Secret Sex: Daniel Day-Lewis

I went to see The Master the other night. It was… good, mostly, although Joaquin Phoenix‘s acting seemed a little bit hammy at certain key moments. But that got me thinking about the leading men of other movies directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, and about how there’s one guy in particular that I’ve always wanted to get it on with. I’m not talking about Mark Wahlberg in Boogie Nights, either; no, I mean Daniel Day-Lewis, the extremely earnest Irish actor who won an Oscar for his role in Mr. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. (Which is a great movie but also one of the least sexy films ever, by the way.)

But the first time I saw DDL—let’s start calling him DDL—it was in the English gay classic My Beautiful Laundrette, where he played a racist skinhead who happened to fall hard for a Pakistani dude. The movie’s still good (although the bubbling soap noises between scenes haven’t really aged well), and it’s a good look at a handsome young man.

Since then, DDL has basically starred in nothing but downers: the one where he was the paralyzed artist; the one about the Salem witch trials; the one where he spent a lot of time in a prison in Northern Ireland. Good movies, all of them, but not exactly wanking material.

And then there’s this new one where he plays Abraham Lincoln. It looks like a big sack of hokey garbage, if you ask me, although I guess you never know. He doesn’t often pick a bad movie, and it was written by Tony “Angels In America” Kushner, so it’s possible that it’s not completely awful. Possibly. It will win a bunch of awards, no doubt, because that is what it was designed to do.

Why, then, do I want to kiss him so badly?

- Lawrence

I think in order to understand that we need some visual evidence:

Incidentally, DDL did one comedy in 1988. It was called Stars and Bars, and it also featured a rather extended full-frontal scene. But I dare you to find photos of it. If there’s one thing I’m good at in this world, it’s Googling, and photographic evidence of this film doesn’t really seem to exist, somehow. There is this grainy video, though, complete with cheesy sax music and everything.