I’m just thinking about how Ben Barnes performance is so good because he actually took it seriously. I feel like it’s so easy for men who act in these teen romance adaptations to completely dismiss the story and it’s value. Like even though I love Robert Pattinson in Twilight, he hated the books. And even if that isn’t obvious in his performance, it’s still there. Ben Barnes clearly mined that text and fully understood everything about the Darkling and it shows every time he’s on screen. This man is the new standard and that’s why his performance is one of the best that’s ever existed in an adapted work.
One thing that really rubs me the wrong way about RPattz is that yes, the Twilight books ain’t a literary masterpiece, anyone with a brain could see that, but it has legitimate reasons for having a passionate fanbase. Even if you don’t agree that it has good or interesting things to say, there are good or interesting statements to make about the material. And even if Twilight is shitty, it gave him EVERYTHING. It made him incredibly famous, it made him rich, it gave him a great career, set him up for life, essentially. So his unending contempt for it, especially his disdain for what its romance means for girls and women, is personally super off-putting to me. You took the job! Stop acting like you’re that much better than it! And obviously, this isn’t exclusive to RP. It’s really rare to hear actors who break through via material targeted mainly at teenage girls say, yes, I liked doing it and I would love to do that again, becoming Christian Bale isn’t that important to me.
What’s genuinely nice about BB is that he has never betrayed a drop of condescension towards the material. The S&B books are middling even by YA standards and the adaptation, while good, is still unmistakably YA. I think many grown-ass men would be embarrassed to be associated with this material, especially if they’ve just come from a round of prestige/hypermasculine fare like Westworld/The Punisher the way BB did. I’ve seen people joke about his English lit degree, and the guy definitely had to read a lot of Shakespeare and all that highfalutin stuff at university. But he still goes out of his way to mention lines he enjoys from S&B, he thought so much about the love triangle to the point of having elaborate explanations for how or why his character kisses the girl a certain way, was considerate of depicting consent in an unbalanced power dynamic, and according to Jessie, he was very inclusive of her views on everything even though she was so young and inexperienced. Yes all of that is hot and he is hot &etc. but most of all this is just very heartwarming and I would love to see more dudes in the industry use his sincerity as a model when it comes to material aimed at girls and women.
