Amateur etymologists—or professional ones who’ve run out of fancier words to dig into—may be interested to learn that the noun himbo entered the English language 36 years ago, thanks to Rita Kempley of The Washington Post. “Their chest measurements rival Dolly Parton’s,” she wrote. “Their brains would embarrass a squid. They…do nude scenes and are wildly popular with both girls and boys. They come in two varieties—greased and armed to the teeth or moussed and undressed-to-die-for.” The former category included Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, the latter Richard Gere, Tom Selleck, and—remember, this was the ’80s—Gary Hart. In the years since, himbos have thrived and proliferated. That’s partly because, while the word bimbo is universally understood to be pejorative, men can generally find a way to take anything as a compliment.
In fairness, later waves of himbos have more going on for them than their forebears did, including endearing qualities that transformed them, despite their flaws, into one of the more likable male archetypes out there. Think about how dear to our hearts the following non-deep thinkers are: the lovable smoothy Joey from Friends, the molten stripper known as Magic Mike, even Thor from the Marvel movies with his biceps and hammer. There’s so little stigma attached to playing a dim or dim-adjacent male character that some of our most resourceful actors have recently done variations on the theme, and there are now himbos in the Oscar race.
The most gloriously unreconstituted new member of the species, of course, is Ryan Gosling’s gorgeous, bleach-blond Ken in Greta Gerwig’s sly smash Barbie. Ken must have felt the old gym-tan-laundry way of life from The Jersey Shore sounded like too much of a headache, because his job is famously just “beach.” Gosling has displayed all kinds of range as an actor in the past, but often it’s been in dramas like Drive and First Man. He plays Ken with a wink and skip in his step, and the freedom makes him very funny. The role even allowed the actor—who tends to keep the media at arm’s length—to turn the Barbie press tour into a kind of performance art. “I just decided I was going to Ken as hard as I can,” he said. “I Kenned in the morning; I Kenned at night. If I’m honest, I’m Kenning a little right now.”
When he’s not actively beaching, Ken primps and pines for Barbie’s attention. Gerwig has said that her vision for the character was inspired by Stallone, lest you think the classics have been forgotten. She wasn’t talking about Sly’s machine guns but about the other accessories that he and his characters favored. If this doesn’t ring a bell, take a moment and google the phrase Stallone in fur. “When I think of adorned men, I think he’s probably the best one,” Gerwig has said. “And I feel like Ken was nothing if not a man in search of adornment.”
There’s an entirely different himbo in Yorgos Lanthimos’s opulently oddball coming-of-age story, Poor Things. Duncan Wedderburn is a smooth lawyer played by hulking talent Mark Ruffalo. After falling for a captivating undead ingenue named Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), he whisks her away from her sheltered London home for a sexcapade across Europe. When they land on a cruise ship, another man who’s competing for her attention writes Duncan off with a sneer—“he’s a pretty moron”—but Duncan has a much higher opinion of himself.
Duncan is indeed a superficial, ego-driven lothario, and he delivers delicious lines with a pretentious, conspicuously unplaceable European accent: “You’ve just been thrice fucked by the very best. It’s probable no other man will bring you to the raptures I have.” Screenwriter Tony McNamara says he initially wrote the character as a two-dimensional caricature. “He’s a cad. Women fall in love with him, he sleeps with them, and then he goes on to someone else,” he says. But when Bella—who’s grown up without the limitations that society usually puts on a woman—makes clear that she doesn’t care all that much about Duncan, Ruffalo really brings the character to life and becomes the funniest part of this off-kilter dramedy.
The character works so well in part because even when he’s frantically trying to hold on to Bella, Duncan is never an evil entity. “He doesn’t have a malicious bone in his body,” says McNamara, adding that the secret to success was “casting this cad with probably the nicest human alive” in Ruffalo, who’s known for playing solid good guys as in Spotlight and even the Avengers movies. The result is a handsome, horny, ultimately insecure dum-dum. Duncan’s job, to put it in terms that Ken would understand, is basically just “bed.”
And Napoleon’s job? You would think it’d just be “invade.” But in Ridley Scott’s new movie, Joaquin Phoenix pulls off the most surprising himbo in recent memory. Yes, a biopic about the war genius who conquered most of Europe doesn’t seem like the most likely place to find a relatable idiot, but this Napoleon is a dopey mess when it comes to his first wife, Josephine (Vanessa Kirby). Short of stature and big of hat, Napoleon’s inability to hold it together in front of his true love makes for some unexpectedly funny moments in an otherwise traditional movie with a lot of cannons. The couple’s warm, playful chemistry turns into a lifelong loyalty, even after Napoleon has to divorce Josephine because she can’t give him an heir.
Jacob Elordi’s Saltburn character, Felix, is a more beautiful specimen, if that’s what you’re into, and the slow-burn reveal that his character is a himbo makes him fascinating to behold. Felix is a privileged, popular Oxford student who takes awkward outcast Oliver (Barry Keoghan) under his wing and invites him to his family’s lavish country estate. Writer-director Emerald Fennell cast Elordi, a breakout star in Euphoria, when she noticed that in his audition he was examining the fact that Felix was born into privilege and gorgeousness but doesn’t exactly have a lot going on under the hood. “The thing about someone like Felix is he’s incredibly sexy and glamorous and cool, but he is kind of not any of those things either,” says Fennell. “He’s lucky, and he’s sort of weak.” When some plot twists jeopardize Felix, we sympathize with him because the lovely dolt was only trying to help a down-and-out classmate—and because Elordi shows us all his vulnerability. “He’s born with an immense amount of privilege, but he’s not born with this swagger and strut—you have to kind of develop that and learn that,” Elordi says of Felix. “A lot of the time, when you meet people that have that kind of sensibility, it usually comes from a place of great insecurity or misunderstanding of their place in the world.”
On paper, none of these himbos should be likable. Regardless of where they rank on the vapidity scale, they’re often just getting in the way of the main characters. Ken allows his mojo to run amok in his dojo. Duncan becomes increasingly pathetic as he clings to Bella. Napoleon leads his army to a savage victory but turns into a bumbling, grunting weirdo whenever Josephine enters the frame. And in American Fiction, Sterling K. Brown, playing the chiseled surgeon brother to Jeffrey Wright’s novelist, shows up when it’s most convenient for him—when he wants to have a pool party in his family’s summer house, for example—and usually makes more of a mess of things. Yet because of their insecurities, we want to care for these men like we would an injured golden retriever.
Unlike their muscle-bound forebears from the ’80s, the current generation of himbo characters are rarely malicious, and—give or take a French emperor—the power never lies with them. There’s an innocence that’s endearing, especially to women dealing with toxic masculinity on a day-to-day basis in the real world. There’s no real threat with a himbo. They’re all beauty and no bite.