If cleanliness is godliness, the Challengers star’s dirtiness is perfectly profane.Midway through Challengers, a movie about how not having a threesome could ruin your entire life, it dawned on me: This was at least the third movie I’d seen in the last several years in which Josh O’Connor is absolutely filthy. As sleazy tennis bro Patrick Zweig, O’Connor spends most of the movie in his sweaty tennis outfits, sleeping in his car and barely showering; at one point, as he tries to check into a motel for the night, a gay couple behind him remark on his stench. In Alice Rohrwacher’s magical-realist romantic dramedy La Chimera, he’s the similarly grimy Arthur, an ex-con who rolls out of jail in a stained all-white linen suit, an outfit he proceeds to wear around Italy as he robs graves and coughs all over everyone. In 2017’s God’s Own Country, one of his major breakout roles, O’Connor plays a closeted sheep farmer named Johnny who passes out drunk atop piles of hay and spends his days literally wrist-deep in pregnant animals. Significantly and relatedly, in each of these films, he is so hot and pulls so much ass without even trying that it’s not even funny.
In Raquel S. Benedict’s 2021 essay “Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny,” Benedict writes about how Hollywood’s major constituents have been waxed and shredded to the point of total sexlessness. Actors, she argues, have been artificially built up and turned into onscreen war machines; hardly recognizable as normal human, they’re no longer able to even simulate horniness. She compares the Ideal Celebrity Body to a McMansion: It’s “not the vehicle through which we experience joy and pleasure during our brief time in the land of the living,” “not a home to live in and be happy. It, too, is a collection of features: six-pack, thigh gap, cum gutters.” Now, I am not here to say that Josh O’Connor does not have a six pack or cum gutters — he does! I am here to say that, much like McMansions, most actors onscreen lately have appeared far too clean: teeth too white, skin too poreless, chests too waxed, gutters too scrubbed. Josh O’Connor is bravely changing all of that, boosting the already-astronomical horniness quotient of three of the sexiest films in recent memory while absolutely coated in grime. (I’m told he is also at times very dirty on a fake-sounding PBS series called The Durrells in Corfu.) All of this while being British and having played a disturbingly clean person on The Crown for many years!
Understandably, O’Connor’s fictional counterparts find his squalid vibe as magnetically attractive as I do. La Chimera’s Arthur is one of the most depressed men ever to grace the screen; he spends most of the film mournfully trudging around fantasizing about his missing girlfriend, Beniamina, while emitting such a dark scent that, in an early scene, a traveling salesman who stumbles past him on a train pauses to insult him for a while. “Jeez, it really stinks in here,” he says, pointing at Arthur. “This man doesn’t like water. Such a charming man, but he stinks!” Three beautiful Italian women, who’d been sitting in the same train car and mooning at Arthur as he slept, are completely unfazed by his acrid tang. Later, Italia, his missing girlfriend’s mother’s singing student, falls desperately in love with him, even after she sees him wearing the same outfit for like 14 scenes in a row. In Challengers, Zendaya’s Tashi wants to hate Patrick — he’s a stubborn asshole who’s destroying her marriage, even as he’s just rolled out of his car-bed, eaten half a stranger’s sandwich, and picked up a Tinder date just to crash at her house— but instead, she can’t stop thinking about him. God’s Own Country kicks off with Johnny puking after a blackout night on the town, chugging straight out of the family milk carton, checking in on a cow’s birth canal, then effortlessly picking up a local a few hours later, whom he fucks to oblivion in an outhouse.
I want to be clear about something: I am not encouraging normal men to stop washing themselves or changing outfits. Like complicated action stunts and talking to Chris Pratt, sexy filthiness should not be attempted in real life. Almost nobody is hot enough to pull this off in real life, and most men I know should shower more, not less. But in our AI-poisoned, motion-smoothed, deep-faked, Instagram-filtered, catfished, holographic, Zoom-pilled, Apple Watched present reality, it is a revelation to see a beautiful man onscreen with three-day-old facial hair, sweaty lettuce tucked behind his ears, his dirty shirt unbuttoned, moodily grilling corn outside a lean-to, as O’Connor does in La Chimera. Or watching his lover remove a dead lamb’s wool and then turn that wool into a little coat for another lamb, and then fucking him atop a pile of hay, like he does in God’s Own Country. Or, as Challengers’ Patrick does, sweating profusely and swinging his dick around in a bougie sauna as he engages in homoerotic psychosexual banter with his male best friend.
Most crucially, O’Connor’s characters’ smutty appeal stands in opposition to current ideas about performative masculinity. His characters are pissed off and cocky and clinically depressed and tormented and do things like piss angrily on barn walls and talk shit on the court and lie down sadly in piles of dirt, but they aren’t violent or aggressive or involved in some kind of intergalactic war. As one character says directly to the camera in La Chimera, if the sensitive Etruscans had survived, “there wouldn’t be all this machismo.” Josh O’Connor is like an Etruscan artifact: covered in soot, sad and magical, and people in this movie want to spit on him.
In the era of the “Clean Guy Aesthetic,” where there exist endless YouTube tutorials about “How to Dress Like Patrick Bateman,” and where billionaires siphon the blood of their teenage sons to live forever, Josh O’Connor is a sensual monument to human mortality, a stubborn salute to defilement, a paean to pungency. His filth is a fuck-you to soulless optimization, an indelible smudge on the increasingly dystopian polish of the ruling class. If cleanliness is godliness, Josh O’Connor’s dirtiness is perfectly profane. Recent songs by Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo have reiterated the mass delusional appeal of the “I can fix him” boy, an eternally doomed human project that every woman must undertake at least once in her lifetime to learn an important lesson. Josh O’Connor is, as it were, an “I can clean him” boy. But please — don’t.
More on Challengers
- Vulture Cinematrix: Cannes Lions 2024 Edition
- BREAKING NEWS: Letterboxd Users Like Challengers
- Vulture’s 2024 Summer Pop-Culture Gift Guide
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7t8HLrayrnV6YvK57wKuropucmnyktMClo56ml5q%2FtHnJqKqhZZ%2BYvK%2B6zqtkoqtdm7atwMeyZaGsnaE%3D