What, when one is the engine behind a multi-million dollar industry devoted to inoffensive desire, can a man do? Efron began by looking in the mirror. “As a man watching Zac Efron,” said Zac Efron. “I don’t necessarily like me yet. So how can I like Zac Efron?” He toyed ponderously with a lone edamame then concluded. “Maybe, if that guy shook things up, did what I didn’t expect him to do, if he wasn’t afraid to be a dick, if he wasn’t afraid to fall on his face, if he hung around long enough and did the grunt work, one day I might respect him.”

So, like a ship of state, Efron set his course for a distant shore where Terpsichore, Melpomene, and Calliope dwelt. There were some hiccups on the way. (No one who saw 2011’s New Year’s Eve could call it anything but frumious gunk.) But the journey had begun, the Rubicon crossed.

Retrospectively, of course, it is easy to see the signs that something had to give. There was that condom that accidentally flew from his pocket onto the red carpet at the premiere of The Lorax, a film adaptation of a Dr. Seuss book for which Efron provided a voice, as apt a place as any to announce that Efron makes love. (“A brilliant fuck–up,” he calls it.) There was the prison tattoo he got on his hand that reads YOLO, short for You Only Live Once [Ed Note: Funny how YOLO is only used to justify poor judgment. No one says, “I should put an extra 15% into my 401K because YOLO.”] Efron doesn’t remember exactly the details of that tattoo. “I went through a period there, when I was single for the first time in six years, where I went out a lot,” he explained sheepishly.

But there was nothing as explicit, mindful, or successful as The Paperboy, Lee Daniels’ pulpy tale of murder, journalism, and sex in the bayou, which comes out October 5th. “I wanted a project that involved risk,” Efron explained, “I wanted to see how deep the rabbit hole went and how far I could really push myself.” If The Paperboy marks twain, the rabbit hole is very deep. In fact, it might never end.

Zac Efron Doesn’t Want to Be Your Teenage Crush Anymore

I am Robert Pattinson’s beating heart and I am speaking to you from my home within his thoracic cage. We are at rest now. I beat 70 bpm, which is fairly typical for a 26-year-old white male who, like Robert, is in good but not superhuman shape. Rob, I should mention, has been going through, what he calls, “a thing.” “I’m on an all-liquid diet,” he explains to an interlocutor in the non-plummy London accent that surprises so many people who haven’t realized that Robert Pattinson isn’t actually a vampire named Edward Cullen. ““I had to be shirtless for a photo shoot,” Rob explaints, “so I asked a nutritionist what’s a diet in which you can still drink as much as you want. She said a liquid diet.” Further proof that Rob isn’t a vampire. Vampires, in general, shy away from photo shoots since their sparkle, exacerbated by the camera flash, confounds even the most skilled photographer. Also vampires rarely have body image issues and they never drink. (Their blood doesn’t circulate.)

Inside the Heart of Robert Pattinson

From recent accounts of Josh Brolin’s career, one might imagine that he did nothing between The Goonies and No Country except putter about his ranch, mend fences, and practice staring into the sunset. He did in fact do all of those things, but he also was working as any other working man might: non-stop. The longest break between movies was only three years, and projects, though spotty, were constant. “I went through 20 odd years very frustrated,” he says, his voice gaining a slight edge. “I didn’t make a lot of money and there were some years that were really, really tough.”

As Brolin toiled in bit parts in genre films, time—relentless time—and the California sun lacquered his skin, kneaded deep furrows around his eyes, and eroded the weight he had clung to as a young man. He gradually built a niche for himself, playing the sorts of western men with whom he had spent his childhood, and with whom he spent his days, but of whom he knew he never was. When faced with the question, Brolin sharply replies, “I am an actor, that’s what I do. I don’t pretend to be something else.”

American Man

But that Josh Brolin—face unbeaten by Santa Ana winds, limbs not yet thickened with age, voice pinched and overall just a little silly—is not the Josh Brolin of today. The Josh Brolin who walks into The Monkey Bar in New York City early one April morning seems to have wandered off the back lot of a mythic American past. He lopes with the slightly pigeon-toed, bow-legged gait of a cowboy. His arms, unusually long, pendulum slowly. Even his goatee, so often the facial hair of a clown, does little to besmirch the handsomeness of his face.

Much of this unshakeable cowboy aura is due to Brolin’s role as Llewelyn Moss in Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country For Old Men, a role so perfectly fit it uncovered what felt like the real man. Much of this is due to Brolin’s not inconsiderable skill as an actor. Much of it is determined by our own need for an American hero who wears denim, not Spandex, and who hides his face not behind a mask but under the shadow cast by the brim of a Stetson. But how much of it is true?

Josh Brolin Brings the Cinematic Return of the American Man

Noomi Rapace Puts Lisbeth Salander Behind Her