CNN
—
In the Chinese zodiac, 2024 is the year of the dragon. In the internet, it's the year of the rat.
It started, it seems, with a few innocuous social media posts likening Mike Feist, co-star of the provocative tennis threesome The Challengers, to a dormouse. Soon, the analogy snowballed into a weird level of specificity. He's a field mouse. No, he's a cartoon mouse. No, he's Despereaux. No, he's Stuart Little, if Stuart Little was hot. He's “like a sleepy cartoon mouse come to life and become obsessed with CrossFit,” journalist Lucy Ford wrote in X.
And it wasn't long before fans on social media began scanning the facial features of other male celebrities for rat resemblances: Feist's “The Challengers” co-star Josh O'Connor. Barry Keoghan. Timothée Chalamet. Jeremy Allen White. Glen Powell. The list goes on. From chinchillas to capybaras, rat comparisons have traveled across social media like runaway cheese wheels, distorting the image (and possibly the confidence) of many popular young, white, male celebrities in their path.
On June 2nd, a Daily Mail article introduced the online joke to the general public, with the headline “How 'hot' men became Hollywood's sexiest idols: Gen Z fans go wild for actors with unusual looks, including Barry Keoghan, Kieran Culkin and Jeremy Allen White.” The trend was subsequently picked up by The New York Times, The Guardian, The Times of London, NBC, and The Today Show.
How do even today's hottest men feel about being labeled “hot”? Powell, who was likened to a rat for the first time in 2023, has always been brave in praising the ingenuity of people who are online. “This is why the internet is an amazing place,” he told Jimmy Fallon last December. “Now I own a capybara. I am the capybara.”
Despite efforts, CNN did not receive responses from O'Connor, Chalamet, Keoghan or White. (Feist's agent, meanwhile, confirmed that the actor doesn't use social media, a small relief.) But more broadly, CNN, which reached out to an informal sample of average Joes (or average Jerry?) for comment, was generally unconcerned about being described as raunchy.
Surveying their WhatsApp friend group, one twenty-something admitted it “tough” to hear the term, while another said he'd happily embrace “hot rat summer.”A third said that while his initial reaction was knee-jerk, he now realised “rat men are super hot right now” and would probably be “flattered.”
For some, the question goes beyond hypothetical. One man has already been called “rat boy” by his current girlfriend. “She's still with me,” he wrote. “So I take it well.”
Similarly, Gustav, a 22-year-old X user, was likened to a rat. (To be precise, he was likened to Stuart Little, just like Feist.) “I think I was mostly amused by the comment,” he told CNN via X. “It was obviously not meant to be insulting, and some people may take it as insulting, but I mostly felt like they were saying I was cute.”
While by no means exhaustive, these responses suggest that men are largely comfortable with the “handsome rat” trend. But if any male celebrities are struggling with the sudden transformation from traditional ideal woman to hairy pin-up, their Chinese zodiac sign (the rat is believed to be one of the most intelligent, popular and attractive of the 12-year animal cycle) may offer some solace after all.
