tom, brad, leo, george

Or the men I can't quit.

This summer has me thinking about the men who colonized the screens of my formative years. Tom Cruise hurtling across IMAX theaters for what might be his final Mission Impossible. Brad Pitt gearing up for the F1 film. Leonardo DiCaprio aligning with Paul Thomas Anderson for One Battle After Another. George Clooney materializing with Noah Baumbach's Jay Kelly. These men are everywhere, again, still, always.

I’ve certainly tracked their hairlines, witnessed their divorces, memorized their filmographies. Not by choice, exactly, but because these four men were the default protagonists of American cinema throughout my entire developmental arc. The stars who sculpted masculinity for me came pre-selected, assigned by a cultural machine operating as monolith. Water we swam in. Air we breathed. Oh, the atmospheric pressure of growing up female in their gravitational pull.

During Mission: Impossible – Final Reckoning, I counted four gray hairs at Tom Cruise's temples, barely visible on the big screen. I watched him jump from a plane at 25,000 feet without oxygen, free-falling through storm clouds, and thought: I've spent more time staring at this man's face than my own father's.

The worst thing I did during a breakup was watch Edge of Tomorrow on repeat in one weekend. I skipped the crying, the friend calls, all that healthy emotional processing nonsense. Just me and Tom Cruise dying over and over, resetting the day, never giving up. Monday morning I showered, went to work, pretended everything was fine. People commented on how well I was handling things. Tom taught me how to keep going when everything hurts. Just reset. Try again. Hide the pain.

Brad Pitt's bare torso was my sexual awakening at age 11. My dad rented Fight Club, thinking it was just another action movie, and suddenly there was Brad in the kitchen scene, shirtless and glistening. Dad fast-forwarded through what he deemed the "inappropriate parts," but too late. I'd already been fundamentally rewired. I spent the next fifteen years of my life with a poster of him from Thelma & Louise above my bed. My mother rolled her eyes every time we redecorated my room and I insisted the poster stay. "Someday you'll realize men like that are trouble," she said, hammering the thumbtack back into our rental's wall.

Brad in Thelma & Louise

Leonardo DiCaprio was my first. Seven years old at my aunt's house in Athens, watching Titanic on a bootleg VHS with Greek subtitles. The women in my family passing around tissues as Jack froze in the Atlantic. "Sagapo," Jack had apparently told Rose in this version – "I love you" in Greek. I believed it completely.

George Clooney showed up late to this emotional party. I was already in college, dating men with dubious facial hair and strange fixations on David Foster Wallace. He seemed like an old man to me at the time, and I didn't understand the appeal. I'd yawn dramatically when my mom called him "distinguished" on some red carpet. But still, I liked him just enough in Ocean’s Eleven.

There's a frustrating problem with falling in love with someone's face when you're twelve: the love hardens like cement even as you mature. I'm 32 now, allegedly a grown woman with a mortgage and strong opinions about how sourdough is overrated. And yet, when Tom Cruise jumps off something tall, when Brad Pitt smirks at the camera, when Leo furrows his brow intensely and I feel that familiar pull. The pathways run too deep, too well-traveled. These grooves were etched into my brain before I understood what consent was, before I learned the word "patriarchy," before I became the kind of woman who demands accountability from the men in my life.

The relationships I've built with these men are fantasy, projection, delusion. They're also the most consistently comforting emotional fixtures in my adult life.

Which makes their personal failings feel weirdly, irrationally personal.

The first real crack in my movie star fantasy appeared in 2005, when Tom Cruise jumped on Oprah's couch. I was thirteen then, old enough to recognize the strangeness of his behavior but young enough to defend it reflexively. "He's just excited," I told my friends, who were already making jokes about Scientology and mid-life crises. "He's in love. What's wrong with showing it?"

As you’d expect.

But something had shifted. The reliable, controlled Tom Cruise I'd grown up with had revealed himself to be something else – something more manic, more unpredictable, potentially more troubling. The subsequent years brought more evidence: the Scientology connection, the controlling aspects of his marriage to Katie Holmes and Nicole Kidman, the reports of estrangement from his daughter Suri.

