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2018-09-01 GQ
2018-09-01 GQ
2018-09-01 GQ
SPECIAL REPORT
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BADASS,
FEMINIST HERO,
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TOM FORD
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3 8 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 P H O T O G R A P H B Y S T E V E N P A N
C A L E B E L I J A H WEARS RAF S IM ONS
S K Y L A R P E N N WEARS GUCCI
Clay Skipper catches up with
ANTONIO BROWN (P.124) , who’s
having a blast being the NFL’s
best wide receiver. Alex
Pappademas manages to find
GUCCI MANE (P.150) in a rare
moment of peace. TOM FORD
(P.154) talks underwear with
Mark Anthony Green. Brett
Martin eats his way through
HOUSTON (P.132) , the South’s new
culinary mecca. Zach Baron
visits CARY FUKUNAGA (P.140) in
upstate New York. Tom Lamont
dissects a deadly attack on an
EX–RUSSIAN SPY (P.118) . JOHN C.
REILLY (P.158) clowns around with
Sam Schube. Are we cruising
for SPERM COUNT ZERO (P.146) ?
Daniel Noah Halpern investigates.
And Lauren Larson breaks
bread with CHRIS HEMSWORTH
(P.108) , sensible hunk.
4 2 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 P H O T O G R A P H B Y T H O M A S W H I T E S I D E
How We Feel About…
HEALING CRYSTALS Crystal-curious Skeptical Hyped
G Q
H Q Fall draws nigh,
→ ↓ ←
The Latest News from the Monthly, the Daily,
and the All-the-Time-ly World of GQ NOAH JOHNSON JAMES
SENIOR EDITOR
EDITOR “The black rope sole
PRODUCER
and suede upper
are an unexpected
combination for a on an island
typically summery
shoe. No matter
what you’re doing,
with these on your
feet, it’s beach time.”
PHOTOGRAPHS, FROM TOP: KRISTA SCHLUE TER (3); @SAINTHOA X . ILLUSTRATIONS, FROM LEF T: ALEX ANDRA COMPAIN-TIS SIER; JUSTIN ME T Z .
Meet…
MARK AN T HON Y
GREEN
As GQ’s resident style guru, Green is used to E A R D AT
fielding readers’ sartorial queries (page 62). ERH GQ
We had a few questions of our own. OV JULY 24, 2018
No context, no mercy
How many pairs of shoes do you have
in your office at this time? Let’s not talk
quantity. Let’s talk quality. I have some gems
in my o∞ce right now. “EVERYONE HAVE
How many rings is too many rings? Eleven.
Because a toe ring would be overkill.
A BEVERAGE READY
Describe an item you own that you’re
too scared to wear. A Gucci G-string
AT ALL TIMES.”
that Tom Ford designed. I don’t have any Zach Baron’s July essay about
sneakers to go with it. CASEY JABBOUR being “washed”—letting your
digital production associate (via Slack) ambition drain away in favor of
When you meet someone new, what is “getting into red wine”—spoke
your biggest style red flag? A maga hat. to people in various stages
Other than that: Come as you are! of washedness.
What’s the best outfit you wore in middle
school? I didn’t miss in middle school. Sweet Memes “I wish I’d known earlier that life
could have periods of dormancy
Probably a green Ralph Lauren blazer. Mere hours after we and activity, and that a dormant
What’s the longest you’ve waited in line released our August- stretch doesn’t mean the
for a purchase? I slept outside for a pair of issue cover, artist end.”—REBECCA ONION, SL ATE
Heineken Nike SB Dunks. The good old days! Saint Hoax shared a
“I love to wake up early, take
Describe your look at age 75. Black Gianni glorious mash-up,
walks, and tend a garden behind
Agnelli mixed with James Baldwin. replacing Travis Scott my house. I’m so washed and I
and Kylie Jenner didn’t even know it.”—SHANNON
What is the smallest thing that you’ve
spent the most money on? Probably that with…well, this. M C FARL AND, T WIT TER
Gucci G-string.
“I love yoga now. When I was
younger, I thought yoga was the
biggest waste of time. But the
REJECTED HEADLINES NO, NOT CHRIS PRATT
—MARIAN BULL
STOP—HAMMER TIME!
—C.G.
THIRSTY THORSDAY
—ASHLEE BOBB
older I get, and the sorer my
FOR OUR CHRIS muscles get, I’ve come around.”
—RYAN, CALLER ON THE ‘BRIAN
HEMSWORTH COVER STORY
WE’RE NOT HEMS-WORTHY! BIG NORDIC ENERGY CHRIS ME, YOU FOOL LEHRER SHOW’ SEGMENT
(See page 108.) —CHRIS GAYOMALI —TOM PHILIP —SAM SCHUBE “ ‘ WASHED’ AND HAPPY”
4 4 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
4 6 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
GQ
Style
The
Fall
2018
Issue
STARRING
Tyler
The
Creator
SUBSCRIBE
AT
GQSTYLE.COM
On
Newsstands
Now
MAKE AN
ENTRANCE
EVEN WHEN
LEAVING.
MORALCODE.COM
The 20-year-old
wunderkind has a new
collection with G-Star
and a whole bunch of
BARBER: KAVION GRIFFITH. GROOMING: SUSSY CAMPOS USING EPICUREN.
thoughts on why
Batman is a style icon
By SAM SCHUBE
P H O T O G R A P H S B Y J U L I A N B E R M A N
S T Y L E D B Y M A T T H E W H E N S O N S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 5 1
JADEN S M I T H H A S three style icons.
T h e S t y le There’s Tyler, the Creator, who taught
him about Supreme. There’s Batman,
F i x S t ar
whose suit Jaden wore to Kim and
Kanye’s wedding because, he explained
at the time, “I felt as though I needed to
protect everyone there and needed
to have the proper gear to do so.” And then
there’s Poseidon: “He always comes with
the next-level vibes.”
Maybe I’ve misheard him. Poseidon?
Like, the Greek god of the sea?
“Yeah,” he says. He’s smirking.
How does he dress?
“Really good,” Jaden says. “A lot of
drapes, you know what I’m saying?
Those are really next.”
Jaden soon makes it clear that he
means sculptures of Poseidon, wrapped
in marble robes, not the actual deity. And
you know what? On this count, Jaden
Smith, 20-year-old actor, musician, and
fashion plate, is not wrong. I do some
Googling, and I learn that Poseidon style
is really next.
There’s a connection here: Jaden, who
is an ambassador for Louis Vuitton and
a fan of its womenswear, has done more
than most humans to encourage guys
to wear skirts, including wearing one
to prom. But Poseidon did it first, and
Jaden has done his homework.
PREVIOUS PAGE
Coat, $1,250, by Comme
des Garçons Homme Plus.
Hoodie, $60, by MSFTS.
Jeans, $360, and T-shirt,
$120, by Jaden Smith +
G-Star RAW Forces of Nature.
5 2 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
T h e
F i x
S t y le
S t ar
This quality—and ability to say some- with sustainable denim as well. It’s just all
thing bananas and then to smile, teas- bringing back nature and animals. Trying
ingly, as you realize that it was, in fact, to make people aware of, like, Go outside.”
bizarrely, uncomfortably sage and true— Which brings us back to Batman. “He’s
might help explain how, shy of drinking just the shit,” Jaden says. “Everything
age, Jaden has become a style icon. about that suit: the cape, the utilities, the
Now he’s channeling his godly tactical equipment. It’s everything you
influence with Forces of Nature, a collabo- ever want. I just want be a superhero and
ration with G-Star. It’s all nature-themed, save lives and jump o≠ of buildings and
including jeans designed to replicate the hide in the shadows.”
patch-heavy denim Jaden cuts and sews You’re a young, famous dude, I say. It’s
in his room at home in Calabasas. It fits hard to hide in the shadows.
nicely in his sustainable-goods portfolio Jaden looks at me like I’m 5.
next to JUST, his paper-water-bottle com- “Hence the Batman suit.”
pany. “Animals are the most important
thing,” he says. “And what G-Star is doing sam schube is gq’s deputy style editor.
5 4 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
C r e a t i n g n ew h e i g h t s
The new Montblanc 1858 Geosphere.
Spirit of Mountain Exploration.
montblanc.com/1858
(SOME) REST
FOR THE WEARY
T h e Even 20-year-old multi-hyphenate
F i x superheroes get tired sometimes.
Jacket, $410, by Jaden
Smith + G-Star RAW Forces
of Nature. T-shirt, $35,
by MSFTS. Jeans (price
S t y le
upon request) by Louis
S t ar Vuitton. Belt, stylist’s
own. Necklace, his own.
5 6 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
EVENTS || PROMOTIONS || EXCLUSIVES
@GQREPORT
T h e S t y le
Where
F i x Tun e - up Do I Begin?
One Man’s
Staff writer
Clay Skipper’s
step-by-step makeover
Modest Quest
to Finally
Get Stylısh
CHAPTER 1:
The Chelsea Boot
5 8 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 P H O T O G R A P H S B Y M A T T M A R T I N
THE CHELSEA-BOOT SPECTRUM, FROM SKIPPER TO SWERVE
T h e S t y le Maybe foremost among the 7,648 reasons we love Chelsea boots? They’re perfect for your
very first foray into fashion—but also for every last step on your own style journey. Whether
F i x Tun e - up you want harness hardware or cherry red designer soles, there’s a boot for you
C L O T H E S H A V E N E V E R really been my
thing. I wore athletic shorts for basi-
cally my entire childhood, including in
pile-driving Connecticut snow, waiting
for the bus to take me to middle school.
NONE MORE BLACK
So when I started at GQ , I quickly 1 2
learned that my closet was not up to Ralph Lauren, master of all things
the rainbow. But before you grab a pair in aspirational, figured out how to turn upper-
the task. No one here dressed alike, but desert camo, try slightly out-there maroon. class velvet slippers into badass boots.
everyone dressed with purpose. The only
Common Projects $529 Ralph Lauren $795
intention behind my outfits was “Don’t
be naked.” My boss gave it six months
before I figured things out. It happens to
everyone who comes to GQ, he said.
It has been three-plus years and I’m
still waiting. That’s not to say I haven’t
tried—a pair of A.P.C. jeans here, 18 pairs
of Stan Smiths there. But I never quite
turned “owning clothes” into “having
style.” I wasn’t trying to go crazy with A BARGAIN BIT STAND TALL
oversize Visvim ponchos or ugly-cool 3 4
One side effect of the Chelsea-boot Buy for the details you can see—that extra-
Balenciaga sneakers. I just wanted to explosion? You don’t have to fork over a sleek silhouette, the cap toe—and the one
give o≠ David Beckham on a Weekend grand for that coveted strap-and-ring piece. you can’t: CL’s famous red lacquer sole.
Co≠ee Run, but I couldn’t manage to get Aldo $150 Christian Louboutin $1,195
past Ben A±eck on a Vape Break.
And then I discovered Chelsea boots.
I don’t remember where, only that once I
saw them, I couldn’t stop seeing them— camouflage (too teen hypebeast-y) and Walking to dinner one night, I felt like I’d
on red carpets, in magazines (like this grabbed a pair in tan (“sand”) suede with finally slid into the slipstream, one more
one), on seemingly every other dude a cushy crepe sole. They were elegant but figure in the nightly parade of fashion-
on the sidewalk. In a fashion universe non-threatening. I could imagine wear- able New Yorkers. Even at dinner, my
where trends moved quickly and barri- ing them without a chorus of my long- boots hidden under the table, I got an
ers to entry were high (“Baggy pants? time bros calling me Devil Wears Prada. added dose of confidence just from know-
With pleats?”), they seemed timeless, Which makes sense: The man behind the ing they were there. Also: They feel like
and democratic: Kanye looked great in boots—Mark McNairy, a veteran shoe walking on memory-foam pillows.
Chelseas, but so too did all the hot dads designer—explained that this whole style And then one night, because it was
in my neighborhood. I didn’t yet have the thing doesn’t have to be so hard. raining and my boots were suede, I took a
vocabulary to describe what I was look- “You can put on a pair of Levi’s and a cab four blocks home. Had that moment
ing at, but I knew they were sleek and white T-shirt with a cool pair of shoes, of reckoning my old boss promised finally,
sexy, not clunky like all the other boots and that’s all you need to make your belatedly, come to pass? Was I someone
I’d owned. (Plus they slipped on!) statement,” he told me. And what did who cared about getting dressed?
Best of all? These boots—from New these particular boots say? “You’re timely. Yes and no. I still don’t know much
Republic—were only $99 and came But you’re not an idiot who spends his about fashion or What to Wear, but I
in lots of di≠erent styles. I passed on money on unnecessary things.” don’t roll my eyes at the idea that caring
brown leather (trying too hard) and I was okay with putting that message about clothes might actually breed confi-
into the world. But even though these dence. When I asked McNairy what he’d
boots weren’t that out-there, their styl- say to the guy—me—who was skeptical
ishness quiet and personal, I was still whether style really mattered, he drove
nervous. So I wore them to dinner with it home: “You can not give a shit about
a low-stakes audience to try something clothes and still look super-fucking cool.”
new on: my family. No one noticed, and I But how? I’ll spend the next few
realized I could wear them without feel- months here, trying to figure that out—
ing like a complete poseur. how you go about finding the denim
So I kept wearing them. I wore them jacket you want to own for life, or how to
with the few “fashiony” items I owned— wear a necklace, or what a damn “grail”
those A.P.C. jeans; a dressed-down gray is. At the end, my style might not scream
suit with a black T-shirt—hoping they David Beckham Jr., but I’m hoping it’ll
would elevate my style. People at work be somewhere beyond “grew up wearing
started to notice. It was a small addition athletic shorts in the snow.” Low bar, sure.
with an outsize consequence, like a spritz But it’s a start.
of cologne providing an extra layer of
presence as I moved through the world. clay skipper is a gq sta≠ writer.
6 0 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
a great brand. We’re too focused on pieces and not
Style editor
T h e A sk Mark Anthony Green
collections. Just because you like a jacket you saw on
has your answer Ryan Gosling doesn’t mean the whole line is strong.
F i x M. A .G .
at @AskMag The way I grade a brand is by something I call the
pass-to-grab ratio. If out of every ten items I would only
grab two, then that brand isn’t really my thing—even
if two of those items are the “must-have,” celebrity-
craze items of the season. It’s like our grandparents
complaining when pop stars pad out their albums
You Just Haven’t with filler songs. (Looking at you, Beebz.) And the
brand that has the highest ratio (I’ll put it at eight out
Found Your of ten) is the French go-to Sandro. It doesn’t just make
hit singles. Each collection is a balanced four-disc rock
6 2 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 I L L U S T R A T I O N B Y K I M J U N G Y O U N
T h e
C o ok ing
F i x 2
2. TOMATO VINEGAR
Never buy pre-made dressing!
Mix up your own. “I’m in love with
Mutti tomato vinegar,” says Ashley 1
Christensen of Poole’s Diner in
Raleigh, North Carolina. “It’s a great 3
base for a vinaigrette—especially
for dressing fresh tomatoes.”
3. MOUTARDE DE BOURGOGNE
Opt for real-deal French mustard
for your next sandwich, says Jess
Koslow of L.A.’s Sqirl: “Once I read
that true Dijon mustard is made
with verjuice—the juice of pressed
unripe grapes—I picked up a jar
of this and quickly realized what
I had been missing.”
5. MOLE SAUCE
Make your own special sauce with
a jar of mole. “I usually fry it up
with some onions to make quick
sauces,” says Fabian von Hauske,
chef at New York City’s Contra
and Wildair, “or to marinate meats.” 6
6. CHILI CRISP
Use this Chinese staple as a
crispy, spicy jack-of-all-trades.
“Whether you’re stirring it into
a vegetable stir-fry or bleeding
it into your instant ramen,”
says Trigg Brown of Win Son in
Brooklyn, “it really transforms
the final product. It’s also money
on scrambled eggs.”
5 7
6 4 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 P H O T O G R A P H B Y M A T T M A R T I N
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In terior s
This retrofitted
Malibu trailer isn’t
the only residence
of Greg Chait,
founder of The
Elder Statesman.
But it is the only
place he calls home
B y NOAH J OHNS ON
The
↑
This custom
Coolest Way
reading nook
Voltrons into a
queen-size bed
for guests. to Live Small
6 8 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 P H O T O G R A P H S B Y D U S T I N A K S L A N D
toyota.com/camry
“ TO DAY, W H AT W E E X P E C T
F R O M A H O U S E I S A LOT
M O R E , I N T E R M S O F L U X U R Y.
W I T H A N O P E N K I TC H E N ,
L I K E T H E O N E AT T H E
T H AT M U C H M O R E I M P O R TA N T
A N D H A S TO B E T H AT M U C H
MORE BEAUTIFUL.”
DA R R E N B R O W N
Designer
T h e
In terior s
F i x
1 3
1. The fridge
is period-
accurate but
was chosen
for the color.
2. Beach-life
knickknacks.
3. Chait keeps
his ’64 Impala
parked a
hundred yards
from his
bungalow.
4. Stacked
petrified-wood
slabs make for 4
an improvised
bedside table.
7 2 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
©2018 Timex Group USA, Inc. TIMEX, INDIGLO and SUPERNOVA are trademarks of Timex Group B.V. and its subsidiaries.
Cut from metal. Shaped by light. From the laser-cut INDIGLO® backlight dial to the
complementing perforated leather strap, the appeal of this watch is all in the details.
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T h e
In terior s
F i x
5. The wood Chait started The Elder Statesman in not exactly an undiscovered beachside
paneling 2007 with a line of cashmere blankets. utopia, but Dorothy can roam freely and
and built-in
closet in the
Today he has a factory in Culver City and he can beat the crowd to the best surf
bedroom are around 50 employees who design and breaks in the morning. “Small spaces
both original. knit everything from vibrantly colored create close relationships,” he says.
6. Paradise socks and ponchos and hoodies to trippy They also force a certain aesthetically
Cove residents
get to the
stu≠ed animals and sculptural furniture. pleasing kind of minimalism. One lamp
beach and The outpost in West Hollywood acts as a or vase too many in a place this small
restaurant via retail shrine for cashmere lovers. and you step onto the precarious path
golf cart. When Chait bought the place, four toward hoarderdom.
years ago, he wanted a safe haven for “I’m super fucking happy,” Chait says.
himself and his 8-year-old daughter, “I don’t even know what I want—I have
Dorothy. “Everybody around here just what I want.” A few hundred square feet,
THE HOME OF FLY KNITS looks out for each other,” he says. (One a golf cart, and a dozen or so surfboards,
At The Elder Statesman’s West Hollywood neighbor, an ophthalmologist, will it seems, is plenty.
outpost, clients can buy high-grade cashmere off soon perform eye surgery on Chait so
the rack or dream up no-limits custom creations
for their closet or home.
he can see where he’s going when he noah johnson is a gq senior style
surfs—“I’m totally blind out there!”) It’s editor.
7 4 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
T h e
F i x
BDE
P H O T O G R A P H S B Y K A T I E M C C U R D Y
S T Y L E D B Y J O N T I E T Z S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 7 9
T h e
BDE
F i x
8 0 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
1 2
T h e
BDE
F i x
3 4
1. Necklace, his own. 2. Coat, $2,900, by Salvatore Ferragamo. Jersey, $165, by Rapha. Pants, $258, by Palace Skateboards. Sneakers,
from left, $190 (for pair) and $170 (for pair), both by Nike at KITH. 3. Vest, $360, by Polo Ralph Lauren. Turtleneck, $170,
by Jil Sander. Sweatpants, $140, by Wu Wear at Barneys New York. Sneakers, $190, by Nike at KITH. 4. Cardigan, $795, by Simon Miller.
