Sexiest Man Alive is no Cumberbatch

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This article was published 29/11/2014 (4313 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s People vs. the people, in the battle for sexy.

Every year since 1985, People magazine has tried to foist the Sexiest Man Alive on a sometimes bemused, sometimes unwilling female public. But in these heady days of participatory media, this kind of top-down, authoritarian approach to sexiness no longer works. The Internet’s potential for radical democracy seems to have been fulfilled — at least in this completely trivial matter — because women are pushing back. Witness this headline in online magazine Slate: “Who Actually Thinks the Sexiest Man Alive is Sexy?”

The People Sexiest Man Alive issue hit the stands last week, and this year’s mandated mainstream man-hunk is Chris Hemsworth, a 31-year-old Aussie actor. Hemsworth seems like a nice enough bloke. He has an enviable shoulder-to-hip ratio, a highly symmetrical face and improbably fabulous hair. He is known for manly roles like Formula 1 racing driver James Hunt and Thor the mighty thunder god.

“He has the body of a superhero and the heart of a nappy-changing dad,” writes People, in a bit of calculated gushing. He looks swell in a chambray shirt.

Yes, Hemsworth’s on-paper sexy credentials are impeccable. But is he the man women want?

No. You know who they want? They want Benedict Cumberbatch. The 38-year-old Englishman seems to be the people’s candidate, his geeky, self-spoofing sexiness having captured the hearts of millions of women (and men). Cumberbatch’s unpredictable alt-sexy success is an affirmation of the crowd-sourced power of social media. It’s also a testament to the wonderfully wayward nature of desire, since the oddly angled Brit isn’t exactly a standard-issue sex symbol.

As the subject of numberless GIFs and memes and blogs and social media mash-notes, Cumberbatch is often called “the Internet’s boyfriend.” Even his recent engagement, which was announced with heartbreaking headlines all over the web (“Benedict Cumberbatch is Getting Married — and Not to You!”), hasn’t dented Cumbermania. It has only proven that Cumberbatch is marriage material.

Cumberbatch has also been dubbed “the accidental superstar.” Abashed by all the adoration, he’s the first to admit he’s an unlikely sex god.

First off, there’s his name. It could belong to a Dickensian clerk or a Hogwarts’ Defense Against the Dark Arts instructor. It’s ungainly and possibly a little comic. As the many online “Benedict Cumberbatch Name Generators” suggest, his multi-syllabic moniker could just as easily be Bombadil Curdelsnoot, Bandersnatch Cummerbund or Burberry Cuttlefish.

Then there’s his appearance, which is, well, offbeat. Cumberbatch can look absolutely beautiful, as if his cheekbones were made of polished porcelain, or kind of goofy and goggle-eyed, depending. With his wide brow and pointed chin, he sometimes resembles a startled woodland creature or a gorgeous alien or — it’s been unkindly suggested — Sid the giant sloth in Ice Age. There’s a whole website devoted to “Otters Who Look like Benedict Cumberbatch.”

Finally, there are Cumberbatch’s roles. He doesn’t play action heroes, alpha-males or macho men. In fact, he got his acting start in drama productions at Harrow, the posh boys’ school, playing girls’ parts. (His turn in As You Like It was apparently “the best Rosalind since Vanessa Redgrave,” according to one observer.)

Cumberbatch is playing Richard III in an upcoming BBC adaptation of Shakespeare’s War of the Roses play cycle. Again, not conventional dreamboat stuff, what with the lank hair and the nephew-murdering tendencies.

And he often plays men who are brilliant or awkward or antisocial or difficult. Cumberbatch portrayed Stephen Hawking in a 2004 BBC television movie, and in the upcoming film The Imitation Game, he stars as Bletchley Park codebreaker and computer genius Alan Turing. “Mother says I’m just an odd fish,” Turing explains at one point.

Cumberbatch’s oddest fish — and the foundation of his superstardom — is the cold, calculating brainiac Sherlock Holmes, whom Cumberbatch himself considers to be a high-functioning sociopath. This doesn’t deter his followers, whose nerd passions clog the Internet with feverish fan-fiction and unrequited love. Eventually, Sherlock’s super-self-referential scripts started taking these obsessive fan crushes into account, writing them into the plots.

Comparing the official Sexiest Man Alive with his unofficial competition is instructive. Chris Hemsworth is an undeniably good-looking guy, but he comes off as a bland, standardized, market-researched idea of male sexiness. Benedict Cumberbatch, as the people’s choice and uncrowned king of the Internet, is idiosyncratically attractive. He has none of the conventional markers for movie stardom but somehow pulls in a tremendous amount of individual appeal with his otter-ish face and self-deprecating English manners.

And these differences are encouraging. Actual people, as opposed to capital-P People, seem to have much more interesting and open-wide ideas of sexiness. And in the age of interactive media, they now have more ways to express these ideas. People magazine, no matter how glossy its covers are, can’t win the Sexiest Man fight anymore.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca