Did Marvel really kill off the old-fashioned the movie star? And should anyone with hopes of becoming the new James Dean avoid starring as Captain America like a night out with Proxima Midnight?
This ongoing debate first entered the cultural ether around the time that Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola were proclaiming loudly that all superhero movies were basically spawn of the corporate whore of Hollywood Babylon in 2019. The supposed problem was then crystallised intellectually by one Quentin Tarantino in 2022, who pointed out that most Marvel stars would be virtually unknown if they hadn’t got the superhero gig.
“Part of the Marvel-ization of Hollywood is … you have all these actors who have become famous playing these characters,” he told the 2 Bears, 1 Cave podcast while promoting Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. “But they’re not movie stars. Right? Captain America is the star. Or Thor is the star … It’s these franchise characters that become a star.”
More recently there have been rumours that Glen Powell, Hollywood’s current great hope for a return to the era in which swaggering, chisel-jawed All-American (and sometimes European) blokes could open a movie with little more than their pheromones, refuses to take part in Marvel films for precisely this reason. Yes, he might look great as the new Johnny Storm/Human Torch – don’t get excited folks, they already cast Joseph Quinn – but might this also take away his power to open middling rom-coms opposite Sydney Sweeney with little more than a smile that feels like it could sell you a luxury watch?
Who better to ask than Harrison Ford, an actor with so much movie star charisma that he could roll out of bed and scowl at his toaster while still coming across as cooler than anything ever in a Fast & Furious flick? And yes, we should probably offer up here that Ford must declare an interest – he has just been cast as General Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (who in the comics, and a recent trailer, becomes the Red Hulk) in the new Marvel movie Captain America: Brave New World. But still …
“I understand the appeal of other kinds of films besides the kind we made in the 80s and 90s,” Ford told GQ. “We’re silly if we sit around regretting the change and don’t participate. I’m participating in a new part of the business that, for me at least, I think is really producing some good experiences for an audience. I enjoy that.”
Ford then went on to describe the theory Marvel has killed off the traditional movie star as “rubbish”, adding: “I don’t think the question is whether or not there are any movie stars. There’s wonderful actors coming up every day […] Whether or not they become movie stars is really not the point. If movies need stars, they will find them.”
He continued: “I’ve never fucking understood being a movie star. I’m an actor. I tell stories. I’m part of a group of people who work together, collaborate on telling stories. I’m an assistant storyteller. That’s what I am.”
It has to be said that we live in a strange world indeed where Powell can apparently achieve more movie star cache by starring in a hyper-cheesy modern-day Shakespeare knock-off than some of the highest grossing, most-watched films of the modern era. But after decades spent struggling in Hollywood prior to his big break in Top Gun: Maverick, the Texan actor clearly isn’t going to mess with the secret sauce. Does this also explain why we never got to see Tom Cruise, Powell’s co-star and reported mentor, as alternate reality Iron Man?
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The problem with this theory is that it stems from a rather conservative sense of cultural terror, firstly that Marvel movies are coming to dominate the landscape, and secondly that anyone who steps into this CGI-heavy fantasy multiverse can never again be “just” an actor.
As Ford points out, this is indeed at least partly a nonsense. Scarlett Johansson was iconic as Black Widow, but far more of a star turn as the inscrutably gorgeous Midge Campbell in Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City. Chris Evans showed his post-Marvel range as the narcissistic scion of a family of rich eccentrics in the excellent Rian Johnson murder mystery Knives Out, while Robert Downey Jr recently earned praise for his role as Lewis Strauss in the Oscar-winning Oppenheimer.
On the other hand, Chris Hemsworth has never really emerged from Thor’s space viking straitjacket, while Brie Larson has rarely hit the heights of her Oscar-winning turn in 2015’s Room since signing up to play Captain Marvel. So perhaps there is something to the sense that Marvel films subsume their cast members in a sort-of comic book gloop that makes it hard for audiences to remember who they are when they are not participating in an interstellar family feud involving glowing space stones.
Perhaps the real question here is whether audiences really want or needs stars like Powell and Cruise any more, though it would appear from the huge success of Top Gun: Maverick that they are pretty sure they do. Then again, if your movie star charisma can’t survive being enveloped in spandex and asked to jump through the multiverse in search of giant space hammers while debating intergalactic ethics with a talking raccoon, perhaps there wasn’t quite so much swaggering charm there to begin with.
