In 2011, nine years ago, a discovery was made. Hollywood had overproduced white, blue-eyed leading men named Chris. The realization almost definitely began on Twitter, but I’m having trouble finding the definitive tweet. What I can find easily is a lot of people making the same joke, with many inspired variations, over the course of several years. Twitter hasn’t changed much since then, nor has the state of Hollywood leading men, really.
By 2014, taxonomies of the industry’s many Chrises began on more established publishing platforms. Allison P. Davis produced probably the best one for New York Magazine’s The Cut as a year-end piece. People made a good effort as well prior to that, as did Esquire U.K. the following year, in 2015. That was five years ago.
And all this, of course, led almost immediately to a ranking of the Chrises in Hollywood, which happens let’s say annually—probably more often than that—on Twitter. The human mind is sometimes less mysterious than we think. First you see the things, then you differentiate them, and then you place them in an order. It is as old as Linnaeus himself. So too with the Hollywoodus Chrisus.
Why does any of this matter? It doesn’t really. But here is the story as a part of the internet lived it in the past 24 hours: After days of government-sanctioned child abduction making headlines again, a summer of police brutality and protest, months of a global pandemic, and four years of the old jerk around by the literal leader of the free world, we are careening toward a presidential election. On Sunday, it was announced that a bunch of actors would do what a bunch of actors always do: make a concerted show of support for the Democratic nominee at a rally. This was not unusual. Chris Pratt, one of the four main Chrises, was noticeably missing from the Marvel event lineup, which happened on Tuesday. This was not unexpected.
Pratt has long drawn criticism for his anti-politics political stance that always reads pretty politically. Like, when, in an interview with Men’s Journal, he said that the average, “blue-collar” guy is underrepresented in the entertainment industry. He also played up the everyman, no politics is my politics thing in the same interview:
Anyway, someone made a little poll on Twitter (again) and jokes were made (yet again) and Chris Pratt lost (again! again! he always does on this one website!).
The jokes kept on keeping on until Pratt’s name was trending on the platform. After what the world has been through in the last few months, it’s probably fine for folks on Twitter to see one of the four wildly successful actors named Chris who doesn’t do politics, but does follow Ben Shapiro, The Intellectual Dark Web, and a couple city police accounts, and say, Lol, yeah, I’m good.