Imagine being told that the £200 million ($462m) film you starred in was a big fat flop because you’re just not man enough.
Tittle-tattle going around Hollywood suggests the director Ridley Scott blamed the box-office failure of Gladiator II on his leading man, Paul Mescal, simply lacking the balls to pull off a convincing Roman general.
Scott’s people have since denied it, of course, but it feels like a fair assessment, regardless.
Let’s not be coy, has there ever been a Roman warrior who looked less like he could sack a city and more like he was on his way to a Boxercise class before getting a matcha latte and a smoothie bowl?
This is not a dig at Mescal, whose Bafta-winning breakout role in the screen adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People proved that he could act.
But poor Paul is just one face in an entire generation of leading men who have swapped grit for a glow-up and machismo for moisturising routines.
Even today’s most manly stars, who are technically handsome in every way – Jacob Elordi, Tom Holland, Austin Butler, Glen Powell – are all, when you look at them, too symmetrical, too perfect and waxed to within an inch of their lives.
They are buff in the literal sense, but you know that if they pop a tyre on the motorway, they’re calling the AA, or their agent is, rather than jacking up the car in their sweaty, oil-stained T-shirt to do it themselves. What, precisely, happened to the macho man that once dominated Hollywood?
You have to go back a bit to remember.
Think of Marlon Brando: in 1954, he played a prize fighter-turned-dock worker in On the Waterfront and you believed it, because he looked like a man who had unloaded the ship himself that morning and then decked someone on the way home.
Or Robert De Niro in 1980, flaunting the 27kg he’d gained to play Jake LaMotta in Scorsese’s Raging Bull. Or Christian Bale, a generation below those other greats, who was variously convincing as a serial killer, Batman, boxer and villain, in part because of the sheer masculinity that oozed from him.
Al Pacino spent the entire 1970s looking one espresso away from a heart attack and was somehow a sex idol. Sean Connery – former milkman, coffin-polisher and bodybuilder – had proved himself as a man before anyone dared put him in a dinner jacket for Bond, and it showed.
Perhaps best of all, there’s Russell Crowe, who starred in the original Gladiator a quarter of a century before Mescal and remains the last of a dying breed: an actor who led a real life before the cameras ever found him.
The feminisation of Hollywood men is laid bare in the ongoing search for the new James Bond.
Watching the current front-runners doing the rounds – Jack Barton, Harris Dickinson, Jacob Elordi, Jack Lowden and Callum Turner – my husband delivered the verdict: “I think I could take most of these men in a fight, which is definitely not what you want in a Bond”.
That’s the bit that’s missing, then.
Not the abs; today’s male stars have more abs than any generation in history, chiselled to perfection by a finicky personal trainer and a diet app that tracks their macros, whatever that is.
What’s gone is the sense that they could do something with that hard-earned muscle, other than posing in front of a gym mirror.
The macho Hollywood old guard were wiser, more mature and better able to command a room.
The new bunch look like men who have never so much as changed a lightbulb. So how are we meant to believe them capable of restoring the Roman republic?
There’s also an emotional element: this generation of leading men have built entire personal brands on being softly spoken and exquisitely in touch with their feelings.
Every press tour comes with a sob story and a therapy anecdote. Nobody drinks anymore. (Tom Holland, who played Telemachus in the recent Christopher Nolan adaptation of The Odyssey, founded an alcohol-free beer brand after what honestly sounded like one or two bad hangovers.)
Which is all very well, and probably good for them personally. It just doesn’t translate into raw sex appeal.
As much as we hate to admit it, the culture that absorbs Hollywood permeates to the plebs, sooner or later.
Beyond the box office, traditional, rugged masculinity has been evicted from the wider culture, too – off the sports pages, out of the pub, away from anywhere a teenage boy might once have picked up a template for how to be a bloke without being a brute.
If the most famous leading men on the planet are more concerned with CrossFit and vulnerability, but have little resembling toughness, self-reliance or backbone, it leaves a gap.
So, is the view ascribed to Ridley Scott right?
Whatever the answer, beneath the underwhelming box-office figures for Gladiator II lies a cultural shift.
Hollywood’s leading men have gone from looking as though they could survive the apocalypse, to appearing more likely to throw their wives at the zombies to save themselves.
Audiences, bless them, still seem to want both – the sculpted abs and the sense that their owner has, at some point in his life, had to use his fists.
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