Making Generic White Boy Actors Happen

There’s a metaphor somewhere in that Wikipedia lists Jai Courtney as being born “1985 or 1986.” His IMDb page lists his birthday as March 15, 1986, but Wikipedia can’t be bothered. Genuinely I myself had forgotten what movies he’d even been in. When I think about him, which is not often, I think about the in-jokes since the days of The Dissolve of sacred memory about how he was our latest Generic White Boy and none of us were going to worry about it. Turns out he was in Terminator: Genisys, which I remember as “your name is bad and you should feel bad.”

The Generic White Boy Actor is not a new phenomenon. Let’s be clear that it’s not necessarily about talent; many of them never appear in roles that would require them to have any. So when I say that C. Thomas Howell and Andrew McCarthy were the Generic White Boy Actors of my generation, it’s to say that Hollywood was clearly really trying to make them happen, and we as a nation said, “Meh.” They were slotted into a lot of roles, and if some of the movies are iconic, a lot of people have to be reminded that the actors exist and have names.

To be a true Generic White Boy Actor, there can’t be anything unusual about you. Alexander Skarsgård, who is on the aforementioned list, is among other things a Skarsgård. Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen were exempted for the same reason. Generic White Boy Actors aren’t from acting dynasties; you almost think there’s a lab somewhere building them from cloned parts of Tab Hunter. (I like Tab Hunter. But still.) The Coreys managed to pull themselves out of the ranks by being Coreys. John Cusack swung toward weirder roles.

It’s not unlikely that a Generic White Boy Actor will have a fan base. He is probably aimed at teenage girls, and he likely hits them. Taylor Lautner is, yes, a Generic White Boy Actor—he’s as Makah or Quileute as I am—and I mean. But even that couldn’t make him happen. I was going to make some point about “either Sam Worthington or the guy from Avatar,” then I looked it up and realized he is the guy from Avatar. I saw that movie in the theatre and still couldn’t pick him out of a lineup. That’s the case with a lot of them.

I get the impulse. Tab Hunter made Warner Bros. a lot of money back in the ‘50s. People still pay money to see Tom Cruise in things. Sometimes, the Generic White Boy Actor becomes a star. Look at Ryan Gosling. He’s got Generic White Boy Actor written all over him, but he’s made the switch to Oscar nominee handily, and it seems likely he’ll win one with the right role. When I was an adolescent, you could buy magazines full of Generic White Boy Actors. It’s quite the industry.

But maybe part of the problem is that we just aren’t aiming movies at teenage girls anymore. Our movies for teenage boys are less likely to star teenage boys. Oh, you’ve got Tom Holland, sure, but Tom Holland is starring alongside someone whose eyes and bad-boy reputation alone kept him out of those ranks when I was a kid. (He’s still got really dreamy eyes.) And Tom Holland, who is now thirty, is the youngest male lead of a blockbuster this summer.

I suppose TV can provide us a crop of Generic White Boy Actors. Honestly, my own kids aren’t much into episodic TV shows and mostly watch YouTube, so I don’t know. I just don’t think they’re putting a lot of effort into it. And that means that the Generic White Boy Actors are too old for teenage girls to fall for, for the most part, and too bland for the rest of us. There’s also the minor detail that teenage girls are much more likely to be willing to admit being interested in, say, Jenna Ortega instead.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m just fine with diversifying a little. They need not be white boys, and that’ll do nicely. Will Smith certainly had his share of admirers when I was a teenage girl, but about the only person I can think of who was in the ‘80s movies that gave us so many Generic White Boy Actors was Ke Huy Quan, and we saw how Hollywood treated him.

I don’t mourn the actors. We’re fine without them. The best of them seem to have realized they’re better off doing interesting roles instead of chasing stardom. Ryan Reynolds keeps trying to sell me wireless service. And playing Deadpool, I suppose. And I like to hope we’ll eventually try to have Generic [other things] Boy Actors forced on us instead; that’d at least make a nice change. But putting some guy in two or three movies a year for several years isn’t going to make us care about him. Or even remember him next week.