming a Hollywood heartthrob, especially one who simultaneously has too much and not enough hair and teeth so pearly white it’s a safety hazard when he smiles while driving, people find the guy irresistible.
While he may not look like the conventional ideal of an attractive man, there’s a lot to be said about charm and natural charisma picking up the slack. Unsurprisingly, then, when gazing inward to reflect on his newfound status as an object of desire, his pick for cinema’s sexiest stars came out of left field.
Whether it’s the ‘Golden Age’ grace of the chiselled Paul Newman or the suave Cary Grant, ‘New Hollywood’ pretty boys like Robert Redford or Richard Gere, or whoever it is that the youths are screaming themselves hoarse over these days, Goggins has no interest in their aesthetics.
Instead, his outside-the-box candidates for the stars who deserve to be lauded for making folk weak at the knees are all a bit like him; prolific character men who spent years paying their dues before becoming respected veterans, all without being blessed with the sort of looks that make things a lot easier.
“There is no space left,” the Justified and The Shield veteran rued. “Like, Scott Glenn, where are those actors? Who is sexy right now? Who doesn’t speak to your heart, but speaks to your loins? Where is Bill Holden? Where’s Warren Oates? Where’s Bruce Dern? I mean, where’s fucking Nicholson, man?”
Jack Nicholson would be the exception, since he was both a superstar and a legendary lothario, who spent decades either throwing himself at women or having them thrown at him, and he possessed a certain magnetism that few names in Tinseltown history have ever been able to hold a candle to.
Beyond that, has anyone really looked at Glenn, Holden, Oates, and Dern and thought to themselves, “God damn, that is a sexy fella”? Maybe, and we’re not here to judge if that’s the case, because if Walton Goggins can emerge as a 21st-century sex symbol, then you can’t say with any certainty that people weren’t falling over themselves for the other four.
“I don’t look like anybody,” he accurately stated. “I don’t look like anybody but me.” That’s correct, but just like the unsung, smouldering character actors of the past that he mentioned, Goggins has done a bang-up job of emulating them as the modern-day loin-whisperer.