Sweater, $300, by Acne Studios. Watch, $315, by Seiko.
8 2 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
less paparazzi-heavy Syracuse, New As with all GQ fashion shoots, we started this one
York. But he won’t exactly evade tabloid with a plan: a half-dozen looks, styled out on a
T h e rack, that we wanted Pete Davidson to try on and,
BDE speculation. There are rumors that he
F i x hopefully, wear. But Davidson dresses with the
and Grande will get married very soon, swagger of a Staten Island dice roller. He’s not the
on August 4, to honor his dad’s badge kind of guy who lays his outfits out the night before.
So we ditched the rack and embarked on a sartorial
number, 8418. (He recently posted Choose Your Own Adventure with the SNL comic
a photo of her wearing the badge on that took us to all corners of a modern man’s
Instagram, but it’s since been deleted.) wardrobe—even the corner where he keeps his bright
pink cycling jersey. Next time you don’t know what to
no forks—you know what I mean?” he Davidson says that they haven’t really wear, borrow a few of these moves and a fraction of
says, taking a massive bite of pasta salad. started wedding planning, but “it’s defi- Davidson’s boundless confidence and you’ll be all set.
“We’re learning how to be adults. We’re nitely going to happen, for sure.” Coat, $1,990, by Burberry. Tank top,
having a really fun time.” As if on cue, Grande appears at the $40 (for pack of three), by Calvin Klein
The only impediment to their domes- studio to pick him up. Looking like a Underwear. Pants, $1,295, by Giorgio
Armani. Sneakers, $450, by Adidas by
tic bliss is the level to which the tabloids fairy-tale woodland creature, with two Raf Simons at KITH. Hat, $100, Wu Wear
have focused on it. It used to be that pigtail buns on top of her head and cat- at Barneys New York. Sunglasses, $665,
Davidson could keep up with what was eye makeup, she skips around in a cloud by Mr. Leight. Necklace, his own.
written about him. “I gotta tell you, up of sweet perfume, offering hugs to every-
until about two months ago, if some- one on set. Then she greets Davidson by
one wrote about me, I saw it,” he says. burying her head inside his Balenciaga
“Nobody gave a shit two months ago, so T-shirt. “The universe works in weird
anytime there was an article, I would ways,” he says. “All I know is that I’m the
obviously see it, because my mom would luckiest guy in the world.” He wears the
send it to me and be like, ‘Yaaay!’ ” purple pants right out of the studio.
Soon, Davidson will get to escape the
city altogether: He’s filming a new movie, allie jones is a writer based in
Big Time Adolescence, in the decidedly Brooklyn. This is her first story for GQ.
8 4 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
©2018 IMPORTED BY BIRRA PERONI INTERNAZIONALE, WASHINGTON, DC
T h e
F i x
Kitch en
Cultur e
PHOTOGRAPH: ALESSANDRO SALVADOR /EYEEM/GE T T Y IMAGES. PHOTO ILLUSTRATION FOR EDITORIAL PURPOSES.
8 6 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
S I G N AT U R E S TA C Y A D A M S C L O T H I N G
C A R G O / / I N D I G O / / TA N
S TA C YA D A M S . C O M
The GQ Best Stuff Box is a quarterly subscription box
featuring our favorite gadgets, grooming products,
style accessories, and beyond—all rigorously tested and
endorsed by the magazine’s editors.
LEARN MORE AT
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T h e
F i x
1 2 3
Kitchen
Culture
4 5 6
HAIR: FRANCIS CATANESE FOR R+CO HAIRCARE. MAKEUP: SARAH APPLEBY USING NARS COSME TICS.
CAST OF CHARACTERS
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
AMANDA COHEN JEN AGG GERARDO GONZALEZ MICHAEL SOLOMONOV PREETI MISTRY TOM COLICCHIO
CHEF-OWNER RESTAURATEUR CHEF CHEF-RESTAURATEUR CHEF CHEF-RESTAURATEUR
Known for: Dirt Candy, Known for: Three bars— Known for: The casual, Known for: Modern Israeli Known for: Semi-casual Known for: Co-founding
a gratuity-free fine- Grey Gardens, Rhum Corner, cool, smart California- at his Philly flagship, Zahav. California-Indian cuisine New York’s iconic Gramercy
dining restaurant serving and Cocktail Bar—and a Latino food at Lalito in Also Federal Donuts in served in Oakland at Navi Tavern and his flagship
vegetarian food in nose-to-tail restaurant, The Manhattan’s Chinatown. Philly and Dizengoff in Kitchen and Juhu Beach restaurant, Craft; judging on
downtown Manhattan. Black Hoof, all in Toronto. N.Y.C.’s Chelsea Market. Club, both now closed. Top Chef.
WE’VE LONG KNOWN that restaurants can be intense, some- West Village landmark, The Spotted Pig. New Orleans celeb-
times hostile places to work—screaming chefs, creepy rity chef John Besh stepped down from his restaurants amid
diners, personal and professional boundaries blurred by long reports of the sexual harassment that allegedly ran rampant
hours and alcohol. But in the past year, it’s become clear: in his company. The list continues to grow.
The need for change, in the way the restaurant industry treats Here at GQ, we love restaurants and desperately want them
its employees and prosecutes abusers, is dire. to be better to the people who make them such a joy to dine
As the #MeToo movement gathered steam, restaurants had in. So we put six chefs in a room—a mix of old guard and new
their own reckoning. We learned about Mario Batali’s his- guard, restaurateurs with empires and chefs who are still in
tory of groping female employees; Ken Friedman, the mega- the kitchen every night—and got them talking about the state
successful New York restaurateur, had a similar M.O. plus of America’s restaurants and the work that needs to be done
a third floor reportedly nicknamed “the rape room” in his to fix them.
8 8 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 P H O T O G R A P H S B Y E R I C T . W H I T E
T h e Ki t c h en
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T h e
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This Fight Is Bigger
Than Texas
Politic s
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AU TO
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T h e
Politic s
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8 kids a day are accidentally killed
or injured by FAMILY FIRE.
FAMILY FIRE is a shooting involving an
improperly stored gun, often found in the home.
ENDFAMILYFIRE.org
T h e
Politic s
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awash in partisan shenanigans that the same age—45 and 47, respectively—
required urgent attention: “I’m trying to O’Rourke looks and talks like a much
do everything I can” to expose the lies of newer model. The fervor that greets him
“[former FBI director] James Comey and verges on the messianic. (A state repre-
[former FBI deputy director] Andrew sentative speaking at the event invoked
McCabe.” The answer, Cruz said, was Nelson Mandela.) He feels like a candi-
“to get rid of partisan players who are date tailored for the moment.
abusing their position and to restore the His campaign’s product—what Beto
rule of law.” In other words, more purges. o≠ers—is an opportunity for dispirited
He’d help lead the way. Democrats to take part in something
For all the talk of image soften- hopeful. But as Election Day has drawn
ing, here was Cruz being Cruz. And if closer, the tone has slowly shifted. It’s
there’s one thing that unites those who gotten more urgent and a bit darker. Our
aren’t fond of him—whether on the right country is in peril, he tells the crowd in
or on the left—it’s the feeling that he’s Hutchins, and if there isn’t a change in
playing a character, that he’s an insin- 2018, things could get worse: The “slip
cere opportunist. that we took in 2016, if unchecked in 2018,
O’Rourke’s message su≠ers no such could become a slide,” he says, and “we
authenticity trouble. His approach, could lose the things that have made us
while sometimes light on specifics, who we are for 242 years and counting.”
half-Cuban Ted Cruz—born Rafael wears, it seems both genuine and inau- analogy—for one thing, it misstates
Edward—took an Anglo nickname thentic at the same time, a part of his the demographic coalition O’Rourke
as a kid, while his opponent, Robert persona more than a part of his person. wants to assemble across an economic
O’Rourke, of Irish extraction, took a In Kountze, while he slouched in the spectrum—but it fits with the blunt-
Spanish one. When O’Rourke was grow- passenger seat, Cruz again bemoans the force logic of Cruz’s political project.
ing up in El Paso, immersing himself in somber turn of contemporary politics. Though Cruz’s team would love to start
the local punk scene, Cruz was touring “Now no one can take a joke, no one can repairing his weak favorability num-
with the Constitutional Corroborators, laugh,” he says. People want to take part bers across the state, they know that the
a youth group that discussed the text of in something “joyful.” surer bet is to energize the conservative
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 1 0 5
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base. Cruz may be a one-trick politi- aren’t going anywhere. Chief among help from the party, and nobody in years
cian, but in Texas, for the foreseeable them: Can Texas “turn blue”? has been able to jump-start it. The hope
future, that’s still the most useful trick The debate over whether the state among many Texas Democrats is simply
a Republican can employ. can swing Democratic often revolves that O’Rourke closes the gap and loses by
For all the attention O’Rourke’s cam- around immigration figures and the less than ten points, which many would
paign has gotten, the most impactful state’s changing demographics, since, take as an encouraging result, something
question for Americans might be the traditionally, Hispanics tend to vote to build on. It would spur other prom-
one least asked in the race. Assuming Democratic. But there’s more to the inent candidates to jump into more
Cruz wins re-election, what does his story. Hispanic voters in Texas are some races. It might even help O’Rourke lay
political future look like? Few observ- of the most conservative in the country, the foundations for a future run.
ers expect him to limit himself to the and the Republican Party needs only a Of course, this is the sort of pragma-
Senate forever. Cruz has been a loyal sizable minority of them to stay in power, tism that a candidate doesn’t express in
soldier for Trump since the 2016 elec- provided the GOP continues to dominate the middle of a race. And O’Rourke, for
tion, but he became one after some the share of the white vote. his part, seems completely unfazed by
pointed out that not doing so could cost The conversation among Texas the pessimism that hangs over the party.
him his re-election. What will he do Democrats focuses now on the extraor- “I will very often get disappointed at
once he’s secured it? dinarily shabby party infrastructure. In myself or disappointed with our team if
No doubt he envisions another run much of the state, the party barely exists I feel like we didn’t reach what we were
for the presidency—this is a guy who and organization remains surprisingly supposed to reach or achieve,” he tells
dreamed about high o∞ce as a kid; a wobbly. O’Rourke’s simple though me in Farmers Branch. “What I never do
political animal who, as a child, sent
cash to Jesse Helms. He seems initially
reluctant to dwell on 2016. I ask him
about Trump’s penchant for starting
meetings with Cruz by rehashing the
fractious GOP-nomination battle—a war, At every event, O’Rourke says,
you’ll recall, in which Trump e≠ectively
called Cruz’s wife ugly and implicated his he thinks: “Holy shit, there are so
beloved father in the Kennedy assassina-
tion. Is it true that he loves to chat about
many amazing people.”
the race, I ask Cruz in his pickup truck.
“Yeah,” he says, gazing straight ahead at
the parking lot. It is his tersest answer.
But then he, like Trump does, returns
to the campaign. “We went head-to- important decision to tour the state— is leave [a rally] like this with anything
head, and I beat him in a significant visiting all 254 counties—has already other than the feeling that, ‘Holy shit,
number of states,” he says. “In virtually done a lot to spread the seeds of the party there are so many amazing people.’ ”
every state in the primary, either Trump in distant corners. In the line to meet O’Rourke that day
was one and I was two, or I was one and O’Rourke entered the race with is a woman who had lost part of her foot
he was two.” He emphasizes that he had significant shortcomings, name recog- to diabetes. “She wheeled over to [me],”
run especially strong in the Republican nition chief among them, and is being O’Rourke recalls, “and she said, ‘I have
youth vote—college campuses, he asked to overcome all of his own prob- no reason to feel this way, but I am so
reminds me, had been split between his lems and then the party’s, too. That’s hopeful right now.’ You meet that person
and Sanders’s campaign. a tall ask, to say nothing of the fact and you’re like, ‘How can I not also be
Cruz had to dismantle his presidential that the electorate in midterm-election hopeful and make sure that we deliver
machine after Trump won, but he still years skews whiter, more conservative, on the hope that we’re all raising among
very clearly hopes to contest the par- older, and more a±uent than the elec- each other?’ ” He would keep pushing.
ty’s future. And in case things go south torate in presidential-election years. “I’m very lucky to be a part of that.”
for the president, Cruz is one of just a Those are just a few of the reasons He seemed to mean it—O’Rourke is a
few Republicans with the credibility to why local observers are less optimis- man without guile. Back into the minivan
attack Trump from the right. tic about O’Rourke’s chances than his he went, o≠ to the next event. He is not a
national supporters are. guy who agonizes over the construction
ALREADY O’ROURKE HAS surpassed the There’s a chicken-and-egg problem and deconstruction of narratives and
low expectations that Texas Democrats here, though, that O’Rourke can help calculates subdivisions of the electorate.
had for him when he first took aim at them solve. The party needs a “good loss” History most often belongs to the ana-
Cruz. Whatever the result in November, in order to really start building its infra- lysts, but from time to time what’s needed
this is the first statewide campaign in structure—that is, in order to start luring is a person to step up and do the thing.
some two decades that the party can feel good candidates and donors and volun- Maybe—just maybe—he will.
genuinely good about, and that’s a win teers who see winning as feasible. But
of its own. Even if he loses, the questions even earning that first “good loss” takes christopher hooks is a writer based
that O’Rourke has raised in this race some organizational and operational in Austin. This is his first story for gq.
1 0 6 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
HOW, IN
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Hemsworth called his wife, the actress Elsa Pataky.
Like her daughter, Pataky missed the race. She had been
shooting that day, but she heard all about the Running
of the Dads—repeatedly. “I’ve never seen him so excited,
not even about getting a big job,” Pataky says with a
laugh. “It was probably one of the best things that has
happened to him in his life, which is funny, right? All
the things he has achieved.”
The next day, Hemsworth had to hop a plane and fly
to London to shoot his next film. He’d been home in
Byron Bay, Australia, for a few months, and his daugh-
ter was distraught that he was leaving. “She’s normally
like, ‘Yeah, see you, Daddy. Cool.’ She was like, ‘Papa!
←←
Papa! Papa!’ She doesn’t always call me Papa, either.”
OPENING PAGES Hemsworth found the shirt he had been wearing the
sweater $1,150 day before, with the first-place sticker still stuck on it,
Gucci and o≠ered it to her. “I wasn’t, like, sobbing, but…” But
eyeglasses $280 it shattered him.
Moscot
An actor treasuring his family isn’t especially unusual.
watch
(throughout)
But a globally famous star who is as earnest about those
$8,700 feelings in public as he is in private, well, that’s not the
TAG Heuer sort of action star that Hollywood has traditionally pro-
ring duced. Hemsworth’s openness and warmth when he talks
(throughout),
his own about his family is not lost on fans—particularly female
fans, who don’t often hear famous men speaking candidly
→
THE PRIVATE LIVES of action stars tend to disappoint, about the di∞culties of juggling a demanding career with
THIS PAGE
action-wise. The superhero costume is replaced by swim child-rearing. “Obviously women are asked all the time,
coat $1,495
trunks and flip-flops. The mighty hammer is abandoned Boss ‘How do you balance it?’ Men are never asked that,” Tessa
for the beer. But when the stakes get truly high, Chris sweater $698 Thompson, his co-star in the most recent Thor movie,
Hemsworth can unleash the Thor within. Michael Kors Thor: Ragnarok, and in the forthcoming Men in Black
Such was the scenario on field day recently at his pants $1,520 film, tells me. Hemsworth’s frankness about his fatherly
daughter’s school, as Hemsworth and a slew of other Tom Ford priorities is endearing, she says, because it’s e≠ortless.
fathers prepared for the “dads race.” They assembled like “It’s so lovable, because it’s really honest.”
young maidens ready to catch the bouquet at a wedding— Back when Hemsworth was first starting out in
all feigning disinterest, all ready to kill for victory. Hollywood, it was better to be a rebel than a dad. He had
The other dads had dressed to move, but Hemsworth appeared for a few years in the Australian soap opera Home
was wearing jeans and boots. There was a big crowd. and Away—the launchpad that also produced Naomi Watts
Hours before, having watched his daughter’s events—the and Heath Ledger—and arrived in America in 2007, during
egg-and-spoon race, the 100-meter and the 200-meter what might be described as a golden age of the Hollywood
dash—he o≠ered his 6-year-old some fatherly wisdom: bad boy. It was an era when a sex tape or a drug problem
“I was like, ‘It’s great, honey. It’s not about winning.’ ” was easily excused with a wink, or even rewarded. Back
But that advice was trash, he realized. Life is about then, the path to stardom seemed clear enough.
winning, and he must. For his daughter’s sake. At the
line, Hemsworth’s heart was pounding. He got a bad
start, pulled it together—his Thor muscles snapping to
attention. The finish drew nearer until, suddenly, he
was the champion.
“There was just this wave of nirvana,” Hemsworth
recalls. “I turn around, and I go, ‘Where’s my daughter?
Where is she?’ And she’s like, ‘Dad, did you win?’ And
I’m like, ‘Did I win? You didn’t see it?!’ They gave me a
sticker. A first-place sticker.” jeans and boots, hoodies and
big ol’ aviators. He’s an expert
practitioner of low-key, fuck-off-
paparazzi celebrity style. So we
Luckily for mega-famous dudes swapped out his understated off-
like Chris Hemsworth, there’s duty kit with sumptuous sweaters,
a subtle side to our favorite fall elegant tees, and oversize
designer gear. While Thor spends outerwear. It’s a clean, sharp
most of his time at Byron Bay look that’ll work for you, too—but
in board shorts, he’s gotta put unless you’ve got the physique
About These on clothes like the rest of us on of a sledgehammer-wielding Norse
occasion, and when he does god, we recommend wearing a
Clothes he opts for covert over cool—slim shirt underneath your camel coat.
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 1 1 1
1 1 2 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
“I remember trying to be Colin Farrell. Thinking,
‘People love the bad boy.’ Going out and being sort of
reckless. But no one cared,” Hemsworth recalls. “There
wasn’t the presence of paparazzi, nor the presence of
social media, nor the immediacy of all these platforms.”
He’s quick to clarify that he wasn’t doing anything bad
bad in his salad days—“just, like, being drunk.”
Mild as they were, those days were fleeting. Hemsworth
and Pataky met in Los Angeles in 2010. “He was a very
mature person for his age,” recalls Pataky. “I could totally
feel that he loved kids. And it’s something that just melts
you, as a woman.” They married fairly quickly. It was a
potentially radical move at the time: There was a sense
then that a rising star should be single, a line of thinking
that may have doomed Leonardo DiCaprio to a lifetime
trapped in a Pussy Posse vortex. Once, a publicist—not
his—advised Hemsworth not to let people know too much
about his personal life. “ ‘The more they know about you,
the harder it is for people to believe your character,’ ”
he remembers the publicist telling him. “They want to
believe the fantasy that that could be them on the screen
in that situation, doing whatever.”
Then, as now, Hemsworth looked like the archetypal
leading man—he had the blue eyes, the eternal tan, the
smirk, and muscles nobody had ever seen before. And he
got the archetypal leading-man roles. His breakthrough
big-screen job was his 2011 turn as a hammer-wielding
Norse god: the self-serious,
unflappably macho Thor. From
← which followed a string of simi-
shirt $1,695 larly one-dimensional roles. His
turtleneck
$1,095 trajectory seemed ordained.
Ralph Lauren But to those who knew him
pants $1,000 well, this all seemed a little
Dior Men odd. “It was quite jarring for
belt $248 my family and friends when I
John Varvatos
was on-screen doing a straight,
heroic, sort of overly masculine
kind of thing,” Hemsworth says.
More recently, filmgoers have finally gotten to see
what he is. Having done his time in hunk purgatory,
Hemsworth has lately re-emerged as an actor eager to
skewer the old stereotypes. He tested those waters as a
bimbo secretary in 2016’s female-led Ghostbusters. And
last year, in the third installment of the Thor franchise,
he played a re-invented version of his old macho char-
acter—a hero suddenly less sure of himself, gleefully
emasculated at the hands of co-star Tessa Thompson.
Hemsworth and director Taika Waititi wanted to create a
Thor who could show more vulnerability—they had more
Kurt Russell in mind than Clint Eastwood. “Not to say that
Kurt Russell has ever been ‘less masculine’ than contem-
porary heroes,” Waititi explains. “[His characters were]
just more flawed than contemporary heroes.”
This fall Hemsworth stars in the artsy crime thriller
Bad Times at the El Royale—a film that excited him for
the same reasons the last Thor movie did: It didn’t feel
safe or entirely conventional. As thrillers go, Bad Times
is quite fun, like a demented Clue board. “It’s got a kind
of Tarantino energy to it,” Hemsworth says. “It’s a thriller
and a drama, but there’s some humorous moments—in
an insane way. I just want to be surprised. I have a real
fear of being bored.”
It’s convenient for Hemsworth that audiences have
grown bored of flawless, archetypal masculinity at the
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 1 1 3
same time he has. And lucky for him, he’s had more incline, a punishing slant that goes up and up over the
to o≠er, anyway. Filmgoers now want characters who next ten minutes. For his current role in Men in Black, he
feel human and fallible on-screen. They want to con- doesn’t need to be Thor-fit, just normal Hemsworth-fit,
nect with what’s real and relatable o≠screen, too. a specification that’s still very daunting. Nearby, the
The golden age of the bad boy, you might say, has given weights look on nervously. The room fills with manly
way to something else—a new epoch of the hot dad, a grunting. The women, on the ellipticals now, glance over
species of cultural figure that Hemsworth embodies every so often, more annoyed than anything else.
genuinely and e≠ortlessly. Hemsworth barely slept the night before. He tells me
this while incongruously punching the air a few times,
then whipping around to walk backward. Soon he’s on
↓
NO MATTER HOW ENLIGHTENED your attitude toward to bear crawls—pawing across the floor and looking, in
jacket $2,495
leading man–dom, Hollywood is Hollywood: It helps still Emporio Armani this tiny space, even more massive than usual. He can
to look the part of the stereotypical star. And contrary to sweater $1,350
traverse the entire room in two bear crawls and one frog
my assumptions about Hemsworth and about those hail- Saint Laurent jump, and he’s surprisingly light-footed. “You have to
ing from Australia—where, move like a kid moves!” he
it seems, everyone looks says instructively.
like they just crawled out of For Hemsworth, a 30-min-
an Abercrombie catalog—it ute circuit in his hotel is not
takes a lot of hard work to ideal. He’d rather be on a
look like Chris Hemsworth. surfboard. He favors fitness
Today that hard work for function versus for aes-
must take place in a hotel thetics. “That’s the way
gym in London’s Southwark we grew up,” he explains.
neighborhood. Though this Recently, Hemsworth’s
one can barely call itself brother Liam Instagrammed
a gym. It’s a single room, a photo of their parents,
small and poorly appointed. Leonie and Craig. His father,
The only other people here Craig, shirtless in the photo,
are a pair of women doing became an instant Internet
gentle cardio by the win- sensation. He is the patron
dows. And then Hemsworth saint of hot dads. There is
and his trainer arrive, dis- no evidence that Craig is
turbing any peace that a not Chris, aged 10 years—
claustrophobic little hotel 15, max—with some light
gym can contain. makeup. But his dad’s phy-
Hemsworth has brought sique, Hemsworth tells me,
to London a mini entourage is naturally Aussie-built,
of friends turned employ- not gym-groomed. “He’s
ees—vital links, it seems, to always been really ath-
home. There’s his trainer, letic, but I don’t think he’s
Luke Zocchi, who projects ever lifted weights in his
overwhelming goodwill even life. It’s a functional sort of
when he’s screaming about strength,” Hemsworth says.
squats. And there’s Aaron “We had maybe a few acres
Grist, Hemsworth’s assistant. of property, and we lived in
Zocchi used to be an electri- a national forest, and he was
cian, and Grist once worked always trimming trees and
as a glazier, but now they roll cutting paths in case there
with Hemsworth full-time. was a bushfire.”
Zocchi and Grist seem to Hemsworth and his broth-
tether him to his proto-self. ers, Luke and Liam, grew up
They do this by merrily mock- between Melbourne and an
ing him. When Hemsworth wonders aloud who is staying Aboriginal community in the bush. Craig worked as a social
in the hotel’s penthouse, Zocchi quickly jumps in: “Guess worker, Leonie as an English teacher. Hemsworth started
you aren’t as famous as you thought, heh?” acting after high school, in 2002, and scored a role on
They’ve all known one another since they were “this Home and Away two years later. In his mind, he had grad-
big,” and when they walk together—a sun-kissed, chiseled uated from one idyllic life to another. “I look back at that
trio—they look like a boy band without the angst. Even if time, and I go, ‘Man, you were 19 years old, you were living
Hemsworth weren’t extremely famous, they would stand on the northern beaches of Sydney,’ ” Hemsworth recalls.
out among Londoners, who see the sun three times a year → “I was getting paid 3,000 bucks a week, which was a lot
and default to an expression of tight-lipped despair. coat $2,705 of money where I’d come from. I was surfing in the mid-
Dries Van Noten
When he talks to non-Australians, Hemsworth reins in dle of the day on set if I had a break, I was experiencing
swim shorts $305
his accent, but when he and Zocchi get going, it’s in a loud Stella McCartney fame, I was a young single guy.” He wonders now why he
patois of “innits” and “mates.” Zocchi starts him o≠ on the socks $29
spent that time panicking about his career. “Why didn’t
treadmill, where Hemsworth begins at an eye-widening Pantherella you enjoy that? We can wish years by saying, ‘Ah, when I
1 1 4 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
get here it’ll be okay. When I get here it’ll be okay.’ We just Hemsworth grunting and straining and putting in way
keep moving that bar until we get to that place.” more e≠ort than they had mustered. Working out in the
Hemsworth saw life as a series of ladder rungs leading same room as Thor for too long is bad for morale.
to stardom, and he couldn’t stop climbing. Even if the
climb felt stressful. Hemsworth still remembers an early
television appearance on an episode of The Saddle Club, FOR A MAN OF Thor-like proportions—he’s six feet four—
a Canadian-Australian co-production, in 2003: “I came Hemsworth can contort himself into some pretty
in as the young vet, and I remember I was so nervous. childlike positions. Even in a fancy restaurant. ←
And you can see, if you look it up on the Internet, my Slumped across the table from me, he’s currently got necklace, his own
voice is so high, so tight. I’m, like, pink, red, flushed face, his right leg folded up almost to his chest, knee level
↓
having a proper panic attack on-screen.” Hemsworth was with his chin, his giant desert boot planted firmly tank top $40
certain that the flop had doomed his career, what with on the leather seat. At one point, the server, intent on (for pack
of three)
the huge reach of the show and all. “I remember being placing a napkin in Hemsworth’s lap, can discern no obvi- Calvin Klein
close to tears, talking to my mum about it and being like, ous lap. Flummoxed, he drapes the linen on the closest Underwear
‘The show gets shown in Canada, so they’re gonna see it, thigh and hurries o≠. (continued on page 165) necklace, his own
and Canada is close to America, so
Hollywood is gonna see it, and I’m
never gonna work again.’ That was
my second job—no one gives a shit.”
That newfound recognition—
that mistakes aren’t always fatal
and first impressions aren’t always
final—was useful as Hemsworth
helped push the Thor trilogy for-
ward in Thor: Ragnarok. “The first
one is good, the second one is meh,”
Hemsworth says. “What masculin-
ity was, the classic archetype—it just
all starts to feel very familiar. I was
so aware that we were right on the
edge.” Where in the first two films he
played his hero character straight,
in the third iteration he injected
more humanity and created a char-
acter truer to his own spirit.
Confident though he may have
become on set, Hemsworth is, right
now, very apprehensive in the hotel
gym. See, he needs a mat. The women
have a mat, but he really doesn’t
want to go over and ask them where
they found it. For a hard-to-mistake
movie star, he’s a master at politely
managing civilian attention, but it
goes against his better judgment to
seek it out. So he stalks the gym, look-
ing for a secret mat stash. He tugs on
a mirror that looks like it might be
a cabinet. Nothing. He resigns him-
self and approaches the women, now
splayed out on the floor.
As Hemsworth appears above
them, they freeze. One of the women,
on her back on the mat, chooses to
play dead. She stares up as he asks
about the mat situation, and she
does not move until her friend
reports that there are no more mats.
Hemsworth mutters a defeated “ah”
and quickly marches away to dis-
courage further discussion.
The women linger for a few
minutes more and then abandon
their mat and quit the room—but
not before one last long look at
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 1 1 7
1 1 8 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
THE INSIDE STORY
OF HOW THE POISONING
OF A RUSSIAN DOUBLE
AGENT BECAME THE
LATEST—AND MOST
TERRIFYING—FRONT
IN VLADIMIR PUTIN’S
WAR WITH THE WEST
TOM LAMONT
1:
and out of consciousness, slumped over and According to a report released by the
gesturing strangely. Passersby assumed they Russian embassy, foreign secretary Boris
were high. At a quarter to four, the cathedral Johnson summoned Alexander Yakovenko,
clock sounded again. The Skripals’ pupils had the Russian ambassador to the UK, on March
shrunk, and they were sweating. They were 12. Sta≠ at the Russian Embassy later revealed
foaming at the mouth. An o≠-duty nurse was what Johnson had told Yakovenko, “that
the first to attend them, and a small crowd according to the UK assessment, it was highly
gathered. At 4:15 p.m., an ambulance was likely that Russia was responsible for the
called, come quickly, forthwith. attack.” (The Kremlin has denied involvement
in the “tragic situation.”) A senior source in the
2: THE NEW KID British government outlined for me the think-
DOCTORS AT SALISBURY District Hospital ing in London that first week: “When you look
guessed that this was opioids, that the around the world, there are very few countries
FORTHWITH Skripals had overdosed. They were taken to that could technically do this. Iran. China.
the intensive-care ward and put on breath- North Korea, conceivably? But they don’t nec-
AS A RUSSIAN DOUBLE AGENT working ing support. Shortly before sunrise on essarily have the means or the motives, and
for the British, he’d been code-named March 5, doctors received new information we’ve never had the intel they’ve even tried.”
“Forthwith”—quickly—but this afternoon the from London: that Sergei Skripal was not In figuring out where to cast blame, many
poison in Sergei Skripal’s system went unhur- just any patient; he was an old, blown spy. found the who-else rationale attractive.
ried, making its way around his body over a Police arrived at the hospital to watch over Sergei Skripal had once been a member of the
period of hours. Skripal was 66, comfortably the critical pair. GRU, the Russian military-intelligence unit
heavy in retirement, an ex-colonel who’d Even in those early hours of what would now best known for hacking into the serv-
been cast out of the intelligence services in become a worldwide crisis, “the gravity of ers of the Democratic National Committee,
Russia and now lived in exile in the English this,” in the words of a senior source in the before he was caught selling secrets to the
city of Salisbury. Neighbors knew the place British government I spoke with, had dawned British, in 2004, and imprisoned. But two
as “Smalls-bury” and said that nothing too quickly. By March 6, national counter- obvious points argued against Russia’s
dramatic ever happened here, which would terrorism police formally took over the involvement: First, Skripal had been par-
stay true for another couple of hours yet. investigation, an initial guardedness about doned by Moscow for his crimes, part of the
This was March 4, 2018, a Sunday of sun- what exactly might have overwhelmed the swap deal that got him out of a wintry prison
backed clouds, the air crisp and glad the way Skripals (“an unknown substance”) quickly and over to Salisbury to begin with. And, sec-
it gets in southwest England after the lifting giving way to a blunter charge: “attempted ond, there was an internationally adhered-to
of snow. A day earlier Yulia Skripal, Sergei’s murder by the administration of a nerve rule of espionage that forbade the murder
33-year-old daughter, who visited Salisbury agent.” Speaking in Parliament two days of re-settled spies. Kill them, after all, and it
regularly, had flown in from Moscow. The later, the home secretary said that any such risked future swaps.
poison had gotten into Yulia that morning, attack would be “a brazen and reckless act After assembling intelligence reports they
too, but father and daughter were still unwit- [and] people are right to want to know who believed put culpability for the Skripal hit
ting and felt well enough early on Sunday to hold to account.” But she asked that her beyond reasonable doubt, the British went
afternoon to plan an outing. Sergei owned peers restrain themselves from speculating busily around Europe and America, persuad-
a cherry red BMW and they drove into town about the culprits—restraint that lasted a few ing allies to join them in sanctioning Russia.
for a drink in a riverside pub. Maybe they minutes before a backbench minister stood President Trump was so convinced by what he
would have a meal together. An ancient up and said that this was surely an act by the learned that he somehow overcame his curi-
cathedral, south of the city center, chimed Russian state: “Who else?” ous reluctance to find fault in the Kremlin’s
the half hour: 1:30 p.m. This poison wanted
two hours more.
Salisbury is a city of spires and rusted
weather vanes, a place that is particular
about time, the dates of things stamped on
buildings and everywhere clocks, clocks, on INVESTIGATORS IN HAZMAT SUITS TRY TO CONTAIN ANY POISON
belfries and over bookshops. Across the water LINGERING ON THE BENCH WHERE THE SKRIPALS WERE DISCOVERED.
from where the Skripals parked their car, a
sundial had been engraved with the adage:
Time speeds up until it is nothing, therefore
use it before it is gone. At the pub, Sergei and
Yulia had a quick drink. When father and
daughter were together, they sometimes
posed for pictures, raising toasts. The pub
was a converted mill that had a display of
photographs on the wall, one of these a
close-up of a pocket watch, its crystal broken,
hands frozen at what appeared to be 1:35 p.m.
Next they went to an Italian restaurant to
eat. An hour passed. Finally, walking back to
their car at around 3:30 p.m., the Skripals
began to feel truly unwell and had to put them-
selves down on a bench, where they drifted in
1 2 0 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
actions—even the most senior members of coded message about the use of chemical
of the British government were surprised weapons in Syria. That it was about domestic
by this, I was told. The president signed o≠ politics, closely timed and meant to rouse
on the expulsion of 60 Russian diplomats, support for the incumbent regime ahead of
after which Russia expelled 60 Americans Russia’s elections that month. THE FIRST TWO VICTIMS:
in reply. London and Moscow swap-expelled Andrew Wood, a former British ambas- SERGEI AND YULIA SKRIPAL.
46 of their people. Diplomatic sta≠s thinned sador to Russia, told me that “guessing, I
everywhere: at NATO headquarters, around would say they would have expected this to
Scandinavia, in Australia. be a relatively swift assassination, quickly
Blood samples from the Skripals were forgotten, but that the method used would
sent to the UK’s main chemical-weapons stick in the mind of people back home....
research facility, a campus not far from Persuading other Russians, in other sys- It emboldened you. And they liked you to
Salisbury known as Porton Down. Chemists tems, to be careful? That’s a valuable aim.” be bold if you were to ultimately graduate, as
detected the presence of one of a family of A well-informed source a∞liated with the Skripal did, into the GRU. Vladimir Rezun,
Soviet-born nerve agents, first developed in OPCW, not British or Russian, told me they a defector from this secretive agency, later
the 1980s and known informally in Russian felt the incident must be about the novichok described in a book of memoirs what initi-
as novichoks—“the new kids on the block.” itself—a lid-lifting on this still mysterious ates were told on arrival at boot camp: that it
These novichoks, which could be deployed weapon, something like a product unveiling was not compulsory to join; it was only com-
in liquid form and absorbed through the after its 30-some years in development. pulsory to stay, the one way out “through the
skin, work their ruin on a body by stop- What connected these theories was the chimney of the crematorium.” After which,
ping the normal transmission of messages idea that Sergei Skripal was secondary— for good measure, Rezun was shown a film of
between the nerves and the muscles. Light- collateral damage in his own attempted mur- a bound and writhing GRU traitor being fed
headedness turns to grogginess, to strained der. After all, the reasoning went, he was a feetfirst into a furnace.
breathing and collapse. spy out to pasture, living obscurely in old In 1985, after five years of GRU training,
Up until March, there’d been few docu- England. What could he have done to bring Skripal was posted to the island of Malta.
mented human exposures to novichoks, but assassins to Salisbury? He had with him his wife, Liudmila, and
back in the 1980s, Andrei Zheleznyakov, a
lab engineer in Moscow whose job it was to
test the toxicity of this nascent weapon for
the Soviet military, inadvertently breathed
some in. He later said that straight away he
felt his brain had emptied. Colors swam.
Before Zheleznyakov lost consciousness, he THEY COLLAPSED ON A BENCH AND
was taken for a walk out in Moscow, where
he experienced a hallucination in which a BEGAN GESTURING STRANGELY. THEIR PUPILS
nearby cathedral began to glow and crumble HAD SHRUNK, AND THEY WERE SWEATING.
apart. The military-research program that
Zheleznyakov was a part of was so secretive THEY WERE FOAMING AT THE MOUTH.
that when he was eventually taken to the hos- PASSERSBY ASSUMED THEY WERE HIGH.
pital, doctors were told nothing of the novi-
chok, only that he’d had a bad meal.