Brad's unraveling came later, with the devastating allegations surrounding his split from Angelina Jolie. Details about drinking, about a terrifying incident on a private plane, about his children refusing to see him. The baby face I'd studied in adolescence now appeared on gossip sites next to headlines about restraining orders and custody hearings.

It’s a trend.

[Sophie’s note:

Clara

wrote a great piece on the Brad Pitt situation in particular in her newsletter

Hmm That's Interesting

a couple of weeks ago. Do give it a read!]

Leo's transformation was more gradual, less a sudden revelation than a slow-building pattern that became impossible to ignore. The "Pussy Posse" years. The girlfriends who seemed to hit some invisible expiration date at 25. The private jets and yachts that contradicted his environmental activism.

The people have questions.

As these revelations piled up, I waited for my feelings to adjust. Surely I would outgrow these attachments, replace them with more appropriate adult concerns. What happened was the opposite. The worse they behaved, the harder I worked to defend them. Public figure versus private person. Career achievements versus personal failings. Fame distorts everything, right? I became the person who devours entire profiles hunting for evidence that these men are more complex, more self-aware, more decent than their worst moments suggest. I became, in essence, an apologist for men I've never met, all to preserve relationships that exist entirely in my head.

Their aging, without true maturing, makes it worse. They keep hawking the same fantasy, just in increasingly battered packaging. Tom still treats gravity like a suggestion. Brad still deploys those cheekbones like weapons. Leo's still the eternal promising young man who never quite promises anything. None of them seem truly interested in examining what they've come to represent.

There's a movie I fantasize about where Tom Cruise confronts his own irrelevance as an aging action star. Another where Brad Pitt explores masculinity without looking like he stepped off a magazine cover. Or one where Leo plays a man struggling with commitment and intimacy. I hunger for self-awareness, for some acknowledgment that they grasp what they've become.

It will happen, when they actually grow even older, I tell myself.

Only George, among my formative four, seems to have grown up alongside me. He married Amal, a woman with an her own realized career and discernible personhood. He makes self-deprecating jokes about getting older instead of hanging from helicopters to prove he isn't. He directs movies where people talk to each other instead of running from explosions. He made Batman & Robin and then admitted it was terrible. He has aged into his face instead of fighting it. When George does a Nespresso commercial, it feels appropriately ridiculous rather than a betrayal of capital-C Cinema.

The problem with loving movie stars from afar isn't that they disappoint you. It's that you never get to sit down with them and talk it through. You never get to say, "Hey, Tom, what the fuck with Scientology, honestly?" or "Brad, I've been worried about your drinking," or "Leo, why don’t you give that girl a real chance?"

Real relationships include reckonings. They survive because you hash things out, you adjust expectations, you decide what you can live with and what you can't. But with celebrities, you're stuck with one-way emotional processing. You have to do all the work yourself.

So here I am, being forced into an uncomfortable position: reconciling my lifelong emotional investment with the growing evidence that these men don't deserve it.

This shouldn't be difficult. I'm a feminist! I believe in holding men accountable! I've ended real relationships with real men who've behaved badly! So why can't I quit these parasocial attachments? Why do I still feel a rush of protective loyalty when someone criticizes Tom's stunt obsession or Leo's fixation on working with older white male auteurs? Why am I already planning to see Brad's F1 movie opening weekend despite everything I know about him? Why do I defend…Wolfs?

My ferocious reader, this is where you may think to yourself: ah here we go, another essay about the eternal art versus artist debate. But that’s exactly what this isn’t. The art versus artist debate assumes you're weighing two competing values: aesthetic appreciation against moral judgment. It assumes there's something worth preserving on the artistic side of the equation.

So what exactly am I preserving here?

I’ve dragged you all the way down to this part of the essay to tell you I’m preserving the attachment living in the body rather than the brain, beyond conscious choice or rational critique (after all, my attachment has survived both Cocktail and Body of Lies).

Of course, this explanation feels clean. Scientific even. It lets me feel superior to other people who make similar excuses. It lets me think this is a primal response I can’t override. And most importantly, it absolves me of responsibility.

