In a development that has left therapists reaching for the smelling salts and social media managers reaching for the X button, a Hollywood B-lister has completed his transmogrification into the manosphere’s newest high priest. The man, whose name I shall withhold to protect the guilty, has apparently undergone a ‘shocking transformation’ – as if the slow, painful implosion of a once-promising career into a slurry of podcast appearances and Twitter spats could be described as anything but inevitable.
Let us paint the portrait: a man who once played a firefighter in a mid-budget rom-com now speaks of ‘the feminine imperative’ as though it were a plot point from a discarded Dan Brown novel. His brother, in a tearful exposé that reads like a therapy session gone rogue, reveals the sacred texts of this new religion: Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, and a suspiciously large number of mid-priced bourbon brands that have yet to distance themselves.
I imagine the transformation sequence: perhaps it began with a late-night YouTube spiral, a comment section that smelled of axe body spray and betrayal, then a gradual shedding of thespian pretensions for the garb of a grifter sage. One morning he woke up, looked into the mirror that once reflected a man who cried on command, and saw instead a prophet of ‘hypergamy’ and ‘red pill truths’. The horror, the horror.
His brother, the whistle-blower, describes family dinners turned into lecture halls where the central thesis is that women are either ‘gold diggers’ or ‘soul-sucking succubi’ – a taxonomy that lacks both nuance and a permit from the local biological authority. The actor, now a guru, sells seminars on ‘masculine frame control’ for the low, low price of your dignity plus a subscription fee. He speaks of ‘alpha energy’ as though it were a variant of renewable power, which I suppose it is: renewable for his bank account.
What fascinates me is the sheer theatricality of it all. This is a man who spent years pretending to be other people, and now he has perfected the role of a lifetime: the authentic fake. He has become a character so convincing that even he believes the script. His brother, bewildered, asks ‘what happened to him?’ The answer is simple: he discovered that the manosphere pays better than the SyFy channel.
And so we watch this sad parade, this carousel of lost souls clutching at the shattered icons of a bygone masculinity. They seek answers in the gravelly voice of a man who sells hustle culture from a private jet, or in the pages of a self-help book that blames your mother. Our actor, now a priest of this strange faith, preaches to the congregation of the lonely and the aggrieved. The collection plate is a Patreon link.
In the end, the shocking transformation is not that a man can change, but that so many will follow him into the abyss. He is the mirror held up to a generation’s desperation, and the reflection is not pretty. But then, neither was his last film.