The firm conclusion of Porton Down’s
scientists, that it was a novichok deployed
in Salisbury, was later ratified by the
Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical
Weapons (OPCW), a 193-state group run out
of The Hague, after it sent out samples of its 3: TOWER AND FURNACE their two young children, Alexander and
own to be checked in the labs of neutral coun- T H E Y C A L L E D I T P R Y Z H K I S V Y S H K I —the Yulia. Notionally, Skripal had a role to play
tries. The evidence was there in its chemical tower jump—and when Sergei Skripal was a at the embassy in Malta, “cultural and sports
structure: This was a novichok—the new kid recruit into the airborne division of the Soviet attaché,” which many years later made
in middle age. army, it was the most dreaded part of basic another former GRU trainee chuckle appre-
On March 14, the U.N. Security Council training. He was in his early 20s, an engineer- ciatively. “That would be the cover,” said Boris
held a special meeting to discuss the attack, ing graduate who’d grown up on the western Volodarsky, a Russian-intelligence historian
THESE PAGES: SEE ADDITIONAL CREDITS.
and it was there that the Russian ambassa- tip of the Soviet Union, near the Baltic Sea. He who many years ago relocated to the West
dor asked the lingering question: But why? was squarely handsome, boxer-nosed, neces- after completing his own GRU training. He
What motive should the Russian state have sarily gutsy. When it was your turn to tower- had since become a leading expert on promi-
to eliminate a retired, redundant spy, “who jump, you strapped on an open parachute nent exiled Russians and their habit of dying
after his prosecution, sentencing, prison and went to the edge of a platform, 80 feet in unusual ways on foreign soil.
term, pardon, and handover to the British up. You were taught to ignore every last Upon graduation, Volodarsky explained to
authorities no longer posed any kind of nerve-ending warning, that this was insane, me, trained-up GRU agents were often given
threat to my country?” Everybody in the like readying to step o≠ the roof of a building. an international posting under diplomatic
West seemed to have a theory. That the Then you stepped o≠. One airborne recruit cover, or they became “illegals,” not o∞cially
Skripal hit was meant to sow confusion and told me that no subsequent leap from a plane, recognized by the Russian government, who
panic abroad or, no, at home in Russia. That no later reckless life risk, ever felt as chancy could do murkier work abroad. Skripal had
this was really about geopolitics, some sort as that first fucking tower jump. diplomatic cover, and he rose in this capacity
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 1 2 1
to become the director of the department of public eye, living in Salisbury with Liudmila. 4 : A CITY ON LOCKDOWN
personnel. “Skripal was an H.R. guy within The British government managed their secu- L I K E I N K , liquid novichok can transfer
the GRU. And knowing the names of oper- rity and gave Skripal a pension. In 2011 he by contact from surface to surface, fainter
atives? That’s seen as the crown jewels,” a bought a semidetached home—No. 47—on each time; it is colorless, odorless, and dete-
senior source in the British government told a drowsy cul-de-sac called Christie Miller riorates slowly. Shortly after the Skripals
me. Skripal was posted in Spain when, in Road. A real estate agent who oversaw the arrived at the hospital, a local cop, Nick
1995, he started working with British intel- deal showed me the sales brochure: power Bailey, came into contact with the poison
ligence. He was o≠ered cash in return for shower, heated towel rail, all of it a long way and had to be admitted for treatment as
state secrets, later testifying to a Moscow from Mordovia and the weekly wash in a well. Later I would learn that this particular
court that “every time I met with members of communal hut. novichok had most likely never been tested
British intelligence, they paid me a fee in hard The Skripals hung a lucky horseshoe on on humans. It all meant that in Salisbury,
currency,” about $100,000 in total. Skripal their front door, though if this was a time authorities were now trying to cope with
stayed in contact with his British handlers of good fortune for them, it did not last. an invisible, spreadable, untraceable poi-
for nine years, through his return to Moscow Liudmila died of cancer in 2012. Their son, son that might be smeared anywhere the
and his elevation to colonel, before he was Alexander, who’d grown to be a bearish and Skripals had been on March 4.
exposed and arrested. amiable man like his father, died young in When I first arrived in the city, I visited
His name had allegedly been passed 2017. Both were interred at a cemetery in the riverside pub where the Skripals had
on by another spy in the system. Tried in Salisbury. Now in his 60s, Skripal cared for had a drink before their collapse, press-
2006, at age 55, Skripal was stripped of his his cat, which he told people took instruction ing my face to its plate-glass door as inves-
rank and sentenced to 13 years, a relatively in Russian, and joined a social club where tigators slow-motioned around inside
short term that, the judge said, took into by unbendable house rule the rear-room TV wearing hazmat suits. Three hours later, a
account Skripal’s cooperation with investi- always showed the horse races. Yulia spent public-health bulletin went out, advising any-
gators. Most of his term would be served in most of her time in Moscow but traveled one who’d been to the pub to disinfect their
Mordovia, in a miserable network of barbed- frequently to England to visit her father. phones, wash their clothes, and so on.
wire compounds in the flatlands southeast of No great care was taken to hide the location The bench where the Skripals had been
Moscow. Thirty-below temperatures. Guards of the Skripal family home, and obviously overcome was enclosed by ribbons of don’t-
with Alsatians. Even so, this wasn’t a furnace, MI5’s assessment of the threat to Sergei in cross tape. Brightly colored forensic tents
and to Skripal’s old colleagues in the GRU, his retirement was low, because for $4 the popped up like spring flowers. Reporters
those 13 years might have looked light. website of the Land Registry would reveal skulked, and the spook-watchers among them
He was out early, too, in 2010—a fluky his name and address. “Frankly,” Robert noticed the movements of unmarked cars
beneficiary of the discovery of the so-called Hannigan told me, “you’re not going to hide known to be favored by British intelligence.
Illegals Program, an operation that had much from Russian intelligence if they’re Over on Christie Miller Road, Skripal’s
placed several Russians undercover on the keen to find someone, particularly if that property had been cordoned o≠, so that
East Coast of the United States. A spy swap person’s still in touch with family back home.” neighbors had to wave a special pass at police
was arranged between Russia and the West, Security-camera footage of Yulia Skripal’s to come and go. I walked a perimeter around
mostly managed by the CIA. I was told by movements through the Moscow airport on No. 47, as close as possible, in the company of
Robert Hannigan, who until last year was March 3, a day before the poisoning, showed Boris Volodarsky, the intelligence historian
head of the UK intelligence hub GCHQ, that a slender woman with an erect bearing, and former GRU man, who was spending the
the British decided to pluck out Skripal not for shu±ing through check-in with other trav- day with me in Salisbury. A suited and cardi-
intel (after several years in prison, he didn’t elers. A fold of auburn hair fell over her pale ganed 63-year-old, his face partially obscured
have much to o≠er) but instead out of a sense face. That morning Yulia shared a video by a brushy mustache and aviator sunglasses,
of obligation: “A duty of care to people who’ve on social media, a gyrating dog alongside Volodarsky was about the most conspicuous
risked an awful lot and paid a high price.” the caption: Dance like no one is watching. man in town that afternoon. But he had no
When, in the summer of 2010, Skripal According to discoveries by British intel- reason to steal around in the shadows, not
was flown to Vienna for the exchange, Boris ligence, later made public in a submission anymore, and instead he turned an opera-
Volodarsky, the intelligence historian, was to NATO, “cyber specialists” working for the tional eye on the scene, trying to identify the
there at the airport to watch a stage-managed GRU had been snooping in Yulia’s e-mails as shadows that might’ve been useful to others.
swap for the media. “Quite a crowd,” far back as 2013. Furthermore, according to a This operation would’ve called for a large
Volodarsky recalled, “to watch a group of person with knowledge of the investigation, team, Volodarsky said—Russian illegals, he
poorly dressed people switch planes.” Skripal Sergei’s e-mails were also under surveillance thought, arriving in the country over the
was put on the same Boeing that the East during that period. “They would have known course of weeks to study the local minutiae:
Coast illegals had just left, which then took Yulia was coming,” a senior government “When lights were switched on and o≠, did
o≠ and flew west. Quickly he was out of the source told me. neighbors look out their windows?” Crucial
to any such plan, Volodarsky said, would be
settling on a where—someplace they could
be certain Sergei Skripal would be—and a
when. The application of this poison would
have been skilled work, technically complex.
“[The nerve agent] will burn through nor-
mal hazmat suits,” a senior source from the
“FRANKLY,” A FORMER BRITISH-INTELLIGENCE UK government told me. “You need time and
CHIEF SAID, “YOU’RE NOT GOING TO HIDE you need cover.”
From Christie Miller Road, we drove two
MUCH FROM RUSSIAN INTELLIGENCE IF THEY’RE miles to a cemetery in Salisbury, a wooded
KEEN TO FIND SOMEONE.” place home to wild ring-necked pheasant,
Volodarsky said there was a part of him,
the GRU-trained part, that felt disgust at his
carelessness in drinking that co≠ee. Then
a sort of fatalism came down. “You think
to yourself, it’s either a well-done job or a
badly done job. If it’s one, you’ll die. If it’s the
other, you’ll survive.”
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 1 2 3
FAIR QUESTION:
IS THE STEELERS’
ANTONIO
BROWN
THE BEST PLAYER
IN THE NFL?
UNFAIR QUESTION:
IS HE THE
FUNNEST?
LET’S ASK HIM
STEVEN
PAN
JIM
MOORE
ACCORDING TO ANTONIO BROWN, superstar wide receiver for the Pittsburgh is boomin’!” But a boomin’
Steelers, there are three crucial, incontrovertible ways to “drip.” ¶ “You business comes with all sorts of
added responsibilities. A Nike-
got to have the smile,” he tells me, launching into an extemporaneous free backed “Destroy Doubt” tour
lesson on personal swag. “The first time someone sees you smile, they gotta this summer. The cover of the
new Madden (and a 99 rating).
know you mean business.” Second, “you gotta have the right smell for the A cameo in the music video
drip. When the person first meets you, they’re going to get that fragrance.” for Drake’s “God’s Plan.” Those
(And what, pray tell, does Antonio Brown smell like? “Like Chanel!”) are great, sure, but so, too, is
the pressure that comes with it.
¶ “You have the fragrance drip and you got the smile drip. That’s two ways “Antonio Brown now gets
to drip. Then you gotta get the fit. You can’t have no basic fit. You gotta have a lot of notoriety, a lot of people
watching him,” says Antonio
that di≠erent fit. When you got that di≠erent fit, you ’bout to DRIP.” ¶ And Brown. “A lot of news. A lot of
does Antonio Brown have that drip, you ask? expectation.”
And though AB
“I got all the drip,” he assures thrives in the high-
me. The divine-drip trinity. stakes environment
Whatever the 30-year-old of big games, the
Brown has, it’s working. In 2010 expansive social-
he was the 195th pick in the media empire he’s
NFL draft, an undersized five- built—2.5 million
foot-ten receiver who could Instagram followers
maybe scrape out a career as and an additional
a punt returner. He was selected 1.2 million on
for the Pro Bowl in his second Twitter—ensures that
season, and he’s made five more the bright lights
since, hauling in impossible never really turn o≠.
sideline catches that have “I just feel that
earned him the nickname “Tony sometimes it can be
Toe Tap” for his ability to keep hard as a player—a
his feet in bounds. His hands targeted player in
have the gravitational pull the NFL—to really
of small black holes—of the 174 express yourself the
passes fired his way last season, right way. Anybody
he dropped three. He’s football’s could say anything,
best current player not named and that’s what the
Tom Brady, its most electric public perception will
playmaker since Terrell Owens, be. If ESPN said I was
and the most drippy since a bad guy, or I was a
Deion Sanders wore a white killer, then that’s what
bowler in a bubble bath people are gonna
for “Must Be the Money.” believe.… I’m a real
“Maaan, I’m having a hell person. You just can’t
of a good time. It’s a great time say anything about
to be alive,” he says. “It’s like, my name and then
if you’re not having fun, what show up thinking it’s
are you doing it for?” In a league cool. You gotta put
that is often hostile to outsize some respect on it.”
displays of personality, he plays Of course, there’s
with a rarely seen brio. You already plenty of
could reasonably argue that he’s respect for his name.
single-handedly brought the So much, in fact, that
touchdown celebration back you might wonder
from whatever dark place NFL’s what he could
tightly clenched executives possibly want next.
buried it—and for his troubles, “Being my best self
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own
see me do, they do. They try to signature phrase: “Business drip.— C L AY S K I P P E R
1 2 6 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
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S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 1 3 1
1 3 2 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
we’ve been hearing the buzz for a few years now: Houston may, sneakily,
be america’s best food city. but when we sent gq food critic brett martin to dive
into the scene, we realized that was selling the city way short
PAO L A + M U R R AY
FEW YEARS AGO, Matthew Odam was driving
from Austin, Texas, where he’s the restaurant
critic at the Austin American-Statesman,
to Houston, where he was raised. He had
a passenger: a friend of a friend who was
moving back to Houston after spending some
time kicking around the capital, working
music festivals, picking up shifts at a juice bar,
and so on. He was a young African-American
kid, maybe 21 but probably even younger, and
kind of a beautiful art freak. He wore a black
T-shirt with some kind of disembodied anime
head on it and a spacey expression. He told
Odam that he “dabbled in the occult.”
“At the time, having grown up in Houston
in kind of a bubble, I was pretty skeptical
about the city,” Odam says. So Odam asked
the kid in the black T-shirt why he’d be mov-
ing there from someplace as verifiably and
undeniably hip as Austin. The kid shrugged.
Austin, he said, was a white monoculture of
hipsters, yuppies, and techies. (Odam was
telling me this story in a Japanese-fusion spot
in East Austin, which made it easy to visualize
said culture.) In Houston, the kid said, things
were happening.
They were already driving through the city’s The Orange
periphery, which hardly meant they were near Show
their destination. Harris County, made up of be pimping their Instagram bemoaning how much less cool it
The temple of outsider
Houston and its suburbs, is 1,777 square miles, accounts; the whole scene would art was built over is now than at some point in the
which is bigger than Rhode Island. “Where do be born, oversubscribed, and several decades and past, usually, by coincidence, the
you want to get dropped o≠ ?” Odam asked. spent before it even happened. remains a must-visit. point at which they arrived.
The kid directed him to a spot nearby the He gripped the wheel and Houston, on the other hand,
park outside the main building of the Menil considered the unspeakable: “Was Houston has remained for many—including plenty
Collection, the art museum tucked into the cooler than Austin? Really?” of people who were raised there—a kind
Montrose neighborhood. “He told me all these of empty image. There’s NASA. There’s oil.
kids were down there, hanging out in the P E R H A P S I T ’ S U N S E E M L Y to begin with such There’s the Galleria—the 2.4-million-square-
park, dropping acid and making art,” Odam a comparison. Houston is America’s fourth- foot shopping mall that is practically its
recalls. “Later, he was heading downtown to largest city, an international metropolis of own city-state. Beyond that, not much: a
a club that was something out of Stefon. Like, great institutions and great wealth. It has sterile, sun-blasted, multi-laned landscape
‘a midget working professional sports teams; it has operas and of concrete, strip malls, and glass, the very
the door, transients ballets. Why compare it to a city that is half vision of air-conditioned American ano-
as bartenders...’ ” the size and a fraction as diverse? mie. When the cry went out, on T-shirts and
Watching the kid But Austin, as Lawrence Wright points out bumper stickers, to keep austin weird,
A Taste of
Houston Cool walk o≠ across the in his book God Save Texas, is the Texas city part of the implicit message was to keep
lawn, Odam con- that is permissible for those who live outside Austin not like Houston.
Opening pages,
sidered: In Austin, Texas: urbane, hip, progressive, and Texan Then, sometime over the past five or six
from left: a smoky
barbecue platter everybody he knew in all the romantic, right ways (swaggering, years, things started to change. As somebody
at The Pit Room; would be fighting to wild, western) without so many of the wrong who writes about food, I could hardly miss it.
the casual outdoor
get on the guest list ones (conservative, provincial, big-haired). With its mix of exploding immigrant commu-
vibes at the Axelrad
Beer Garden. for that club; the kids Also, Austin is unimpeachably cool—even if nities and ambitious, sophisticated variations
in the park would Austinites will spend half of any conversation on upscale dining, Houston had decisively
1 3 4 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
in its youthfulness,
diversity, and explosive
growth, houston looks
like the american city of
the future.
shrugged o≠ its reputation as a city of steak into Texas from the Gulf of Mexico. As though
houses and chains to become increasingly tired from its Caribbean journey, the storm
mentioned as one of the nation’s great restau- circled lazily above southwest Texas for a cata-
rant cities. In these pages, David Chang called strophic four days. The images, on the ground
Houston the next food capital of America. This and TV, were otherworldly: water, pushed by
year, it earned two spots on my annual list of swollen bayous and overwhelmed pumps,
Best New Restaurants, a distinction shared running uphill; highway signs hovering
only with New York City and Los Angeles. mere feet above the waterline, the roadways
And as stories like Odam’s showed, there beneath them filled up like giant bathtubs. By “Shade Tree”
were signs of more afoot. Not only of a the time it was over, the numbers, too, were Barbecue
cool city but of a city that was cool in a way surreal: Harvey had disgorged as much as want to hear from a The Bookity Bookity
that wasn’t just another replication of 48 inches of rain—a trillion gallons—on the state climatologist. Boudain Man is the
Brooklyn built in some reclaimed industrial Houston metro area. Some 154,000 homes had I firmly believe king of Houston’s
pirate barbecuers,
downtown (for one thing, Houston doesn’t flooded and tens of thousands of people had that there’s no such who set up shop
really have one). needed rescue. “The takeaway from Harvey thing as a city that anywhere—in his case,
Last summer I made plans to head to is that it expands our understanding of what has more “grit” or a Walmart parking lot.
Houston, to explore further. Then, on is possible,” a state climatologist later said, “resilience” than any
August 25, Hurricane Harvey came churning which is precisely the kind of thing you do not other; some are just unlucky enough to get
the chance to show it. Still, the cracked-open
metropolis that the rest of the country gazed
upon in the immediate aftermath of Harvey
was clearly one of deep communal ties, fierce
civic pride, and wells of creative energy. There
were the four employees of El Bolillo Bakery
who, trapped by rising water, spent two days
of the storm baking 4,400 pounds of flour’s
worth of bread and pan dulce to distribute to
flood victims. There was the Houston Ballet,
whose home theater was inundated but who
pressed on with its season in makeshift digs
all over the city. Something special, it became
clear to those who might not have been paying
attention, was going on here. In its youthful-
ness, its diversity (by some measures, the most
diverse large city in America), and its explo-
sive growth (an astonishing two decades of 25
percent in the greater metro area), Houston
was looking more and more like the American
city of the future.
Part of the change has been intentional.
In recent years, a series of public-private
partnerships has worked to develop the
kind of amenities and public spaces that
cool cities tend to have: bike lanes; down-
town attractions;
ambitious and beau-
tiful green spaces
like Bu≠alo Bayou
Full-Spectrum
Houston Grub Park, with its criss-
crossing pathways
Chef Chris Shepherd
across the bayou
turned his James
Beard Award–winning and astonishing
restaurant Underbelly Cistern—a massive
into UB Preserv, a
underground reser-
shrine to Houston’s
multicultural cuisine. voir now used for art
installations—and
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 1 3 5
this is a key point of
downtown’s Discovery Green, a park and identity: the theoretical
gathering place for Houstonians of all eth-
nicities that longtime Houston Chronicle ability for anyone to
food critic Alison Cook calls “our new town
square.” After years of development that
build anything anywhere.
involved automatically tearing down any-
thing old in favor of building anew, a pres-
ervationist movement has finally begun to which other guy’s glass tower. “No zoning” outfit located in a mansion originally built for
take hold, too, leading to victories like the turns out to be the urban equivalent of the an oil magnate. Seemingly preserved some-
renovated Heights Theater, reopened as a great western myth of “no fences.” time in 1979, it is filled with art and sta≠ed by
beautiful and intimate music venue. Larry McMurtry once argued that Texas’s a rotating assemblage of men in suits, all of
But a good deal of what’s happening in cities inevitably sit uneasily alongside its whom seem to have worked there for decades.
Houston feels more organic and idiosyncratic rural, pioneer history: “Imagine yourself as I was the sole guest for much of my time there,
than what an urban-studies expert might a small hopeful immigrant family, alone on in a suite that inexplicably included a full din-
devise in a PowerPoint presentation—an the Staked Plains, with the Comanche and ing room set, and I was never 100 percent sure
energy that feels born of two major factors: the Kiowa still on the loose.… Elements of they weren’t ghosts.
one, the growth that has turned the city’s that primal venturing will surely inform sev- Montrose is the part of Houston that looks
diverse but discrete bubbles into a series of eral generations.” To which I would add only the most like a cool city is supposed to look—
unavoidable Venn overlaps, allowing cul- that you can equally imagine yourself as a dense; green; filled with museums, co≠ee
tures to clash, cohabitate, and collaborate; small hopeful immigrant family o≠ a plane shops, cocktail bars, and other hip indepen-
the other, a pervading sense of independent from Saigon, or Michoacán, or Tegucigalpa, dent businesses; at least plausibly walkable
frontier wildness. or o≠ a bus from flooded New Orleans, in (though few seem to do so). Montrose has
That trait may not ride in wearing the order to understand the feeling of primal also been the center of Houston’s food scene,
cowboy costume it does farther west, but it venturing that Houston still exudes. And which, as is customary these days, has led the
nevertheless feels distinctly Texan. “There that you can look east, as well as west, for city’s charge into the national conversation
are no zoning laws here” is the sentence you its source, to the special properties of places in a way that a music or art scene might have
will hear more than any other in Houston. that line the Gulf of Mexico: Cajun self-re- done for an emerging city 20 years ago.
