Crushes & Books
These are the actors on whom I had a crush for years.
For some, it’s a certain role that brought them to my attention. For others, I love them in everything I’ve seen them.
When an actor intrigues me, I try to see them in as much of their work as I can. But no matter how much I like an actor, I always “use” them as inspiration as one or more of their characters. I may like the packaging, but I don’t feel comfortable using the real person. For me, the person I have a crush on is the character.
Here are some of my most enduring crushes, the movies and TV shows in which they live (because for me, they live there, even when the character gets killed), and the books in which I imagined the actor inhabiting one of my characters.
Amazingly sensual actor. He had his breakthrough role was the Christian in the best known and best loved adaptations of one of my old time favorite love stories which became a trope in its own right, Cyrano de Bergerac (there will be a whole post about my love for this trope).
- I loved Vincent Perez in many movies and I was delighted to see him in the French version of my favorite Law and Order spin-off, Criminal Intent, Paris enquêtes criminelles.
- He totally and completely stole my heart in the less than happy story of The Crow: City of Angels. Not many people love this movie and it’s a shame. Even with the infamous producers’ intervention, I love the look of the movie, I love the motivation of the main character and I love the tragic romance.
- In La reine Margot he has sex against a wall with Isabelle Adjani and has a scene with a glimpse of full frontal nudity.
- I liked potrayal of a sensitive pianist in Demain dès l’aube (Tomorrow at Dawn) . If I ever write a book called “My Piano Teacher” or “My Private French Teacher”, thiss movie will be behind it.
- Puppylove was the trigger for writing “My Best Friend’s Dad”. The movie feels nothing like my book and it definitely doesn’t end the same but I got a lot of inspiration for the first episode of Paul and Sarah’s romance from this movie.
- Un prince presque charmant in which he plays a jerk who falls in love with a much younger woman and he changes because of her.
- He was the best part of the failed TV pilot based on Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein series, Frankenstein, in which he played the monster.
- A special place in my heart has Cesare Mori – Il prefetto di ferro. I loved Vincent as the iron prefect but the main antagonist of the movie inspired me stole my heart and he will star in his own book.
Paul Sinclair
Blush-Worthy Crushes
The following is an incomplete and unordered list.
I’ll start with the Vincents to get them over with 🙂
- Vincent Perez
- Vincent D’Onofrio
- Vincent Cassel
- Russel Wong
- Peter Stebbings
- Aidan Gillen
- Colin Farrel
- Antony Starr
- JR Bourne
- Dominic Cooper
- John Schneider
- Kiefer Sutherland
- Karl Urban
- Alan Rickman
- Damien Lewis
- Laurence Fox
- Mickey Rourke
- Jeffrey Dean Morgan
- Nikolaj Coster-Waldau
- John Allen Nelson
- Paolo Ricca
- Alan Davies
- Tim Matheson
- Michael Fassbender
Blush-Worthy Crushes
When I first noticed him, I thought he had a squashed face. Now, he’s one of my favorite actors and my most inspiring crushes. He’s the only actor on this list who was behind two separate books from the Girls Playing with Fire series. One of them is currently unpublished but I will write this wrong in 2022.
- The role that brought him on my radar was, oddly or not, a movie in which he doesn’t show his face despite being the title character. Dredd is an amazing movie. He has a much younger female partner in this movie, but there’s no romance. Except in my head 🙂
- Hot shower scene and smutty (for a mainstream movie) interactions – Bent
- Hangman
- Priest
- RED
- Thor: Ragnarok
- The Bourne Supremacy
- DOOM
- Almost Human
Joe Gallagher
