Counting down 2024's flyest onscreen white boys

Quirked up white boy with a little bit of swag busts it down sexual style... is he goated with the sauce?

In April 2021, America’s Failson Chet Hanks declared that ‘White Boy Summer’ had officially begun with the release of a song nobody had asked for. The term was immediately embraced by white supremacists (who’d have guessed) forcing Hanks to issue a clarification: “White boy summer was created to be fun, playful and a celebration of fly white boys who love beautiful queens of every race.” Even as an immediate punchline, the concept brought back into the public consciousness that classic archetype of the white boy earnestly occupying a non-white space (think Lawrence of Arabia but even more goated).

Three years on, long after President Biden had relinquished all his faculties save for his bone-deep love of genocide, it was becoming increasingly untenable to pretend that a crazy white boy could ever be a force for good (Hanks tried and failed to resurrect the season). But just when it seemed like there may be no country for quirked up white boys, 2024 turned out to be the year that a number of fly white boy narratives were released in cinemas and our living rooms. Whether or not they had been greenlit in response to Hanks’ original proclamation remains to be seen.

These are films and shows with protagonists occupying a position somewhere between white saviour, bumbling ignoramus and genuine ally. Their well-meaning hero finds himself among an unfamiliar people and does his best to adapt, often finding love where he least expects it. If he does save the day, it is because he uses his privilege (his whiteness, his skill with the blade or his swag) for good. This often means he will have to betray his own people as a half-assed Hollywood statement on decolonisation. These films also get a lot of mileage out of making the hero the butt of jokes intended to defang him and put viewers at ease (the cinematic equivalent of Tim Walz’s ‘white guy tacos’).

There are a few films I’m not going to talk about because they don’t quite fit the archetype. Josh O’Connor’s Englishman in Tuscany, Arthur from La Chimera is the closest but the cultural barriers he must navigate aren’t quite profound enough to make the list. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes countinues the series-long treatise on otherisation but Freya Allen as the human (the part she was born to play, baby!) is pretty perfunctory (not to mention, she is neither a boy, nor particularly fly). In the documentary No Other Land, Israeli filmmaker Yuval Abraham reckons with his own privilege and power among Palestinians but this is a goofy-ass article and that is one of the most important films of the year.

So with those caveats, these are the flyest white boys onscreen in 2024:

5 - Paul Mescal as Lucius Verus Aurelius / "Hanno", Gladiator II

Ridley Scott’s legacyquel to his 2000 dumb-guy opus is a borderline case. As a Roman growing up in Africa, forced to avenge his dead Numidian wife, Lucius may seem like your classic funky white boy. However, his adversary Macrinus, an African growing up in Rome is simply several degrees more goated. As the latter, Denzel Washington acts circles around everyone else in the film. Any potency inherent in the decision to pit a white actor against a black actor in this context is undermined by the colourblind casting of everyone else in the film. As a result, the Irishman doesn’t really read as an outsider in the ahistorically diverse Numidia (which in real life had been conquered by Rome centuries earlier). When facing the evil empire that decimated his adopted homeland, Lucius takes it out on the man who wants to bring down that same empire so he can instead reform it from within (big yikes, Paul).

After proving himself with devastating performances as sexy sad ghosts in better films, I can’t help wishing Mescal played the dead wife instead of her avenger.

4 - Gonçalo Waddington as Edward, Grand Tour

I’ve been a Miguel Gomes devotee since 2012’s Tabu which similarly combines a classical depiction of the colonial past with a more naturalistic present. In Grand Tour, Edward runs away from his fiancée Molly as she arrives to meet him in 1918 Rangoon and haplessly makes his way through colonial Singapore, Bangkok, Saigon, Manila, Japan and China before disappearing into a haze of opium smoke (there but for the grace of God go I). Gomes inserts himself into this screwball narrative with anachronistic documentary footage from his own Eat, Pray, Love trip through the region. Edward isn’t very fly, driven mainly by a fear of commitment and never plays an active part in the history happening around him, which certainly makes it more honest than many of these other films.

But sometimes a white boy needs to lose himself in the global south to truly find himself.

3 - Guy Pearce as Thomas Munro, The Convert

Having written off Lee Tamahori completely after Mahana, I was pleasantly surprised when I realised that The Convert is pretty great. Guy Pearce plays a veteran of the British Army seeking redemption in 1830s Aotearoa where he navigates the complex politics of the Musket Wars and eventually becomes a Pākehā Māori. If you listen to David Seymour, you might be surprised to learn it but there was an actual historical context that led to the signing of Te Tiriti. This chapter of our history, in which Pākehā were few enough in number that they had to be cognisant of their status as guests on the land, doesn’t get nearly enough play, presumably because of how it upsets racist narratives. Munro may be older and more haunted than the boys on this list and has wasted the swag of his younger years in the service of an evil empire but there is something instructive in the selflessness with which he engages with Tangata Whenua.

2 - Timothée Chalamet as Paul Atreides / “Muad'Dib”, Dune: Part Two

Even if it is a favourite of white guys who say ‘Inshallah’, Dune: Part Two, like Gladiator II buries the real-life implications of its narrative under colourblind casting. The Fremen may be inspired by colonised peoples from the Arab world, primarily Bedouins, but they are played by a diverse (albeit not Middle Eastern) range of actors. Were Villeneuve to acknowledge that the righteous uprising he depicts was ultimately inspired by Muslim decolonial struggles, he may alienate his decidedly non-goated lead actor. Villeneuve’s disinterest in real-world politics (this isn’t the first time he’s treated the Middle East as an abstract) means that the critiques of white saviour narratives in the source material are half-baked.

There’s no denying it though, few people could have expected a white boy to be that good at riding the worm, even if his intentions for leading the Fremen to victory aren’t entirely pure.

1 - Cosmo Jarvis as Pilot Major John Blackthorne / "Anjin", Shōgun

I would usually never dream of letting a TV show top of a list of films but it would be dishonest to deny that as the Anjin, Cosmo Jarvis lowkey has the sauce. James Clavell’s novel has been quintessential white guy wish-fulfillment for half a century, convincing generations of dads that they too would be proficient with the blade if anyone would just give them the chance. In adapting it for the screen, Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks have done something very savvy: they made the white guy seem as alien to viewers as he would have to his Japanese hosts. Jarvis’ performance is absolutely bizarre, an exaggeration of stilted English-ness and clumsy masculinity that may be historically accurate but comes across like Tom Hardy playing Graham Chapman.

In my opinion, the Anjin is the fly-est onscreen white boy of 2024 because of the way everything about him upsets the Eurocentrism of the source material (without fundamentally changing the narrative).