This is a key point of identity: the theoretical liance, New Orleanian devil-may-care, that Nobody has worked harder toward that
ability for anyone to build anything anywhere sense of extraterritoriality that exists up end than Chris Shepherd, who has three
(never mind that it is in part responsible for and down America’s third and wildest coast, restaurants in Montrose. His empire begins
the kind of development that makes the wherever the water regularly threatens to along Westheimer Road, Montrose’s main
city so susceptible to damage from natural rise. The Houston band the Su≠ers, which drag, in the building that was once his flag-
disaster). People chatter about commercial have been gaining a national profile, have a ship, Underbelly, and reopens this month
real estate in Houston with the same mix name for their smoothly powerful mishmash as a cast-iron steak house, Georgia James.
of envy, romance, and fascination that they of ska, R&B, country, and more, borrowed That menu (you may want to take notes)
do residential real estate in New York or San from the great Beaumont-raised blues gui- began as a one-year experiment at One Fifth,
Francisco: who’s developing what project and tarist Barbara Lynn. It works equally as a down the street, which Shepherd has given
where; which buildings are sitting empty, description of the city a whole. They call it a conceptual overhaul for each year of his
waiting for the price Gulf Coast Soul. five-year lease. (This fall’s iteration, the third,
of oil to rise; who’s As for Houston’s place in the Texas firma- is “Mediterranean.”) Meanwhile, the much
erecting what glass ment, one businessman with shops in all three loved Underbelly, at which Shepherd won a
tower as revenge for of the state’s most famous cities broke them James Beard Award, has been rebranded as
Texas-Style
Brisket down for me thusly: “Austin is like your young, UB Preserv, located in a strip mall that also
hip millennial brother who always knows the houses a laundromat, a vape shop, and a
Get some at Ray’s. And
latest cool thing. Dallas is the metrosexual clothing store called Guyz ’N’ Style (“Where
don’t forget to order
the oxtails, too. middle brother that nobody really wants to endless fashion meets”).
spend time with. But Houston is the older, Shepherd is a large man, partial to shorts,
cooler sibling—he’s got some miles on him, bespoke dress shirts from the venerable
he’s been through some stu≠, but he totally Houston tailor Hamilton Shirts, and New
knows what’s cool and what’s not. Balance sneakers. These conceal the results
“You love all your siblings, but you know of monthly pedicures finished with nail pol-
which one you want to hang out with.” ish in the shade Deep Steel Blue, which hap-
There’s a T-shirt for sale in Houston these pens to be the Houston Texans’ color. Born
days that was designed by James Glassman, in Nebraska, raised
who runs a website about the city’s his- in Tulsa, he came to
tory and is the author of The Houstorian Houston for culinary
Dictionary. It is in the same font as keep school when he was
austin weird but one significant word 22 and has never left.
shorter. It reads keep austin. “I fell in love with
the city,” he says.
AND ANYWAY, YOU WANT WEIRD? Houston has “Everything I could
it by the square mile. Not Weird™, either. Like, ever want was here.”
genuinely strange. On days o≠, he would
The only hotel in Houston’s Montrose drive aimlessly and
neighborhood is La Colombe d’Or, a five-room explore, reasoning
in Vietnamese, Chinese, English, A scene was being born—one that, its par-
A Perfect Spanish, Korean, and more, begin ticipants quickly realized, had the potential to
Night Out
to look like slabs of Rosetta stone. invent a culinary identity where there hadn’t
The light-filled— You pass buildings of exquisite been one before.
and extra-delicious— strangeness. Cars mounted on That generation has continued to work
environs of Justin
Yu’s Theodore Rex, poles as 3-D signs. A three-storied together, in various combinations, ever since.
a GQ Best New Italianate villa—complete with And all seem to have reached a natural point
Restaurant of 2018. arches, columns, fountains, and of change: Yu recently transformed Oxheart
statuary lining its circular drive- into the less rigid Theodore Rex (another
way—turns out not to be a casino or banquet 2018 GQ Best New Restaurant); Revival
hall but in fact a dentist’s office. Market has transitioned into a fast-service
Shepherd and I started at Saigon Pagolac,
one of the first Vietnamese restaurants
to open as the city’s Asian-immigrant
community spread out along Bellaire in the
late 1980s. Within a few minutes, the table
H OW T O E AT
was overwhelmed by platters of food: the
crispy egg pancake banh xeo; tight pouches HOUSTON
of beef wrapped in betel leaf; spongy squares IN 8 DISHES
of banh hoi, the intricately woven pads of
vermicelli noodles. Shepherd had recently 1. “ALL-IN” CRAWFISH
found a nearby supplier of fresh banh hoi CASIAN CRAWFISH
The emblematic Viet-Cajun dish of the
that however lost he got, he could always for his own restaurant, a discovery he talked new Houston: spicy, citrusy, garlicky, and
drive straight in any direction to eventually about as though each weekly delivery arrived utterly addictive.
reach the I-610 Loop that would get him via reindeer-pulled sleigh.
home. When he found something he thought We were joined by Alba Huerta, who came 2. BARBACOA
HUGO’S
was delicious, he was unabashed about ask- to Houston from Mexico with her family Rich, flavorful slow-roasted lamb at the
ing how it was made, ultimately transferring when she was 6 and has long been one of the flagship of Hugo Ortega and Tracy Vaught’s
that knowledge to the menu at Underbelly, to city’s pre-eminent bartenders. In addition to modern-Mexican empire.
which Shepherd gave the tagline “The Story co-owning downtown’s mezcalería The Pastry 3. PASTRAMI BEEF RIB
of Houston Food.” War, she owns Julep Bar, which is devoted to TEJAS CHOCOLATE CRAFTORY
“I wanted to introduce Houstonians to southern cocktails and features a Jacuzzi-size Thursday is Pastrami Day at Tejas, but
their city,” he says. tub of crushed ice behind the bar, a copper any day is a good day for elite craft
barbecue alongside high-end homemade
One hot morning, he was doing the same fairy rising from its center. chocolate bonbons.
for me. Despite having made this trip hun- We talked, as we ate, about the emergence
dreds of times, he grew palpably excited as of the city’s food scene. The turning point, 4. SMOKED OXTAILS
RAY’S REAL PIT BBQ SHACK
we approached Bellaire Boulevard, the main they agreed, was the annus mirabilis of 2012. Ray’s serves classic East Texas barbecue,
drag of Houston’s Chinatown. Each strip Shepherd opened Underbelly that year. porkier and saucier than its Central
mall o≠ered another suddenly mandatory Huerta was bartending at Bobby Huegel’s Texan cousin: fat spare ribs, ricey links of
boudin, and, as a weekly special, these
stop: hand-pulled noodles here, Szechuan Anvil Bar & Refuge, which had opened a gamy, gelatinous beauties.
dumplings there. few years earlier and was riding the new
The most obvious urban counterpart to craft-cocktail wave. One of its founders, 5. PARIS-BREST
Houston is Los Angeles, with its diversity, Morgan Weber, had just opened the gour- THEODORE REX
Everything on Justin Yu’s ever changing
its car-centrism, its sprawl. Houston is not met Revival Market. A branch of the high- menu is precise and soulful, but this simple
beautiful like L.A., but it is ugly like it: We end sushi restaurant Uchi arrived from dessert, funkified by Swiss-cheese cream
drove mile after flat mile filled with parking Austin. A few years earlier, Justin Yu and and honey, is what I’ve craved since I tried it.
lots and strip malls, fast-food restaurants Seth Siegel-Gardner, both Houston-born
6. BRISKET TACO
and box stores, new undistinguished con- chefs who had been working in fine dining THE PIT ROOM
struction cheek by jowl with older undis- in California and Europe, returned to town The Pit Room’s brisket shines brightest
tinguished construction. It is empirically and, along with Terrence Gallivan, opened (and smokiest) topped with cheese,
sour cream, and salsa roja on a chewy
ugly and totally intoxicating. The point a one-month summer pop-up. It was such homemade tortilla made with beef fat.
isn’t that there are beautiful places hidden a resounding success that they were now
amid the ugliness; it’s that the ugliness opening ambitious projects in town: Siegel- 7. SMOTHERED TURKEY WINGS
itself becomes imbued with a kind of beauty, Gardner and Gallivan opened The Pass ALFREDA’S SOUL FOOD
There’s nearly as much meat in the
thanks to the thrum of human energy that and Provisions; Yu created a tasting-menu vegetables as there is in the meat dishes
takes root there. The tall multi-paneled restaurant named Oxheart where he, too, at this venerable cafeteria—which is
signs standing outside each mall, written won a James Beard Award. how you know it’s legit.
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 1 3 9
FROM ‘TRUE DETECTIVE’ TO HIS
MIND-BENDING NEW NETFLIX SERIES, ‘MANIAC,’
CARY FUKUNAGA
HAS PROVED HIMSELF A MASTER OF CREATING THE
PERFECT TONE ON-SCREEN. NOW THE VISIONARY
DIRECTOR HELPS US HIGHLIGHT SOME OF THE SEASON’S
KEY STYLE MOVES—CLOTHES WITH A LIVED-IN VIBE,
ALL SHOT AT HIS HOME IN UPSTATE NEW YORK
1 4 0 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
Z ACH
B ARO N
T H O M AS
WH IT E S ID E
TO NY
IRV INE
←←
OPENING PAGES, LEFT
coat (price upon
request)
Alexander McQueen
sweater $595
immediately, people called. By the time True Detective
Joseph made him a household name (in households that pay
necklace $4,900 attention to directors), he was in Ghana shooting his third
David Yurman film, Beasts of No Nation, which Netflix ended up buying
RIGHT
for $12 million. As Fukunaga looked around for his next
jacket $16,400 project, he was doing so as one of the most sought-after
Hermès directors in Hollywood. That was nearly four years ago.
sweater $895 Then It fell apart, and another project kept getting
pants $355 delayed and he had to walk away from that, too, and all
Joseph
the while he was working to compromise, working to
↓ just get something made. He was supposed to be, maybe
sweater $1,075 already was, our next great director. And then: “Between
Giorgio Armani
directing Beasts of No Nation and directing Maniac, it was
t-shirt $40 (for
pack of three) three and a half years of no production,” Fukunaga says,
Calvin Klein shaking his head. “I was in the prime of my directing life!”
CARY FUKUNAGA ISN’T ENTIRELY SURE if he has a rep- Underwear Maniac, the series that will finally bring him back to
utation for being di∞cult. But it’s something he’s heard pants $348 audiences, is loosely based on a Norwegian TV show of
Boss
from time to time. He heard it in the wake of shooting the same name. The original is a black comedy that fol-
HBO’s True Detective—a series that became a phenom- → lows the absurd delusions of a man locked in a psych
enon following the fourth episode, which included a turtleneck $345 ward. That was Fukunaga’s starting point: He wanted
Z Zegna
virtuosic six-minute-long tracking shot of Matthew to do something lighter—bright-colored candy, starring
pants $265
McConaughey stalking his way through a robbery that Sandro a pair of two-time Oscar nominees.
turns into a bloodbath. The show’s creator, Nic Pizzolatto, belt $690 But it turns out “lighter” is not exactly something
thought Fukunaga was being willfully idiosyncratic just Tom Ford Fukunaga is capable of: “I realized that I have a
for insisting on a shot like that. “Nic
wanted to cut it up in post-production,”
Fukunaga says over lunch in New York,
where he’s currently finishing Maniac, a
surrealist Netflix series starring Jonah
Hill and Emma Stone as two patients in
a pharmaceutical drug trial. “He did not
like that I was pushing for that one at
all.” But the show had been a lot of talk,
and a lot of philosophizing, before that.
Fukunaga wasn’t trying to showboat. He
just thought, “Let’s do something fun.”
And then there was It, the 2017 adap-
tation of the Stephen King novel, which
Fukunaga wrote and was prepared to
direct. He ultimately decided to leave
the project two weeks before it started
shooting, after the studio started treat-
ing Fukunaga like he might go rogue. “I
think it was fear on their part, that they
couldn’t control me,” he says.
And…were they right?
“No, they thought they couldn’t
control me. I would have been totally
collaborative.”
The irony, to Fukunaga’s mind, was
that he’d actually worked hard to appren-
tice himself. In 2009, he signed on to
direct an adaptation of Jane Eyre. At
the time, he was 32 and coming o≠ his
first film, Sin Nombre, which had won a
directing prize at Sundance. Fukunaga is
a romantic, and Jane Eyre appealed to
that part of him; it was also a relatively
conventional studio film, with movie stars
and well-known source material. “There
was nothing experimental about it,” he
says. “But for me, it was an exercise.”
The exercise worked. Fukunaga’s Jane
Eyre was taut, glossy, a bit haunted—a
success, and a calling card, and almost
1 4 2 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
hair by silvia
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grooming by kumi
craig using
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Fall fashion has a
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vis orange behind to
discover a more elegant
side of rugged style,
where subtle texture,
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so slouchy fits ensure
you are seasonally
correct without looking
like you got lost on an
Outward Bound trip.
tendency to make things harder than they need to be. ↑ discuss this and maybe I’m gonna win. The algorithm’s
Because the idea of having fun and not worrying too suit $4,545 argument is gonna win at the end of the day.” Fukunaga
polo shirt $1,495
much about production value went out the door the Brunello treated the process as one more thing to learn from, he
moment I started conceiving ideas.” The show he ulti- Cucinelli says: “I have no doubt the algorithm will be right.”
mately made takes place in a grimy, melancholy New t-shirt $40 (for But it also made him want to do what, contrary to
York and focuses on two broken people, in Stone and pack of three) popular belief, he hadn’t done yet. “I just kind of want
Calvin Klein
Hill, trying to connect with their pasts and with each Underwear
to make something that’s idiosyncratically all mine,”
other—when they’re not hallucinating. (And sometimes watch $5,950
Fukunaga says. He’s been working on a project with
even when they are.) It’s one of the more delightfully Omega HBO, based on Stanley Kubrick’s unproduced film about
strange projects you’ll ever see executed by a director Napoleon, and another thing about Hiroshima, and yet
→
this talented; the show feels like a John Lennon solo another thing about Alexandre Dumas. Will any of it
sports jacket
album, or a guided meditation by Terry Gilliam, or both $8,995 actually happen? There is no way to know. But the pro-
at the same time. Kiton cess, so far, has been amicable.
Like Beasts, Maniac will stream on Netflix, which has shirt $690 “I’ve only walked out of one project where a producer
its own surreal development process. “Because Netflix is Salvatore was like, ‘You’re never gonna work in this town again!’ ”
Ferragamo
a data company,” Fukunaga says, “they can look at some- Fukunaga says. “When he said that, I was like, Did he say
pants $348
thing you’re writing and say, ‘We know based on our Boss that? I want to record this!”
data that if you do this, we will lose this many viewers.’ boots $1,890
So it’s a di≠erent kind of note giving. It’s not like, Let’s Tom Ford zach baron is gq’s sta≠ writer.
1 4 4 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
N
L PER
HA
H
OA
N
L
IE
N
A
D
A STRANGE THING HAS HAPPENED TO MEN OVER THE PAST FEW DECADES: WE’VE
WE MAY LOSE THE ABILITY TO REPRODUCE ENTIRELY. WHAT’S CAUSING THIS MYSTERIOUS
SI
MO
NA
BRA
N OW I CZ
DROP IN SPERM COUNTS—AND IS THERE ANY WAY TO REVERSE IT BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE?
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 1 4 7
MEN ARE DOOMED. lead authors of the study, to ask if there was almost 60 percent: We are producing less
Everybody knows this. any good news hiding behind those brutal semen, and that semen has fewer sperm
We’re obviously all doomed, numbers. Were we really at risk of extinc- cells in it. This time around, even scientists
the women too, everybody tion? She failed to comfort me. “The What who had been skeptical of past analyses had
in general, just a waiting Does It Mean question means extrapolat- to admit that the study was all but unassail-
game until one or another of the stupid ing beyond your data,” Swan said, “which able. Jørgensen, in Copenhagen, told me that
things our stupid species is up to finally is always a tricky thing. But you can ask, when he saw the results, he’d said aloud, “No,
gets us. But as it turns out, no surprise: men ‘What does it take? When is a species in it cannot be true.” He had expected to see a
first. Second instance of no surprise: We’re danger? When is a species threatened?’ And past decline and then a leveling o≠. But he
going to take the women down with us. we are definitely on that path.” That path, couldn’t argue when the team ran the num-
There has always been evidence that in its darkest reaches, leads to no more nat- bers again and again. The downward slope
men, throughout life, are at higher risk of urally conceived babies and potentially to was unwavering.
early death—from the beginning, a higher no babies at all—and the final generation of Almost all the scientists I talked to
male incidence of Death by Mastodon Homo sapiens will roam the earth knowing stressed that not only were low sperm
Stomping, a higher incidence of Spiked they will be the last of their kind. counts alarming for what they said about
Club to the Brainpan, a statistically signifi- the reproductive future of the species—they
cant disparity between how many men were also a warning of a much larger set of
and how many women die of Accidentally I F W E A R E H A L F A S fertile as the genera- health problems facing men. In this view,
Shooting Themselves in the Face or Getting tion before us, why haven’t we noticed? One sperm production is a canary in the coal
Really Fat and Having a Heart Attack. The answer is that there is a lot of redundancy mine of male bodies: We know, for instance,
male of the species dies younger than the built into reproduction: You don’t need 200 that men with poor semen quality have a
female—about five years on average. Divide million sperm to fertilize an egg, but that’s higher mortality rate and are more likely to
a population into groups by birth year, and how many the average man might devote to have diabetes, cancer, and cardiovascular
by the time each cohort reaches 85, there the job. Most men can still conceive a child disease than fertile men.
are two women left for every man alive. In naturally with a depressed sperm count, and Testosterone levels have also dropped
fact, the male wins every age class: Baby those who can’t have a booming fertility- precipitously, with e≠ects beginning in utero
boys die more often than baby girls; little treatment industry ready to help them. And and extending into adulthood. One of the
boys die more often than little girls; teenage though lower sperm counts probably have most significant markers of an organism’s
boys; young men; middle-aged men. Death led to a small decrease in the number of sex is something called anogenital distance
champions across the board. children being conceived, that decline has (AGD)—the measurement between the anus
Now it seems that early death isn’t been masked by sociological changes driving and the genitals. Male AGD is typically twice
enough for us—we’re on track instead birth rates down even faster: People in the the length of female, a much more dramatic
to void the species entirely. Last sum- developed world are choosing to have fewer di≠erence than height or weight or muscu-
mer a group of researchers from Hebrew children, and they are having them later. lature. Lower testosterone leads to a shorter
University and Mount Sinai medical school The problem has been debated among AGD, and a measurement lower than the
published a study showing that sperm fertility scientists for decades now—studies median correlates to a man being seven
counts in the U.S., Europe, Australia, and suggesting that sperm counts are declin- times as likely to be subfertile and gives
New Zealand have fallen by more than 50 ing have been appearing since the ’70s— him a greater likelihood of having unde-
WE SHOULD HOPE FOR THE BEST AND PREPARE FOR THE WORST,” SAID HAGAI LEVINE, A LEAD
AUTHOR OF THE STUDY. “AND THAT IS THE POSSIBILITY THAT WE WILL BECOME EXTINCT.
percent over the past four decades. (They but until Swan and her colleagues’ meta- scended testicles, testicular tumors, and
judged data from the rest of the world to be analysis, the results have always been a smaller penis. “What you are seeing in a
insu∞cient to draw conclusions from, but judged incomplete or preliminary. Swan number of systems, other developmental sys-
there are studies suggesting that the trend herself had conducted smaller studies on tems, is that the sex di≠erences are shrink-
could be worldwide.) That is to say: We are declining sperm counts, but in 2015 she ing,” Swan told me. Men are producing
producing half the sperm our grandfathers decided it was time for a definitive answer. less sperm. They’re also becoming less male.
did. We are half as fertile. She teamed up with Hagai Levine, an Israeli I assumed that the next thing Swan was
The Hebrew University/Mount Sinai paper epidemiologist, and Niels Jørgensen, a going to tell me was that these changes
was a meta-analysis by a team of epidemiol- Danish endocrinologist, and along with five were all a mystery to scientists. If only we
ogists, clinicians, and researchers that culled others, they set about performing a system- could figure out what was causing the drop
data from 185 studies, which examined semen atic review and meta-regression analysis— in sperm counts, I imagined, we could solve
from almost 43,000 men. It showed that the that is, a kind of statistical synthesis of the all the attendant health problems at once.
human race is apparently on a trend line data. “Hagai is a very good scientist, and he But it turns out that it’s not a mystery: We
toward becoming unable to reproduce itself. also used to be the head of epidemiology for know what the culprit is. And it’s hiding in
Sperm counts went from 99 million sperm the Israeli armed forces,” Swan told me. “So plain sight.
per milliliter of semen in 1973 to 47 million he’s very good at organizing.” They spent a
per milliliter in 2011, and the decline has year working with the data.
been accelerating. Would 40 more years—or The results, when they came in, were clear. T H E S I X T H F LO O R of the Rigshospitalet,
fewer—bring us all the way to zero? Not only were sperm counts per milliliter of a hospital and research institution in
I called Shanna H. Swan, a reproductive semen down by more than 50 percent since Copenhagen, houses the Department of
epidemiologist at Mount Sinai and one of the 1973, but total sperm counts were down by Growth and Reproduction. The babies are
1 4 8 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
MEAN SPERM COUNT AND
all a few floors downstairs—on six, the unit
GLOBAL PLASTICS PRODUCTION SINCE 1970
is populated not with new parents but with
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 1 4 9
BEFORE HE WENT to prison for probation
violations, and after years of opioid addiction
and spiraling legal trouble, the Atlanta-bred
rapper Gucci Mane became hyper-prolific
even by his standards, cranking out mixtapes
in the time it takes most artists to consider
dropping a single. A lot of it was amazing; as
the work of a troubled man unsure when he’d
next see the inside of a recording studio, a lot
of it was also pretty dark.
