If you have any sort of social media connection (and really, more power to you if you’re tiptoeing off the grid), you’ve been seeing one face over and over all summer. A sometimes blond, sometimes chestnut brunette man with a pouty smolder and a mole above his lip—a perfect fit for the Gen Z Marilyn Monroe that the Tumblr, Twitter, and Letterboxd crowds are making Nicholas Galitzine out to be.
The actor’s red-hot summer—which began with a leading role as a bubble-butted British prince in Red, White & Royal Blue—is continuing into the sweltering dog days when his latest film, the ribald teen comedy Bottoms, hits theaters this weekend. Galitzine’s hammy part as the quintessential American dumb jock is bound to send his hype train full steam ahead. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Unlike his equally dreamy contemporaries Noah Centineo and Jacob Elordi, there seems to be more to Galitzine than just charisma, good looks, and a baritone voice. Dare I say there might even be… talent? I don’t want to jump to conclusions (this guy was in that unspeakably terroristic Prime Video remake of Cinderella, after all), but it would seem that Galitzine actually has the prowess to back up the excitement his career is generating.
Take Red, White & Royal Blue, in which Galitzine might’ve been the only actor in the whole film besides Uma Thurman to deliver his dialogue with even a hint of emotional nuance. While his co-lead Taylor Zakhar Perez performed with the expertise of a Riverdale extra and talked with the timbre of Ghostface, Galitzine managed to pull out a performance that was far more thoughtful than the film’s overall quality demanded. At this point, he’s an expert in acting for his life in the face of a mawkish script, which he reliably accomplished in last year’s dreadful Purple Hearts as well.
Happily, it seems as if Galitzine’s relatively short career is already on the upswing. If you thought the hullabaloo around Red, White & Royal Blue was a lot to handle, strap in (or maybe, strap-on?): Bottoms is about to incite new heights of audience obsession with its core cast. The no-holds-barred sex comedy, about two lesbian teenagers who start a fight club at their high school to meet hot girls, deserves to be a breakout hit. The film is the perfect mixture of raunch and sheer, gleeful lunacy, the kind of feature that, if there’s any justice, will make as many year-end lists as it will repertory screening lineups.
In Bottoms, Galitzine plays Jeff, the film’s take on a classically douchey football player, as American as apple pie or student loan debt. Jeff and his team of equally block-headed football players might be the film’s antagonists, but director Rachel Seligman does a fantastic job turning them into attention-seeking victims. The football team manages to make itself look like the marginalized target of the school fight club’s new regime, and the tension between the two warring factions explodes (sometimes literally) in outrageously unexpected, hilarious fashion.
But Galitzine, who is never not seen in the film outside of full game-day regalia—shoulder pads and cleats included, one of the film’s many running jokes—doesn’t just exist here to be pretty and pouty. He’s given some of the film’s most exaggerated jokes, proving that he’s just as skilled at physical comedy as he is in the quiet dramas or sludgy gay rom-coms he’s starred in.
In one of Bottoms’ opening scenes, where Jeff says that he’s sorry he “looked at Mrs. Riley, and lightly grazed her left tit,” he delivers the line with all of the expertise of someone who grew up suffering the piggishness of his American peers. It’s a bit shocking, given that Galitzine is British by way of a Russian dynasty, but a good actor should be able to make you forget that they’re descended from executed nobility. Galitzine does that in Bottoms with every hip thrust and arrogant remark.
Galitzine adds such a fun, monstrous touch to Bottoms that it’s no surprise he’s not going to be relegated to streaming originals much longer. He’s already being cast alongside majorly beloved Hollywood power players—and I don’t mean Camila Cabello, sorry! Next year, he’ll pivot back to the monarchy with one-half of a titular role in the limited series Mary & George, where he’ll play the First Duke of Buckingham, George Villiers, opposite Julianne Moore. And after that, he’ll cozy up to Anne Hathaway in The Idea of You, a rom-com based on the bestselling novel about a divorcee inadvertently crossing paths with the world’s biggest pop star.
If the latter sounds like the Harry Styles fanfiction it’s based on, don’t worry. We’ve already seen what Galitzine was able to pull from Red, White, & Royal Blue’s glorified Wattpad script. (The film’s source novel was allegedly based on a piece of The Social Network fanfiction its author wrote back when Andrew Garfield and Jesse Eisenberg were the objects of Tumblr’s affection—how sultry!) Besides, this is a descendant of Russian nobility becoming a major heartthrob actor that we’re talking about; if there’s one thing Galitzine knows, it’s how to transcend fanfiction.
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