The boy’s body was gone, but the room kept a record of what had happened. David and Xander donned PPE to wipe blood off Nike high-tops and an Xbox. They cut out the carpet, sealed the floor, and bagged up bloodstained fragments of a small dresser. Leanne came and went, taking photographs for the insurance company. To anyone close to the tragedy, the room would never appear quite as it had before. But until it could be a teenager’s bedroom again, at least it would be clean.
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Peter Cullen is one of the few actors I’ve ever met whose true personality closely matched his most famous character. This is especially unusual since that character was a towering red-and-blue robot that could make a clockwork conversion into a big-rig truck.
For decades, beginning in the early ’80s, Cullen was the voice of Optimus Prime, the heroic leader of the Autobots in the Transformers animated series, which aired five days a week on afternoons after school. The actor, who has died at the age of 85, taught kids to do much more than deepen our squeaky voices to convey authority. He himself transformed what might have been a cynical animated toy commercial into a model of decency and fortitude.
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It would happen like this: I’d get an email at 4:15 p.m. that said my roommate was looking at porn—along with a pixelated image of penetration.
We were both members of an accountability group at Southwest Baptist University called Dangerous Men. In fact, he’s the one who introduced me to it. If you were in this group, you were not supposed to watch porn. At all. Everyone in the group had an accountability partner, and you’d have to share your masturbation habits with them. Whenever you were tempted, you were supposed to text your accountability partner and be like, Dude, I’m horny right now. I need you to distract me.
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Every football fan knows how memorable a postseason college game can be. The Rose Bowl, the Sugar Bowl, the Orange Bowl. In every case, excitement, passions, and enthusiasm run high, but there’s another lesser-known bowl game that was played only once, nearly 82 years ago, but carries even more profound emotional and historical heft. A new Netflix movie called The Mosquito Bowl, from Friday Night Lights filmmaker Peter Berg, aims to bring it to the attention of a new generation.
The true-life Mosquito Bowl took place in December 1944, and a devastating number of its key players died shortly thereafter. That’s because this football game was held on Guadalcanal, part of the string of Solomon Islands in the South Pacific, where Allied forces established a base of operations that helped turn the tide of World War II. The island was swampy, muddy, and teeming with visible clouds of tiny bloodsucking and malaria-spreading insects, which is how this tilt got its ruefully amusing nickname.
As the very last veterans of World War II slip away from the world, Berg says he wanted to create a kind of cinematic memorial for present-day generations, to highlight not just the valor but the humanity of those who fought. “I want their sons and their grandchildren to understand. I don’t think that’s a message that can be overstated,” he tells Esquire.
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“That,” Danny Trejo tells me, pointing to a black fedora perched on top of his head and cracking a grin, “is style.” It’s been less than a minute since we connected over Zoom to talk about his role in the campaign for Ugg’s new collaboration with Mexican American designer Willy Chavarria, and the man who played Machete is already smiling. So we’re off to a good start.
He may occupy a mythical space in the celebrity world thanks to his famous glower and his history on the wrong side of the law—later in our conversation, he’ll tell me about the time he explained to a director who asked about his acting education that he studied in “San Quentin, Folsom, Solidad … every prison in California”—but the Trejo I meet is easygoing and approachable, and he genuinely gives a damn about looking good.
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“Stop me if this is out there,” he says. He scrunches his face and subtly tilts his chin. It’s a familiar expression—narrow eyes, slight grimace, a contemplative wince. But is it his? Or just something mirrored from the man he happens to look remarkably like?
“We can’t imagine,” he continues, “but, if you could somewhat imagine the idea of no time, no space, infinite distance . . .” He takes a sip of his Smithwick’s. It’s a Tuesday afternoon on the west side of Los Angeles. Sitting in a booth with his back to the door at a mostly empty pub, he nibbles at a Scotch egg and, rather breezily, unpacks the nature of cosmic fluctuations. Also: cosmic duplications. “We are the nothingness and the something at any given moment,” he says.
His sentences have a dreamy quality to them, and right now, at least, he sounds like he’s delivering a monologue from the sci-fi thriller Inception. His name is Ben Cornish, and though he and that film’s star, Leonardo DiCaprio, have never met, Leo is aware of Ben, and Ben, of course, is aware of Leo. Ben, like Leo, is an actor. He makes his living around Hollywood, and occasionally around the world, popping up at glitzy gatherings in a black tuxedo with slicked-back hair. He gives toasts and poses for selfies with baffled strangers. People who know Leo have texted their famous friend pictures of this curious guy with a confounding resemblance to, well, him. Like Leo, Ben has mastered the art of pretending to be someone else. Unlike Leo, Ben is a noncelebrity who lives with a face that is at once his and does not belong to him.
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