“It’s like, ‘Damn, man—that guy was going
through some shit,’ ” Gucci tells me. “I was
just manic in the studio. I had shit that I opuses into the mixtape marketplace long ←←
OPENING PAGES beanie $16
wanted to get off my chest. I don’t think it before chart-gaming three-hour albums Neff
overcoat $5,770
was so much that I wanted to give it to the became the standard. And he’s at least part of Maison Martin jewelry, his own
world—I just wanted to get it out my head.” the reason your favorite Soundcloud rapper Margiela
When he was released two years later, has a prominent face tattoo. coat $600
OPPOSITE PAGE
Gucci was a Mane reborn—skinny, sober, and You get the sense he always expected to be Pyer Moss coat (price upon
request)
ready to dominate a hip-hop landscape he’d a legend, but not necessarily a living legend. shorts $13 Dolce & Gabbana
helped redefine. He has become an improba- His two-year plan involves tripling his per- Starter
tank top $40
bly inspiring public figure, a beacon of seren- sonal fortune and using his passport—his sunglasses $185 (for pack of
ity and gratitude for positivity-starved times. first ever—to see the world. (Already checked Retrosuperfuture three)
He’s in a more stable, focused place on his off the bucket list: Iceland, where Gucci jewelry, his own Calvin Klein
Underwear
fifth post-prison album, out soon; it’s called documented his first dip in a hot spring on
THIS PAGE shorts $250
Evil Genius, a perfect title for a victory- Instagram. The video of his journey—“Ya boy jacket $1,650 Daniel Patrick
lap album by a once derided Trap God who Guwop in a lagoon!”—went instantly viral.) Prada
jewelry, his own
may have shaped 2018 hip-hop more than any “I want to go to Australia,” he says. “I want tank top,
other artist. His endorsement helped break to go to Africa. I want to see the animals. I grooming by
stylist’s own
heather blaine
Migos, Nicki Minaj, Young Thug, and Mike want to just ride on out. Take a safari. Just pants $2,315 at creative
WiLL Made-It. He was dumping triple-disc show me everything.” Philipp Plein management
1 5 2 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
MARK ANTHONY GREEN M AT T M A RT I N
Leave it to the king of sex to re-invent the first thing
you put on every day—and the last thing you take o≠
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 1 5 5
Tom Ford for your underwear supply is a bit like
going to a vegan’s house for a barbecue. Underwear
is a new frontier for Tom—completely. He doesn’t
even wear boxers or briefs. In fact, he’s notori-
ous for going commando. (In the fashion world,
his wardrobe malfunctions and more, um, voluntary exposures are
well known.) But his new “fully developed” underwear line is every
bit the Tom Ford we know and love. The underwear is damn soft,
but the real draw here is the look. You can pick a pair of flesh-toned
skivvies or something more exotic. “Let’s say you’re going on a date,”
he says. “When you take o≠ your pants, you want it to be kind of a
great moment—which of course it will be when you take o≠ your
underwear. But before you get to that point, why wouldn’t you want
silver metallic underwear? Or zebra? Or leopard? Or something
a little crazier?” ¶ That’s kind of the entire guiding ethos of Tom
Ford. It’s how the sex-appeal shaman made Gucci a temple of
swank and his own namesake fashion brand a powerhouse for
every leading man and woman in Hollywood. Tom Ford makes
the tux for the big premiere, the suit for the big meeting, etc. Sure,
there are designers who make pricier clothes than Tom Ford. (Not
many, though there are some!) But there’s no world as luxurious,
mahogany-wood-filled, and plush to the touch T H E S E P A G E S
as Tom Ford’s. His name alone is synonymous with underwear (from
$60 to $350)
the good life. And yet even with Ford being one of Tom Ford
the most consistent fashion hitmakers for over hair by thom
priano for
30 years, he’s still surprising us. Take as a start his r+co haircare.
makeup by
not-so-luxurious snacking. fulvia farolfi.
with at least three doughnuts a day. How big is your closet? Yikes! And I assume that wasn’t a rare
I have no clothes! I wear the same suits day that you wore underwear, correct?
Really? over and over and over to the point they I was sitting there with my butt hanging
Absolutely. I was just eating some Cheetos literally wear out, because when that’s all out at a restaurant. So anyways, I need to
before this interview. But my lunch is going you do all day long—dress other people order myself some clothes.
to be totally vegan, absolute protein. I’m and design clothes—the last thing you want
very conscious of my main source of food. to do when you have five or three minutes It’s di∞cult to celebrate any Tom Ford
But you know the thing that’s like cocaine is to order new clothes for yourself. So I creation with the man himself. For starters,
to me? Those little mini doughnuts covered don’t. I went to a restaurant the other day, he’s not much of a smell-the-roses kind
in the white powder. I cannot see them and I was having lunch. I felt a little bit of of guy. Moreover, by the time we get the
without having to eat the pack immediately. cold on my butt. I reached around, and my new product in our hands, he’s o≠ working
It’s like, if we have them in the o∞ce, I eat pants had ripped all the way from my waist on the next big thing. When we spoke
every single one. completely to the bottom of my butt. in July, he was preparing his women’s
P H O T O G R A P H B Y T O M F O R D A N D J E F F B U R T O N
What better way to
celebrate the newest,
sexiest part of Tom Ford’s
world than with his friends,
supermodels Shanina
Shaik and Sean O’Pry?
collection, which was due in two weeks. Are you worried that all of these and when Jack [Tom’s son] grows up, I’ll
He’s coy about film projects he may have collections and films will eventually think, Why was I doing all that? And that
in the works—Ford directed ‘A Single Man’ put you in a creative slump? I should’ve spent more time with him. But
in 2009 and ‘Nocturnal Animals’ in I never actually stop. It’s a sort of constant I think a lot of people who work hard have
2016—but it’s not because he thinks the thing. So I don’t have time to be in a slump. that same fear if you have kids. Richard
public isn’t ready to hear about them. In fact, that’s a word I think you have to have [Ford’s partner] is going to be almost 70, and
It’s to keep the sta≠ of the Tom Ford fashion the luxury to sit around and say, “I can’t I’ll be 57 this summer, and I’m becoming
house from flipping their shit when they think of anything.” I never have that luxury. very aware of time and how much time we
hear he’s o≠ in Tinseltown again getting I’m constantly producing. So if I’m in a have. My biggest fear is looking back and
all noir and sexy. His life is mania— slump right now, I don’t know until later. thinking, Did I spend that time well? ’Cause
powered by ego, purpose, and doughnuts, you don’t get it back. That’s it.
apparently. But how long can Tom Ford Do you worry about “balance”?
keep on Tom Ford–in’? My biggest fear is that I work too hard, mark anthony green is gq’s style editor.
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 1 5 7
HE’S BEEN THE SIDEKICK-IN-CHIEF
FOR LONGTIME COLLABORATORS LIKE
WILL FERRELL AND PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON,
MOVING SEAMLESSLY FROM ONE
END OF THE DRAMA-COMEDY SPECTRUM
TO THE OTHER.
IS STEPPING ONTO
CENTER STAGE
LUCY ARMSTRONG
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 1 5 9
LOOKED LIKE A excited to re-interpret for their movie, you loud they want. Well, I got news for them.
53 -year-old man start to realize, Well, if I’m going to get more There’s a thing called the law.’ ” They’d impro-
since I was 18. In interesting opportunities that challenge me, vise, Anderson catching it all on tape. The
my face, anyway. My I’m going to have to start generating them.” footage would eventually yield Reilly’s lonely
body has caught up now. This suits me.” He laughed. “It’s an obvious thing that just o∞cer in Magnolia, but at the time, the exer-
Drinking tea and mauling a tomato- took me a long time to figure out.” cise scratched a new itch. He was improvising
and-mozzarella tartine on the patio outside Conveniently, his figuring out the industry seriously, but it was also deeply, stupidly, pee-
a Los Angeles photo studio, John C. Reilly coincided with the industry figuring out him. your-pants hilarious, Ho≠man faking a heart
was explaining how, growing up alongside “It’s like suddenly chocolate ice cream becom- attack before sprinting away cursing. “It was
what looks to be America’s final generation ing wildly popular,” he said. “I’ve been here all really, really, really, really, really, really fun,”
of true open-a-movie-solo stars, he’d crafted along. I’m a standard flavor that’s been avail- Anderson recalled.
a career as Hollywood’s ultimate sidekick. able. I’m not a new flavor. Not the flavor of And then they made Boogie Nights, and
And how he’d managed to find roles in films the month. I’m just chocolate. And goddamn! Magnolia, Reilly quietly becoming America’s
this fall and winter that let him share center People like me right now.” most reliable character actor. In 2002 he had
stage: The Sisters Brothers, a Western; Ralph parts in three of the year’s five Best Picture
Breaks the Internet: Wreck-It Ralph 2, his nominees: Gangs of New York, The Hours,
first sequel; Holmes and Watson, another IN THE ’90S, AFTER a childhood among six and Chicago, for which he earned a best-
Will Ferrell team-up; and Stan and Ollie, siblings on Chicago’s South Side and a spell in supporting-actor nomination. (Maybe the
about the comedy duo Laurel and Hardy. that city’s hard-driving, ego-denying theater best measure of Reilly’s enduring legacy of
“In every one, I have a strong partnership,” scene, Reilly jumped to movies—catching versatility is that the Internet has started
he said. He’d been wondering: “Why is that? small parts, his facility often leading direc- uno∞cially giving the “John C. Reilly Award”
Why aren’t you just a stand-alone movie star? tors to rewrite and expand roles for him. A to the actor who appears in the most best-pic-
Why don’t you just do that? I know a lot of few pictures in, the Sundance Director’s Lab ture nominees in a given year.)
actors, that’s their thing. They don’t do buddy paired him with a young filmmaker named Once he’d firmly established himself in the
movies, or they don’t do partnerships. Why Paul Thomas Anderson. Reilly played the lead serious acting world of critical acclaim, some-
aren’t you like that?” in Anderson’s star-crossed debut, Hard Eight, thing funny happened. Reilly had met Will
By the time Reilly and I sat down together, and made supporting roles iconic in Boogie Ferrell a few times, and then, around 2000, did
he had the answers. “Number one,” he said, Nights and Magnolia. “I was as big a fan as a table read for Anchorman that has become
“things like that don’t generally come you can be of somebody who’d made five the stu≠ of legend. “We were like, ‘God, that
my way.” Reilly—rock-solid, mop of curly movies,” Anderson told me. “He didn’t look guy is so good,’ ” Ferrell told me. Reilly wanted
hair, brow like a bridge strut—has always like anybody, he didn’t sound like anybody to do the movie, but a prior commitment got
understood what Hollywood will and will else. And that was really exciting.” They grew in the way. “I think I was doing Gangs of New
not give to a guy like him, but he’s also spent close, each letting the other into his career. York at the time,” he said with seemingly real
30 years figuring out ways to turn looking Anderson credits Reilly with figuring out the disappointment. (Director Adam McKay: “I
like a 53-year-old into a basically unparal- ending to There Will Be Blood. said, ‘Dude, you have a Martin Scorsese movie.
leled filmography. One summer, waiting for the financing You don’t need to apologize to us.’ ”)
“I’ve finally come to embrace that: This is for Boogie Nights to get settled, they were So when the opportunity arose to do
the way I look,” he said in his French horn of a bored and frustrated. Cops was relatively Talladega Nights, he jumped. And from
voice. “I know I don’t look like Brad Pitt. I love new back then, and they were obsessed. there, the follow-up was, Reilly says, a no-
Brad Pitt. I really do—he’s one of my favor- They’d call each another from their respec- brainer. Step Brothers, the tale of two 40-ish
ites—but I’m never going to be like that guy. tive living rooms and stay on the phone men-children living at home, cracked
I’m never going to walk in that guy’s shoes. while they watched. Reilly had a goatee at $100 million in the U.S. and had the added
This is what I’m like, so I’m here. Some people the time, and Anderson gave him holy hell honor of prompting Roger Ebert to write, in
like what I do, and there’s something freeing for it, but when Reilly caved and shaved it his review of the film: “Sometimes I think I am
about that.” o≠, he realized he looked like a cop. The next living in a nightmare. All about me, standards
Reilly is given to understatement. step was obvious: “If you’ve got nothing else are collapsing, manners are evaporating,
“As you get older, this business can kind of to do, take a video camera and drive around,” people show no respect for themselves.”
typecast you or decide what your limits are Anderson said. Reilly explained: “He got me As far as Reilly is concerned, the two poles
OPENING PAGES, T YPE ILLUSTRATION: SIMON ABRANOWICZ.
G RO O M I N G : CAT H E R I N E F U R N I S S F O R TAC K A RT I ST G RO U P.
for you. So as you get into it, and you’re not in an L.A.P.D. uniform from a costume friend, of his career—the nervy pathos of Magnolia
some new, fresh commodity that everyone’s and we would drive around” in Anderson’s at one end and the Talladega Nights scene
Oldsmobile. “We’d call up, where Reilly’s character imagines Jesus
like, Phil Ho≠man and say, as wearing “a tuxedo T-shirt, ’cause it says,
‘Phil, we’re coming over. ‘I wanna be formal, but I’m here to party, too’ ”
Someone called the police on the other—aren’t terribly far apart.
because your music was too “I’m good at being sincere when acting.
RE I L LY loud. Just go with it. You’ll I’m good at believing what I’m saying,” he
C T I N G," E V I NG
see when we get there.’ ” explained, reducing a career of remark-
A L I
WHEN OOD AT BE
They had fun. “On the able breadth to a general folksiness. “But I
way to Phil’s house,” Reilly can’t take something and make it funny. If
. " I ' M G said, dropping into his dim, it’s circumstantially funny, or if in relation-
SA I D
thick cop voice, “I would be ship to the other people around me it’s funny,
like, ‘Apparently’—and I I can do that.” But “that” is truly rare—it’s
had the Oakleys on—‘this far easier to give a comic actor a six-pack
individual thinks they can than to find a “serious” actor with Olympic-
play their music however grade improv chops.
1 6 0 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
OPENING PAGES my one time.” Reilly
jacket laughed while he
Mister Freedom told the story; he’s an
other clothes, actor, not a Method
his own
farter. But while he
THIS PAGE made his bones with
jacket dramatic parts, the
David Saxby funny stu≠ opened
vest, new avenues artis-
his own
tically—and made
shirt him the kind of guy
Emporio Armani
at whom people bel-
hat low “Boats ‘N Hoes!”
in airports.
“I think it’s well
known that Step Brothers is one of my favorite
movies,” Phoenix said. “It’s a broad comedy
and he’s functioning in that space, and yet it
feels like there’s such truth to the character.
It doesn’t feel like it’s just played for laughs.
There’s a real history there for that character.”
There’s real history to Eli, Reilly’s Sisters
Brothers character, too. Reilly and Phoenix
play hit-man siblings pursuing a target down
the Pacific coast in the 1850s. While Phoenix’s
Charlie is the bu≠oon, Eli gets the romantic
scene. He wins a solo gunfight. He also makes
brushing his teeth an act of comic genius. The
lesson: John C. Reilly’s tongue is a world-class
character actor, because of course it is.
