The Bear star Jeremy Allen White is the one we’ve been waiting for

That The Bear star Jeremy Allen White is in fighting shape – he must have spent months in the gym – suggests that he’s not entirely against being objectified for whatever princely sum Calvin Klein paid him. Right?

The Bear actor Jeremy Allen White appears in a Calvin Klein ad. PHOTO: MERT ALAS/CALVIN KLEIN

As awards season rolls on, there is an unexpected winner: the so-so looking man, enjoying the sudden – and surprising – apex of his sex appeal. At this month’s Emmy Awards, The Bear cleaned up again. The show centres on the kitchen of a failing restaurant, but it’s not just the frenetic pan dance that gives the viewers palpitations.

Enter protagonist Carmy, played by the winner of the best actor category, Jeremy Allen White. White is 32 and just shy of 5ft 6in (167cm), according to reports (and pictures of him standing next to the famously short Zac Efron, his co-star in the film The Iron Claw). And he’s the sex symbol of the moment.

Normally, discussing whether or not I – and every single straight woman I know – find White handsome would be a bit off. Reductive. Creepy. But he’s the star of the latest Calvin Klein campaign, in which he walks in slow motion across a rooftop in his underwear, muscles glistening. At least I think it’s in slow motion – that might just be how my brain sees it. Calvin Klein has been leading sex-sells advertising since Mark Wahlberg, Brooke Shields and Kate Moss took up the pants mantle, so White can’t be oblivious to having signed up to be an object of global lust.

Jeremy Allen White as Carmen 'Carmy' Berzatto in The Bear. Picture: Frank Ockenfels/FX

Before nothing came between him and his Calvins, I might have described him as a thinking woman’s pin-up. Obviously, to succeed in Hollywood you have to have some mesmeric quality, so he isn’t exactly average. But thus far he’s been more of an everyman. He’s not boy-band baby face handsome, and he’s not rom-com perfect symmetry, either. As a friend put it, he looks like Gene Wilder. I loved Wilder as Young Frankenstein and Willy Wonka as a child, so no wonder White is my type, but by the measure of crowds of swooning women camping out to catch a glimpse of their heart-throb, Gene Wilder wasn’t Gene Kelly, was he?

Before he became a Calvin model, we White-fanciers could convince ourselves that fancying him gave us higher-brow taste than women who froth over Aquaman and Thor. Not so now. Calvin Klein casts confirmed beautiful people: Davids Beckham and Gandy, Michael B Jordan. White’s ad has a touch of the Diet Coke break about it, so camp that it’s almost tongue in cheek – though thankfully there’s no tongue to speak of or it would have been banned by the Advertising Standards Authority as quickly as the women’s campaign, fronted by FKA Twigs, was. Was that any racier than White in his tighty whities? No. Jez is even wearing a literal wet T-shirt at one point. I can only guess that the person in charge of the rubber stamp that day was a woman with a Disney+ subscription.

That White is in fighting shape – he must have spent months in the gym – suggests that he’s not entirely against being objectified for whatever princely sum Calvin Klein paid him. Neither do the paparazzi pics of him kissing the singer Rosalía, whom he’s rumoured to be dating after his wife, the actress Addison Timlin, filed for divorce last year. If he were a woman, we’d call this his “revenge body”. His new fitness regimen might fit with the requirements he must meet to be allowed joint custody of their two small daughters – daily alcohol testing, AA meetings twice a week and therapy – or it might simply be down to his role as a wrestler in The Iron Claw. But no woman pausing over her morning coffee to see what White wore to the latest awards ceremony is enamoured of the wrestler, even with White in the role. We’re over the hunk; we want the hot chef.

Sure, there’s 6ft 5in and chiselled Jacob Elordi in Saltburn (who starred in his own Calvin campaigns in 2019 and 2021), but weren’t we all watching for Barry Keoghan?

We want the hot priest (Andrew Scott in Fleabag), the hot dad (Paul Mescal in Aftersun) the hot weirdo, even the hot villain – like the oddly fanciable a---hole Tom Wambsgans (played by Matthew Macfadyen) in Succession. Timothée Chalamet, who looks like a Victorian child, is dating the billionaire beauty mogul Kylie Jenner; her sister Kim Kardashian was one in a long line of incredibly rich, incredibly famous, incredibly beautiful women to date the less rich, less famous and definitely less beautiful comic Pete Davidson. This is the 2024 masculine ideal.

But the joy of celebrity pin-up is that it’s not real life. There are no stakes, and we can blur the lines between the role and the real person as much as we like. It’s not just the average-looking man we’re fetishising now, but the average-doing one, sweating in the kitchen in his chef whites (miles hotter than any red carpet finery). Good news for odd-looking, below-average-height men everywhere, especially if they know their way around a kitchen: yes, chef, yes please, chef.