The man has a voice like honeyed gravel and a jawline that could cut glass. But it is not his latest film role that has him making headlines today. It is his new vocation: messiah of the manosphere. And British family values campaigners are not amused.
At a packed auditorium in central London last night, the actor in question delivered a two-hour sermon on the ‘crisis of masculinity’. Men, he argued, have been systematically emasculated by modernity. They need to reclaim their ‘sovereignty’. The crowd, predominantly young and male, roared its approval. Some wore ‘Red Pill’ T-shirts. Others held up phones to livestream the event to a global audience of millions.
The campaigners, a coalition of Christian groups and parenting organisations, stood outside with placards reading ‘Real men respect women’ and ‘No to toxic manfluencers’. They are worried, and with good reason. The actor’s online following has swollen to over 10 million across platforms, and his ‘man camps’ in the US have been linked to rising rates of domestic strife, according to local reports.
But what does this mean for the average British family? In living rooms from Croydon to Cumbria, parents are now grappling with a new fear: that their sons might be lured into a world of anti-feminist dogma, where vulnerability is weakness and emotional labour is for ‘betas’. One mother I spoke to, a nurse from Leeds, said her 17-year-old son had started parroting phrases about ‘hypergamy’ and ‘looksmaxxing’. ‘It’s like he’s joined a cult,’ she whispered.
The actor’s defenders say he is merely ‘telling hard truths’ about male loneliness and alienation. And it is true that traditional support structures for men have eroded. The closure of community centres, the decline of the pub as a social hub, the atomisation of modern life: these are real phenomena. But the prescription on offer, a cocktail of self-help, biomoral essentialism and casual misogyny, feels like a cure worse than the disease.
As I watched the actor leave the stage to a standing ovation, I noticed something odd. A young woman in the front row was crying. Was it tears of joy? Anger? I will never know. But her presence there, in the heart of the manosphere, suggests that this movement is not simply about men. It is about a cultural shift that leaves no one untouched. The alarm bells are ringing. The question is whether anyone is listening.