The film is based on a novel by Patrick
DeWitt, a friend and former collaborator of
Reilly’s; Reilly and his wife, producer Alison
Dickey, optioned the rights before the book
was published in 2011 and spent nearly a
decade shepherding it to the screen. Reilly
always saw himself playing Eli, but only if the
director he and Dickey chose—French film-
maker Jacques Audiard, making his English-
language debut—felt the same way. Audiard
did: “I knew some of John’s work, and I felt as
So I’ll submit that Reilly was bullshitting screwing around, he explained—he was pay- if I knew and loved him before truly knowing
me, or at least being modest. Multiple col- ing homage to John Malkovich. Malkovich him. John as Eli was a great idea, anyway.”
laborators described him as riotously funny. was the king of the Chicago theater scene And Eli is perhaps the role of Reilly’s
“Only if somebody hadn’t been paying atten- right when Reilly was breaking in, and career—the first that feels big enough to
tion would they be surprised that he was during a production of Curse of the Starving contain everything Reilly does best, his over-
somehow a comedic actor,” Anderson said. Class, Reilly explained, “the legend was whelming earnestness pressed in new, satisfy-
Joaquin Phoenix, Reilly’s Sisters Brothers Malkovich peed on stage in front of the ing directions. Imagine one of his characters
co-star, went further: “He does have a natural audience every night. All of us in my friend in an Anderson film, weary and good-hearted
ability to just make any moment very sensual. group were actors at the time. We’re like, Oh, but now extraordinarily talented with a pis-
You would find him oftentimes on set just my God, how did he do it? Malkovich is so tol. “He is one of the funniest people I know,”
lying on the rocks in a very seductive pose, just Method, oh, my God.” Phoenix said. “But I think we know that. We’ve
sunning. And it was a lot. It was beautiful.” So when it came time to make Step seen that in films. What’s unexpected is this
Brothers, Reilly channeled Malkovich. “Ask other part of him that I think really shines in
Will—I did it a number of times and in a num- this film, a real depth and a real sensitivity
WHENEVER POSSIBLE, Reilly likes to align ber of scenes,” Reilly said. “But in that one”— that I don’t know that we’ve seen before.”
some splinter of his own personality with his the interview scene—“it was not that long, Reilly and Phoenix shared a house in
character’s. But sometimes darker methods of course. But I was like, Boom, there. I did rural Spain before they started filming.
are required. I asked him about a scene in it. Put that on my SAG card.” Ferrell more or They’d take three-hour silent walks to build
Step Brothers—the one where Reilly’s Dale less confirmed it: “I think that became a thing their brotherly rapport, and ride horses and
Doback, 40 and interviewing in a tux for a job where we would really try to, in the middle shoot guns to look proficient on film. Reilly’s
at a sporting-goods store, lets o≠ a 15-second of the scene, if you happened to have gas, horse was named Pollito—Little Chicken.
trumpet blast of a fart. just let it go and try to mess with the other He and the horse grew close, too, Reilly
“I was really cutting real farts,” he said, guy and stay in the scene. John is an expert stopping by the stables on weekends to
still a little astonished. But he wasn’t just at it. He was [farting] probably five times to feed Pollito apples. (continued on next page)
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 1 6 1
J O H N C. R E I L LY HO US TON
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H O US TO N C O N T I N U E D
produces an exceptionally funny YouTube with a sweet, slightly spicy Hennessy glaze. activists and collectors who moved to Houston
series of cooking videos called “Trill Meals.” (There is also a Cîroc Mango Habanero ver- from France during World War II, the Menil
“I think Bun could be elected mayor,” I was sion that I felt would be too performatively is one of the world’s great museum-going
told by Shepherd, who once had him collabo- woke to order.) The legs are also available experiences: Its campus of bungalows and
rate on a comic-book version of tasting notes stu≠ed with shrimp Alfredo or crawfish mac galleries seems to grow organically out of the
for the wine list at Underbelly. and cheese. If that sounds vulgar, consider surrounding Montrose area. Its main lawn has
I met Bun B at his barber, on the southwest that it is reminiscent of nothing so much as become a kind of public square for picnick-
side of the city. It had been a typical Houston the signature dish of Montreal chef Martin ers, yoga groups, hippies doing circus tricks,
arrival in that I was convinced, pulling up to Picard, who stu≠s a slow-cooked pig’s trotter and those just napping under the live oaks. It
what seemed like an abandoned office complex, with foie gras at his restaurant Au Pied de is also the anchor of a museum district rich
that my GPS had failed. Eventually I noticed a Cochon and in return receives endless acco- with the benefits of the kind of institutional
tiny barber-pole sign on one entrance. Inside, lades, not to mention 60 Canadian dollars. philanthropic art funding that comes with
the rapper, who was born Bernard Freeman, periodic oil booms. The Houston Center for
was being tended to by Nicholas Howard, self- Photography is nearby, as is the Contemporary
styled Barber to the Stars, a title bolstered by THE FRONTIER COMES in di≠erent guises: Arts Museum Houston, the Museum of Fine
photos of athlete and rapper clients covering Sometimes it looks like a pickup truck bar- Art, and, most indispensably, Rothko Chapel,
the wall behind his shop’s single chair. Bun B reling up I-45 at night, bouncing behind it the artist’s last commission and a place (to
shrugged when I repeated Shepherd’s com- the blackened tube of a smoker at full burn,
ment, sending the faintest ripple of alarm smoke billowing down the road like steam
across the face of Howard, who happened to be from a locomotive. This is the Bookity Bookity “There’s a sense of
holding a razor millimeters from Bun B’s nose. Boudain Man, king of Houston’s pirate barbe- percolation in the arts
“That might be overstating it, but I’ll take it, I cuers, whose destination is a Walmart parking
guess,” Bun B said. “I try to represent the city lot somewhere north of the Loop, I-610, south
that’s very palpable,”
with pride.” Howard recovered and proceeded of the beltway, TX-8. Rabinow said. “You have
cutting his client’s beard in a line as straight as I am being vague because, as Bookity a creative class that can
a West Texas road. tells me, he’s “down with the underground
As Bun B told it, the rise of Houston rap was economy,” a position that somehow doesn’t a≠ord to be here and an
another example of the city’s frontier ethos. preclude taking credit cards or having a innate sense of confidence
“Everybody who got famous here did it work- Facebook page but that has a well-established
ing outside the system,” he said. “It was a lot history in Houston. “We have a long tradi- that you can try anything.”
of hand-to-hand: going out, meeting people, tion of ‘shade tree’ barbecue,” said J. C. Reid,
making connections. If they had a buzz, they who co-founded and runs the Houston BBQ me, at least; part of its power is that it means
were the ones who created that buzz.” The Festival and writes a barbecue column for the di≠erent things to di≠erent people) of simul-
success of UGK, Geto Boys, and others drove Chronicle. “Somebody just sets up under a tree taneous melancholy and soothing.
the mainstream record business crazy, he said: and starts cooking. It’s old wildcatter culture.” Rabinow took me on a tour of the museum’s
“New York likes to lay claim to everything, and Bookity wears a chef ’s toque and a T-shirt newest building, the Menil Drawing Institute,
this was something they couldn’t lay claim to.” covered in hundred-dollar bills and the word proof that sometimes the frontier can come in
Perhaps as a sign of middle age and new civic hustle. He lost his left foot to diabetes last the guise of the old-fashioned institutional high
responsibility, he now downplays the role of year, so he’s in a wheelchair, and while a culture as well. The $40 million building, by
syrup in creating the Houston sound: “It was younger employee works the smoker, he works the firm Johnston Marklee, is stark white, with
just a reflection of the vibe. Very laid-back.” the crowd. A steady stream of cars and SUVs, overhangs that echo Renzo Piano’s main Menil
Another thing we tend to mean when we driven by whites, African-Americans, Latinos, Building as they extend out into the surround-
say a place has gotten cool is “cool for white and Asians, head o≠ into the night with fat, ing area and crisp, folding angles that bring to
people.” The sheer size and centerlessness of ricey links of boudin sausage; slabs of ribs; mind the works on paper it is built to celebrate.
Houston has spared it some of the gentrifi- pork-shoulder steaks pulled, sizzling, o≠ of We walked through bright, empty galleries,
cation debates that roil other cities, but it is the smoker’s burn box; and dripping, moist archives, and research rooms as workmen
hardly immune. Close to downtown, the Third links of deer sausage made from deer that a moved past us, attending to finishing touches.
Ward, a traditionally African-American neigh- couple of police-officer customers who are also Given the fragile nature of paper, the building
borhood that’s recently seen a glut of high- hunters bring him. “That’s wild meat,” he said. would be brought to optimal temperature
priced construction, has become a particular “Not everybody can stand the wild.” and humidity for six weeks before any art was
battleground and inspired a pushback. Sometimes the frontier looks like The introduced. That was not the only consider-
“White communities have their co≠ee Orange Show, an extraordinary artifact of out- ation being made for climate: At key doorways,
shops and their bars and that kind of thing. sider art in the East End, built over the course Rabinow pointed out, there were riveted cuts in
Black communities are starting more and of several decades by an eccentric postal car- the floor, like those on the deck of a boat. These
more to invest in themselves,” Bun B said. “It’s rier named Je≠ McKissack. McKissack was were dams, programmed to automatically rise
a conscious e≠ort to bring black businesses obsessed with the healthful properties of if water ever breached the already formidable
into black neighborhoods. It’s just part of our oranges and constructed a riotous, colorful network of pumps and bulwarks designed to
DIY nature.” shrine filled with twirling weather vanes, protect the collection against the intrusion of
Black Restaurant Week started in Houston welded birds, fluttering Texas flags, and cryptic weather. Harvey had been an unexpected test,
in 2016 and has since spread to five other mosaic proclamations from Confucius, Aesop, and the dams had not even been called into use.
cities. The restaurant Kitchen 713 has been and others. McKissack reportedly felt a keen Rabinow spent nearly 30 years as a cura-
one participant in the promotion, serving sense of competition with another monument tor of modern and contemporary art at the
“Global Soul” food from its location near to human insanity and hubris going up across Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York
Rice University. Another is Turkey Leg Hut, a town: the Houston Astrodome. It pleases me before returning to Houston, where she’d
wildly successful late-night restaurant owned on his behalf to note that the Dome closed its spent her high school years. “I came for the
by the couple Lynn and Kia Price. Music doors over a decade ago while The Orange Menil, but Houston has been the real sur-
was already pounding at noon, when I sat at Show is still open for visitors, administered by prise,” she said. “There’s a sense of percola-
the bar. Behind it hangs a yellow neon sign: a foundation that also oversees a collection of tion in the arts that’s very palpable. You have
when life gives you lemonade, add mosaics just down the street named Smither a creative class that can a≠ord to be here and
hennessy. That apparently goes equally for Park, and the annual Houston Art Car Parade. an innate sense of confidence that you can try
when life gives you turkey legs. The Hut’s sig- “There’s a wonderful quirkiness that has anything. It might work, it might not, but peo-
nature item is a tomahawk-size leg, smoked a home in Houston,” said Rebecca Rabinow, ple are going to show up.”
until ruby red and ready to fall apart at the the director of the Menil Collection. Named These qualities—community and a≠ord-
slightest touch; one version comes lacquered for John and Dominique de Menil, visionary ability—shouldn’t be underestimated. They’re
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 1 6 3
H O US TO N C O N T I N U E D SPERM C O UNT ZERO
part of what allowed someone like Chris Wise with a young, beautiful body, sometimes two;
to stay in the city. Wise, 31, is the talent booker if you ever find yourself asking “Where did all
for the Day for Night music-and-arts festi- these hipsters come from?” look to the fertile
val (which was headlined last year by Nine Hammock Fields of East Texas.
Inch Nails and took place in a converted post Axelrad’s owner, Adam Brackman, cut
office), a part-time bartender, and the bass- his teeth helping out and providing a venue
ist for the neo-Americana band Buxton. He for displaced New Orleans musicians after
grew up in La Porte, a town 30 minutes east of Hurricane Katrina. The NOLA trumpeter
Houston dominated by petrochemical plants Kermit Ruffins is an Axelrad investor and
that nearly every high schooler was expected plays regular gigs there. (Some 250,000 New
to go work for after graduation. As a kid more Orleanians spent time in Houston after that
interested in film, musical theater, and art, storm; an estimated 40,000 stayed for good—a
Wise had other plans, but unlike those of pre- small population bump but one that can’t have C O N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E 1 4 9
had anything but a happy e≠ect on Houston’s
taste for eating, drinking, and going out.) which took place in May, on Lidingö, a small
If there’s anything left in the It was open-mic night, and on a large island in the inner Stockholm archipelago. A
exposed wreckage of tech stage near the neon tree, a bearded guy with hundred spermatologists in one place: You’d
a guitar sang “Ain’t No Sunshine” while surf think (incorrectly) that the jokes would be
utopianism, this is it: The videos played on the wall behind him. He good. Skakkebæk had told me I’d be able to
damn phones really do help was followed by a young black duo. He, with find some dissenters to the conclusions of
dreads creeping out from under a bucket hat, Swan’s meta-analysis there, but what I wit-
people find one another. started rapping in a kind of mumble while nessed instead was the final vanquishing of
she crooned Fill me up / Fill me up / You’ve the few remaining doubters.
vious generations, that didn’t automatically got to fill me up in a way that made it clear At the welcome dinner (reindeer
mean heading east or west. “New York or L.A. she didn’t mean with gratitude. The perfor- and rooster), I met Hagai Levine, the Israeli
never really occurred to me,” he said. Instead, mance threatened to wander o≠ course until co-author of the Hebrew University/Mount
he set up in Houston, where energy may rule the “Ain’t No Sunshine” guy reappeared, Sinai meta-analysis. Levine, who is 40,
the roost (nearly every person I met could strumming, behind them, and suddenly it all told me we had reasons to worry. “I’m saying
quote the current price for a barrel of crude oil came together. that we should hope for the best and pre-
o≠ the top of their head), but there’s still room It was hard not to think of the Su≠ers’ “Gulf pare for the worst,” he said. “And that is the
for a young man to pursue talent booking/bass Coast Soul” and of Kam Franklin, the band’s possibility that we will become extinct. That’s
playing/bartending while living with two dogs mighty-voiced lead singer. Raised in Houston, a possibility we must seriously consider.
in a one-bedroom apartment near downtown Franklin got her first gigs by inventing agents I’m not saying it’s going to happen. I’m not say-
for $600 a month. and managers: fake old white guys with fake ing it’s likely to happen. I’m not saying that’s
Handsome and slender, with a sweep of e-mail accounts. the prediction. I’m just saying we should be
hair in something approaching a pompadour, “I used ‘Mike’ a lot. Mike seems like a trusty prepared for such a possibility. That’s all. And
Wise appears to know literally every person guy but also tough,” she said. we are not.”
in town, a condition that grew so comically In those days, Franklin could easily have His session the next morning—“Are
ostentatious during an evening bar crawl borrowed the Bookity Bookity Boudain Man’s Spermatozoa at the Verge of Extinction?”—
that he felt the need to embarrassedly assure hustle T-shirt: Wednesdays and Thursdays, would be the defining event of the conference:
me that he hadn’t set up any of our encoun- she sang at open mics at R&B clubs on Almeda It cast a shadow over all the other talks. At
ters. Echoing many others I’d met, he said Road or Emancipation Avenue, joints where a panel discussion that followed his presen-
that technology has helped Houston’s scene you needed to crush covers of Erykah Badu tation, Levine continued his argument for
cohere. Until recently, it was simply hard to or Chaka Khan or Beyoncé 50 or 60 times addressing the causes of the crisis, saying,
navigate the far-flung corners of the city, much with the house band before anybody even “My default, if I don’t know, is that it is up
less gather a crowd. “There was always great thought of asking about original material. to the manufacturers of chemicals to prove
food, but it was 30 miles away,” he said. “There “Late Tuesdays, I’d go sing with a country that their chemicals are safe. But I don’t feel
were people who wanted to come see shows, band I used to mess around with,” she said. like I need any more evidence to take action
but they didn’t want to drive.” Now social net- “Saturdays, I’d go hang with the punk and ska with chemicals already known to disrupt the
works have brought people of similar interests kids. And the rest of the week it would be stu- endocrine system.”
together; Google Maps help them find places dio gigs with rappers, if I could get them.”
to meet; ride shares let them stay out later On the road, people still express disbelief
getting drunk and then home safe. If there’s that the band is from Houston. “We get, ‘Are We can glimpse what our
anything left in the exposed wreckage of tech y’all from Austin? Are y’all from New Orleans?’ low-sperm-count future
utopianism, this is it: The damn phones really I’m like, ‘No, we’re from H-Town, Texas. Where
do help people find one another. we’re going to stay.’ ”
might look like. It will be
The Su≠ers’ new album, Everything Here, arduous to conceive, and
leads o≠ with a song called “Intro (A Headnod expensive—so expensive
the frontier looks like
A N D, Y ES, S O M E T I M ES to Houston).” It features Paul Wall rapping
Hipster Brigadoon, as in the sprawling com- over a background of voices singing: It might that having children may
pound of a bar in midtown called Axelrad Beer not be that pretty / But it looks real good to me no longer be an option
Garden. In the center of the outdoor space / It might not be your favorite city / But it’s
is a large tree covered in neon. Around that really got a hold on me. available to all couples.
totem, when Wise and I visited, was arrayed Maybe it’s that sense of defiance that ulti-
an entire souk: There was an Airstream out- mately defines Houston’s cool—the sense that The organizer of the symposium, Lars
fitted with beer taps. Massage tables. Shelves a city where cool isn’t the primary commodity Björndahl, a Swedish spermatologist who
filled with board games. Someone was selling can a≠ord to lie back and let the world come to had presented earlier in the morning, urged
churros from a folding table. At another, a it, whenever the world catches on. As Matthew caution. “I have great respect for epidemi-
South Asian man o≠ered biryanis. Couples Odam’s passenger put it, before closing the car ological studies, but we should remember
wound their way through, carrying steaming door and taking o≠ toward the Menil’s lawn that mathematical correlations don’t prove
boxes from the adjacent pizzeria. Along one and into legend: “Houston is cool because that there is a causative relation,” he said.
long side, there was a grove of hammocks Houston doesn’t give a fuck about being cool.” Questions from the audience—often taking
hanging from steel racks and swaying in the the form of statements—were much along
summer breeze, each as heavy as a seed pod brett martin is a gq correspondent. the same lines: Be careful of a bias toward
1 6 4 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
SP E R M C O U N T Z E R O C O N T I N U E D CHRI S HEM SWORTH
the assumption that all these things are an epidemiologist famous for fighting the
connected. Levine nodded with only a hint regulation of chemicals from her position as
of chagrin, like a patient professor waiting president of the American Council on Science
hopefully for his students to catch up. and Health, which has received funding from
David Mortimer, who runs a company that Chevron, DuPont, and other companies in the
designs and establishes assisted-conception plastic business.)
laboratories, was one of the only members Assuming that we’re unable to wean
of the audience willing to question Levine’s ourselves o≠ plastics and other marvels
study itself. He pointed out that methods for of modern science, we may be stuck inno-
measuring sperm had changed dramatically vating our way out of this mess. How long
over the time period of the study and that the we’re able to outrun the drop in sperm count
old studies were profoundly unreliable. may depend, finally, on how good we get
Levine was ready with an answer. “So at IVF and other fertility treatments. When C O N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E 1 1 7
that’s one of the reasons we also conducted a I spoke with Marc Goldstein, a urologist and
sensitivity analysis,” he said from the stage, surgeon at Weill Cornell medical center Hemsworth’s clinical contentment seems to
“with studies with sample collection only in New York City, he said that while there have started when he and his wife moved near
after 1995—and the slope was even steeper. was “no question I’ve seen a big increase the easternmost edge of Australia—to Byron
So that could not explain the decline we see in men with male-factor infertility,” he Bay, a gorgeous beach town perched on steep
after 1995.” wasn’t worried for the future of the spe- cli≠s that plunge straight into the ocean. In
“I’ve never said there was no decline cies. Assisted reproduction would keep 2014, burned out from the increasing hassle of
in sperm counts,” Mortimer said, a bit the babies coming, no matter how sickly paparazzi in Los Angeles, they went in search
defensively. Levine, who had been so gra- men’s sperm become. of quiet. They visited Australia, and Pataky,
cious and engaged with his critics, began It’s true that fertility treatments have who is from Spain, wasn’t initially impressed,
to look a little tired. He rallied, though, already given men with extremely low sperm Hemsworth says. “Both trips we did, it was like
when the group agreed to put out a joint counts the chance to be fathers. Indeed, by pouring rain. And she was like, ‘I don’t know
statement about the crisis. The chairs of the looking at their cases, we can glimpse what what the big fuss is,’ ” he recalls. “Then I said,
symposium called on the world to acknowl- our low-sperm-count future might look like.
edge that male reproductive health We know that it will be arduous to conceive,
was essential for the survival of the species, and expensive—so expensive that having chil- “I really do feel a sense
that its decline was alarming and should dren may no longer be an option available to of ease for the first time
be studied, and that at present it was being all couples. A fertility-treatment-dependent
neglected in funding and attention. future is also unlikely to produce a birth rate
in years,” Hemsworth
Mortimer came around and ended up anywhere near current levels. says. “I don’t mean that
signing the statement. When I caught up Not long ago, I spoke with Chris Wohl, as an assessment of
with him later, he wasn’t nearly as dismis- a research materials/surface engineer
sive of the study’s conclusions as I expected. at the NASA Langley Research Center in my achievements. I just
He agreed there was little question that sperm Virginia, who spent six years trying to mean I’m content with
counts were dropping, and he even embraced conceive a child. Both he and his wife had
some of the direst predictions of scientists like fertility problems: Wohl’s sperm count what’s going on.”