All of this is bullshit, at least partially. My attachment is self-inflicted. Tom Cruise's smile makes my stomach lurch. Brad Pitt's voice sounds like safety. Leo's intensity feels like home. These damn Nespresso ads bring me so much comfort. I’ve attached these feelings onto them. I have. That’s all on me.

I’ll turn 33 this year. I'm not old by any rational standard, but I've started finding gray hairs, started noticing how bartenders no longer card me, started realizing some doors are closing that won't reopen. Watching Tom defy time feels like watching someone fight a battle for me. If Tom Cruise can still be Tom Cruise at his age, maybe I don't need to fear what coming decades will bring, right?

Nonetheless, walking away from that history feels Herculean, even as I recognize its troublesome aspects. Part of me wonders if these men serve as steady constants in a life marked by typical millennial instability. I've changed countries, careers twice. Weathered a global pandemic, the 2009 financial collapse in Greece, multiple personal crises. Watched my parents age from a distance, unable to visit during lockdowns. Drifted from friend groups, lost touch with cousins, deleted Instagram in frustration only to reinstall them weeks later. Through it all, they’ve been my sun, moon, and stars of an unconventional personal zodiac.

Except stars don't love you back. I've always been the one doing the emotional work. Nothing about that has changed. What has is my awareness of that imbalance, my recognition of its limitations and costs. I’m now starting to acknowledge the contradictions. I want to say: I know exactly what you are, and sometimes I'll still buy a ticket, and I'll hate myself a little for it, and I'll write a newsletter about that feeling, and next time there's a Tom Cruise movie I'll probably do it all over again.

A few months ago, my eight-year-old niece discovered desire. She calls it Tom Holland, tapes his Spider-Man posters to her bedroom wall, the same way I once did with Brad Pitt. I listened to her explain the plot of No Way Home with the same intensity I once brought to discussions of Fight Club.

My mouth opens to warn her—these men will break you, little one. I wanted to tell her that these relationships are dead ends, that these men will inevitably disappoint her, that she's setting herself up for a complicated reckoning years down the line. But then I remember: Sacred things deserve their season.

So I lean in. Ask about his web-slinging technique. Nod solemnly when she ranks every Spider-Man who ever lived. Her attachment burns clean and bright, untouched by the complications that may find her later.

Because the truth is, I don't wish I'd never fallen into that particular rabbit hole of celebrity attachment. Through this experience I’ve mapped my own erosion, the unavoidable evidence that time passes, that youth doesn't last, that everything ends. Each new crow's foot on Brad's face, each slight softening of Leo's jawline, each creak in Tom's joints as he insists on keep making films until he leaves this Earth—they're mile markers on my own journey toward whatever comes after youth.

My biggest failure has been fighting evolution. Clutching childhood's simple worship as evidence of their humanity accumulated. Still, I'm trying to hold these feelings more honestly now, and to allow my personal feelings to mature into something more nuanced. (Which sounds like therapy-speak for:) The real relationship I've been craving has been with myself all along.

I’ve always wanted to connect with the girl who stayed through the end credits of Titanic fourteen times because she didn't feel seen, with the teenager who saved babysitting money to buy a bootleg Fight Club poster because she was angry, with the uni student who wrote a paper on Seven Years in Tibet because she was depressed. They live in me still, these younger selves. Their hearts leap at familiar faces on screen. But now they're joined by an adult who understands that people are never as simple as they appear on screen, that beauty often masks damage, and talent doesn't correlate with character.

I'm learning to love these men the way you love a flawed city you grew up in: eyes wide open to its violence, grateful for its gifts, forgiving what it couldn't give. You stop crafting excuses. Start witnessing clearly. It's not a perfect resolution, not by any meaningful stretch, but it feels like growing up, finally. And that's the best I can hope for – to grow up alongside these men, even as they grow in their own myths.

I sometimes wonder what happens when they stop making films. Will Tom ever slow down? Will Brad eventually retreat from public life? Will Leo start playing troubled grandfathers? Will George, already semi-retired, make his final exit from public consciousness?

Of course, for all I know, George has a dungeon full of expired protein powder and the complete works of Ayn Rand. Celebrity is mostly fiction anyway. But the fiction of George Clooney, Grown Man feels increasingly necessary as I watch the others struggle with time.

---

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- Sophie x