Levine. “The epigenetics are the scary bit,” was under 2 million per milliliter—the aver-
he told me, “because what we’re doing now age count we’d expect to reach, at the cur- ‘Let’s do a trip up to Byron Bay,’ and we get o≠
a≠ects the future of the human race.” When rent rate, by 2034. “We started in the normal the plane and it’s raining. I’m like, ‘Oh, my God.
even the skeptics are scared, it’s probably time way of trying to have kids,” he said, “and after I’m not selling it.’ And she instantly went, ‘No,
to pay attention. a few years, we said, ‘Okay, let’s talk to some there’s something di≠erent about this place. It
folks.’ ” They went through several rounds is a very special place.’ She went, ‘This could be
of intrauterine insemination. “And then it. It could be the best decision we’ve made.’ ”
CAN ANY THING BE DONE? Over the past after that sixth time, we said, ‘This isn’t work- The charm of Hemsworth’s life by the sea
20 years, there have been occasional ing. We need to kind of up our technology can be glimpsed on Instagram. That publicist
attempts to limit the number of endocrine game.’ So we went to a reproductive endo- who once told him to be cryptic and withhold-
disruptors in circulation, but inevitably the crinologist and went through several rounds ing about his personal life might be surprised
fixes are insubstantial: one chemical removed of IVF. And then when that failed, we by how the world has changed. “The social-
in favor of another, which eventually were going to look into adoption. That’s media side of it is just trying to work out: How
turns out to have its own dangers. That when somebody came forward and said that do you keep up with the times?” Hemsworth
was the case with BPA, which was partly they would be a surrogate for us.” Finally, explains. “You see that Sylvester Stallone has
replaced by Bisphenol S, which might be with the surrogate, the process worked. He an Instagram account, and you kind of go,
even worse for you. The chemical industry, and his wife now have a healthy, strong- ‘This is the world we’re in.’ ”
unsurprisingly, has been resistant to the willed 4-year-old girl. When Hemsworth shares shots of his kids,
notion that the billions of dollars of reve- So perhaps that’s the solution: As long as his 20 million followers go especially crazy.
nue these products represent might also we hover somewhere above Sperm Count “In the few and rare times that he does, it’s
represent terrible damage to the human Zero, and with an assist from modern medi- genuine,” Waititi observes. He’s not curating
body, and have often followed the model cine, we have a shot. Men will continue to be anything; he’s just proud: “It’s ‘Here’s this
of Big Tobacco and Big Oil—fighting essential to the survival of the species. The amazing moment when my daughter was
regulation with lobbyists and funding problem with innovation, though, is that surfing!’ ” Waititi says with a laugh.
their own studies that suggest their products it never stops. A new technology known as Still, Hemsworth and Pataky are both
are harmless. The website for the American IVG—in vitro gametogenesis—is showing careful not to show their children’s faces in
Chemistry Council, an industry trade asso- early promise at turning embryonic stem photos. He bristles at any suggestion that he
ciation, has a page dedicated to phthalates cells into sperm. In 2016, Japanese scien- is somehow “selling” his life by sharing sweet
that mostly consists of calling Shanna Swan’s tists created baby mice by fertilizing normal tidings from his family. “The exploitation is
research “controversial” and asserting that mouse eggs with sperm created via IVG. The something I’m very wary of,” Hemsworth says.
her “use of methodologies that have not stem cells in question were taken from female “We’ve been o≠ered things, like ‘Advertise
been validated and unconventional data mice. There was no need for any males. such-and-such and have dinner with your
analysis have been criticized by the sci- family.’ There’s no way.”
entific community.” (Cited critics of Swan daniel noah halpern wrote about the Even on a relatively remote bay in
include Elizabeth Whelan, now deceased, Singularity in the November 2014 issue. Australia, the threats of fame can crop up.
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 1 6 5
C H RI S H E M SWO RT H C O N T I N U E D T H E P O I S O N WAR
Recently, Hemsworth was out with his a relative of Yulia’s back home, a cousin, had
son when he spotted some paparazzi. He tried given interviews to the Russian and British
to ignore them, but then one of his sons took media, pointing out she’d been denied a UK
o≠ his bathing suit. “He’s naked, and I look visa to visit her relatives and making a disarm-
over, and they’re still shooting,” Hemsworth ing suggestion that echoed right back through
says. “I ran over, and they knew. I just very the years. What if all that ailed Sergei and Yulia
pointedly and definitely said, ‘Don’t you dare.’ was a bad meal—food poisoning?
I was close to destroying the camera.” From London the Russian embassy pushed
for consular access to the Skripals, a request
that would later be repeated by Vladimir Putin
A SOMMELIER STANDS before us, wonder- himself. In a brief statement, Yulia politely,
ing whether Hemsworth would like a glass very carefully, declined.
of wine with his steak. Moments earlier we C O N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E 1 2 3
had admitted to each other our mutual illit-
eracy on the topic of wine. That sort of shared Midsummer, a 45-year-old British man 6. “Some Analytical Work”
ignorance can feel comforting and egalitar- named Charlie Rowley found what appeared FEW OUTSIDE MOSCOW knew the world of
ian—nobody wants to look like a fool in front to be an unopened box of perfume and brought Kremlin intrigue—and what happened when
of the sommelier. it home. A few days later, he gave the perfume you found yourself on the wrong side of it—as
Before the guy arrived, I had joked that to his partner, Dawn Sturgess, a 44-year-old well as Valery Morozov, a Russian business-
the word I use when I’m trying to sound mother of three who was staying in a homeless man in his 60s now living in the London com-
knowledgeable about wine is “nostalgic”—a shelter in town. Sturgess sprayed her wrists muter town of Guildford, where he keeps up a
seemingly vague descriptor for a red wine with some of the bottle’s contents, which colorful blog about Russian politics. Morozov
with long legs and strong notes of bullshit. came out “oily,” Rowley recalled afterward, and his wife, Irina, were now in their sixth year
Hemsworth volunteered that his enological and did not smell like perfume. He quickly of restless exile in the UK, Valery having once
safe word is “jammy.” “We should go on a washed his hands. Sturgess had to lie down. risen fast and high in construction back in
wine tour!” he’d suggested, looking out the Rowley was later found frothing at the mouth, Moscow before he made “too many enemies”
window as though he might spot a vineyard and the couple were taken to the same hos- and had to flee. It was from reading Morozov’s
peeking from behind Parliament. pital as the Skripals. Samples sent to Porton blog posts after the attack that I’d learned of
“Do you have a Cabernet?” Hemsworth Down confirmed it was a novichok—the scav- a chance encounter he’d had a few months
asks the sommelier. enged bottle, it seems, may have been a vessel before—with Sergei Skripal.
“I do have some Cabs,” he says. “Something for the poison carried by attackers back in They had run into each other in December,
oaky? Something perfumy?” March. Guards returned to the ward; more Morozov recalled when I met him at his home.
“Something”—Hemsworth pauses, and cordons went up. After a week, Sturgess died Both of them were waiting for trains out of
I know what’s coming because he shoots in the hospital. Rowley recovered and was dis- London, and they’d stopped in at a grocery
me the same challenging look a cat gives charged back out into Salisbury, where locals store, not far from Waterloo Station, that spe-
you before batting your water glass o≠ the were being warned, firmly now, not to pick up cializes in delicacies imported from Russia.
table—“nostalgic.” anything they hadn’t themselves put down. Shrink-wrapped sausages the width of biceps.
The sommelier nods once and zips away, As a backdrop to all this, a vigorous informa- Colorful roe in jars. A certain kind of chocolate
presumably to consult whatever tome allows tion war had broken out between London and made from “bird’s milk.” By which was meant
a sommelier to describe a wine as “reticent” Moscow, and their row was coming to repre- (the store owner snickered when recounting
with confidence. Hemsworth cackles. The sent something larger and more sinister, too—a this to me later) bird shit.
sommelier quickly returns with a glass of the feud between the Russian Federation and the Morozov was stocking up on this chocolate
Châteauneuf-du-Pape. “It smells of co≠ee. NATO-anchored West. In April, when the Assad when he found Skripal in the shop, a pink-
Chocolate. Roast buns,” he tells Hemsworth, regime bombed a rebel-held Syrian city with faced deda, or grandfather, with a telltale
who reaches for his glass and gives it a sip. what were widely accepted to be chemical gait. “He looked like military intelligence,”
“That’s nostalgic for me,” he replies. “You weapons, Russia stood by Assad. Afterward, Morozov said. “You behave in a certain way,
know what I’d describe it as? Jammy.” in speeches making the case for Western your posture.” Irina was there in the shop that
He brings the glass to his lips again. retaliation, Teresa May directly and repeat- day, too, and the three exiles fell into conver-
“Someone told me that you’ve got to just sip edly invoked the Skripals—as if Yulia and her sation, discussing family, cats, the best jarred
it and say literally what comes to mind,” he father, who last they knew were out for pizza, herring on the surrounding shelves—and also
says. “I think it’s a smoky, musty…forest?” were now endorsing air strikes. work. Valery had his blog, rich and gossipy and
“You do like your wines,” the sommelier says In the hospital, Yulia’s health improved, stoked by old contacts back home who kept
with detectable snark. “If we’re going to hire, delighting those who treated her and—they him v teme—in-the-know—about Kremlin
I’ll let you know.” would admit—perplexing them. “To see the intrigue. Irina took jobs as an interior designer.
For now, of course, Hemsworth’s all set recovery happen and at such a pace,” one Skripal (the couple recalled) said something
career-wise. He’s all set on plenty of fronts, to of Yulia’s clinicians later told the BBC, “that that day about his own line of employment that
be honest. “I really do feel a sense of ease for I can’t easily explain.” The details of the would only later seem significant.
the first time in years. I don’t mean that as an Skripals’ medical treatment remain confiden- I spent hours in the company of Valery
assessment of my achievements. I just mean tial, though one source told me there was a Morozov this April, when the reverberations
I’m content with what’s going on and relaxed member of sta≠ at Salisbury District Hospital from Skripal’s poisoning were wildest. I found
and open about it,” he says. who also worked at Porton Down, which his bracing, fiercely un-Western way of looking
Gone are those old uncertainties—the helped doctors identify the symptoms of at the world a useful counterweight to all the
occasional feeling that he was a passive nerve-agent exposure relatively quickly. easy anti-Russian rhetoric in the daily press.
player in his own career. Gone, too, are the Anxious about overwhelming her, Yulia’s Despite his exile, he remained a Kremlin nos-
old assumptions about what it might take doctors were not sure how much to tell her talgist to his core; he’d drunk vodka, once,
for him to thrive. “I came into Hollywood about what was happening outside the hospi- with Vladimir Putin. When I asked him the
thinking I had to be Russell Crowe. I loved his tal walls. Her recovery, her headlong progress same questions I asked everybody about the
performances, and because of my physical- toward discharge, only made the diplomatic sit- Skripal hit—why? and why now?—Morozov
ity and my size, that was the obvious choice. uation knottier. Here was a Russian citizen, in a was withering about certain British assump-
I think I was aware that it could kind of get British hospital, under the protection of British tions. Whenever the poisoning was described
me in the door,” Hemsworth says. “But it police. If there were plans afoot to secretly as being ordered by Putin, he said, it showed
wasn’t me.” re-settle the Skripals upon their release from an awful naivety. “Everyone thinks that Putin
the hospital, the Russian embassy stated, this controls everything. No! He’s controlling only
lauren larson is a gq associate editor. would be seen “as an abduction.” Meanwhile what he controls.” To the Russian mind, the
1 6 6 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
T H E P O I S O N WA R C O N T I N U E D
Western impulse to have everything be dis- have been useful—“logical.” When I consulted repeating with delicacy her refusal of assis-
tinctly this or that—if not the truth, a lie—read Robert Hannigan about all this, he said it tance from the embassy: “At the moment I do
as idiotically simplistic. didn’t sound so unusual. Once spies re-settle, not wish to avail myself of their services.”
He flung up his hands in frustration when I “they’re free individuals. They can do what The week of Sergei’s discharge, I sat with
asked, the Skripal hit in mind, how one might they want. And bear the risks, too.” a senior government source and asked what
draw the Kremlin’s permission structure. A tri- Boris Volodarsky told me if Skripal had was next for father and daughter. “They don’t
angle, I asked, with Putin at the top? Morozov plugged himself into Western intelligence know,” the source said. “I think that’s the hon-
was appalled. “A triangle!” He searched for a networks, that would have made him a con- est truth. Of course there will be o≠ers of deep
less facile description, something that would spicuous point of contact for anybody waver- levels of cover for both of them. But there’s a
properly conjure the mass of interconnecting ing within the Russian system. Volodarsky balance. You’ve got to live.” As to whether this
interests: the politicians, mafia, business- recounted that when Alexander Litvinenko living would finally be done in the UK, else-
people, generals, spies, all cross-assisting or first hoped to contact MI6, he sought an intro- where in Europe, or even somewhere in North
at cross-purposes. “It’s not a triangle. It’s the duction through Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB dou- America, they hadn’t decided. The source told
Internet.” He told me he believed that Skripal ble agent living in the UK. And once Litvinenko me, “They’re scared.”
had been punished for interfering, maybe inad- was on MI6’s books, a later defector named By early July, the investigators still hadn’t
vertently, in the financial interests of a self-con- Vyacheslav Zharko reportedly came to him for announced any suspects. The head of counter-
tained criminal group. Morozov speculated a similar intro. Volodarsky imagined an equiv- terror policing, Neil Basu, sounded a note that
that Skripal had passed the wrong intel to the alent conversation between Skripal and some was very like despair. “I would love to be able
wrong people, probably during the course of old colleague: “Sergei, could we meet?” If it was to say that we have identified and caught those
“his analytical work for some intelligence com- di∞cult for Volodarsky to explain the targeting responsible and how we are certain there are
panies, if I understood what he was saying...” of a pardoned, pensioned-o≠ spy, he had less no traces of nerve agent left anywhere,” he
I asked Morozov to repeat this. Yes, during di∞culty in imagining why a roving defector said. “The brutal reality, however, is that I can-
their December encounter in the shop, magnet might be worth snu∞ng out. not.” (Later that month, the Press Association
Morozov said, Skripal claimed to be doing con- reported that investigators, finally, after scour-
sulting work in “cyber-security, intelligence, ing hundreds of hours of CCTV, had identified
some analytical work.” 7. The End of the Cold War “several” of those who were suspected to have
This was a surprise. It made me recall a and without fan-
I N S A L I S B U R Y, F U R T I V E LY traveled to Salisbury to carry out the operation
conversation I’d had with a Salisbury taxi fare, Sergei Skripal left the hospital and disap- on Christie Miller Road. The authorities, at the
driver, Mehmet Beykanoglu, who said that peared into protected hiding with Yulia. It was time of writing, refused to confirm this.)
over a period of about seven years, he’d taken mid-May, 74 days after the initial exposure. Around Salisbury—you couldn’t call it
Skripal home from the train station to Christie Later that month, Yulia filmed a short state- Smalls-bury now—what choice did they have?
Miller Road “maybe 40, 50 times”—so often ment from an undisclosed location: In it she They continued to touch foreign objects, half in
that Beykanoglu knew his address by heart. said her immediate focus was on caring for her mind of lethal risk while carrying out everyday
Beykanoglu’s cab queued with others at the father, whose recovery had been slower than tasks. Investigators’ best guess was that it could
station, taking random fares, which sug- her own. Yulia herself appeared outwardly take 50 years for the last of any stray novichok
gested a much larger number of such jour- healthy, despite the breathing-tube scar on her to deteriorate. Tourists didn’t want to visit, and
neys undertaken by Skripal over the same throat—smiling, contented even. But doctors there were businesses behind the quarantine
period. Beykanoglu believed his fare, wearing acknowledged that the future health of both lines that had to shutter. In the window of a
a suit on most occasions, was returning from of them was more or less unknown. Without bookstore (the Skripals would have driven right
employment in London: “I asked, once, and he giving details in her statement, Yulia spoke of by it on March 4), a history book, The End of the
said he worked for the government. I wish I’d “devastating changes thrust upon me.” Cold War, was put on display. On closer inspec-
asked which government.” After Andrei Zheleznyakov had been saved tion, you could see a new, handwritten note
Perhaps Skripal was a why in his own assas- from the initial ravages of a novichok, back protruding from its pages: “Or is it?”
sination attempt after all. A well-informed in ’87, he was a±icted by a miscellany of side On Christie Miller Road, Sergei’s home had
source told me that Skripal had given at least e≠ects, among them cirrhosis, hepatitis, and its front door removed. The garden was cov-
one lecture at a British military institution, epilepsy. He died in 1992, five years after his ered by wooden planks, and steel-fence bor-
in which he discussed his GRU background. exposure. The attack this March has killed ders lined the drive. Decontamination was
Had he been trading on his knowledge and one bystander, Dawn Sturgess. Her compan- due to last for months; there was a rumor that
his past in other quarters, too? The owner ion, Charlie Rowley, has reported that the No. 47 could even be razed. For the time being,
of the Waterloo shop, Mohsen Najim, said novichok has a≠ected his ability to concen- the house assumed its position in the history
Skripal would sometimes drop by after trav- trate. Nick Bailey, the cop exposed during the of international espionage, and in the lore of
eling abroad. “He said, ‘Oh, I’m working for course of the investigation, was eventually assassinations ventured if not quite achieved.
a company; they send me everywhere. They released from the hospital but said in a state- It was a place that had once had its time,
need my experience.’ ” In May, responding to ment that “normal life for me will probably its target, its horrible method. The Skripals
reports that Skripal had traveled to the Czech never be the same.” For the Skripals, the future wouldn’t live here again.
Republic to help instruct intelligence agents looks, at best, precarious. “I take one day at a
there, the Czech foreign minister, choosing time,” Yulia said in her statement. She hoped tom lamont wrote about the Grenfell
his words, said such a visit would certainly to go back to Russia eventually, she said, while Tower fire in the December 2017 issue.
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 1 6 7
BACKSTORY
Revenge Is
a Dish Best
Served...
at a Fashion
Shoot
So how did we get Pete
Davidson, a guy who
finds photo shoots totally
embarrassing, to pose for
this issue? He was motivated
by revenge, he says. Revenge
against…us. Because once
upon a time, in 2016, we made
fun of his shoes. It was right
after Comedy Central’s
roast of Rob Lowe: Davidson
appeared on the red carpet
wearing a slim navy suit
with self-lacing high-top
Nikes (a.k.a. “Marty McFlys”).
A couple of days later, he
wakes up to this shit: “It was
a picture of me on the carpet
with my McFlys, and the
person was like, ‘Those are
the coolest sneakers ever.
Here’s how to not wear them.’
I was like, ‘Eyy, that’s mean!’ ”
But now he gets the last laugh.
Two years later, GQ came
calling, asking the 24-year-old
to appear in a fashion story
(see page 79). “It’s just funny
how things turn out,” he says.
—ALLIE JONES
coat $1,990
Burberry
tank top
$40 (for pack
of three)
Calvin Klein
Underwear
pants $1,295
Giorgio Armani
sneakers $450
Adidas by Raf
Simons at KITH
necklace, his own
1 6 8 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 P H O T O G R A P H B Y K A T I E M C C U R D Y
www.grand-seiko.com