25 Fashion

Flexes to
Kick-Start
Your 2024
The 21 Most
Stylish Hotels
on Earth
Surfing With
Jeffrey Wright
Inside the
Billionaire
Frenzy to Buy
a Pro Sports
Team

The Beautiful
Chaos of

BARRY
KEOGHAN
 CONTENTS

February
GQ World Behind the Scenes
With the People Who
Make GQ
The Drops: 25 Fresh Fashion Flexes to Start
2024 Off Right............................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Contributor
The Return of the Watch World’s Opulent ’80s. . . 20

GQ’s Most Stylish Hotels on the Planet 2024:

Art & Design Edition. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

ALEX PAPPADEMAS
Senior culture editor, GQ US
Features Twenty years after he first joined GQ, Alex
Pappademas is back on the masthead,
this time as senior culture editor. He’s also
Cover Story: BA RRY K EO G H A N ....... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 writing features, including this month’s
cover story on Saltburn’s Barry Keoghan.
“He endured a lot of loss and struggle
Skier C ODY TOW N S EN D ’ s before his mid-teens,” Pappademas says
of Keoghan, “and is now adjusting to a
Death-Defying Quest. .................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 life much bigger—and stranger—than he
would ever have imagined back then.”

The Enchanting Rise of Artist A N N A WEYA N T . . . . 50

Office Grails
JE FFR E Y W RIG H T ’ s New Wave. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
→

How to Buy a Pro Sports Team........ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68

A Wild Weekend on the Road With E KKS TACY .... 74

ALEX PAPPADEMAS AND OFFICE GRAILS: COURTESY OF SUBJECTS.

←
KENTARO
TAKASUGI

On the Cover
Photograph by Jason Nocito. Styled by
Taylor McNeill. Hoodie by Balenciaga. →
Jeans by Magliano. Bracelet, his own.
Necklaces (on top, and bottom two) by
David Yurman. Necklace (second from top), British GQ
his own. Necklace (third from top) by
Miansai. Hair by Tomo Jidai using Oribe.
Skin by Charlotte Willer at Home Agency.
Set design by Rosie Turnbull. Produced
by Hen’s Tooth Productions.

6 G Q . C O M F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4
Need a reason Scenic rail trails, award-winning golf
courses, world-class chefs, and so much
more. But the best reason to get away—
to get away? the chance to catch up with friends
old and new. Cheers to Dark ‘n Stormy’s
and taking the guys’ trip you didn’t
Bermuda will know you needed so much.

give you plenty.

 CONTENTS

February

ST YLIST, TAYLOR MCNEILL. PIGEONS PROVIDED BY BERLONI THEATRICAL ANIMALS.

For our cover story on Barry Keoghan, see page 30.

Tank top by Martin Keehn. Necklaces (on top, and bottom two) by David Yurman. Necklace
(second from top), his own. Necklace (third from top) by Miansai.

8 G Q . C O M F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4 P H O T O G R A P H B Y J A S O N N O C I T O
 CONTENTS

February

ST YLIST, MOBOL A JI DAWODU.

For our story on Jeffrey Wright, see page 58.

Wetsuit by Bantu Wax.

1 2 G Q . C O M F E B R U A R Y 2 2 2 4 P H O T O G R A P H B Y G R E G O R Y H A R R I S
 GQ now is operating in Web3.
Join the conversation on Discord.
 LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
The Power of Allow
IN THIS ISSUE’S COVER STORY on Barry Keoghan,
we encounter a supremely talented young man
who is on one hell of a hot streak. Especially
given Keoghan’s hardscrabble past, the story of
his recent run is invigorating and hopeful. And
over the course of the profile, written by GQ’s
Alex Pappademas, we learn that Keoghan has
a special gift: He is a manifester. ¶ You see,
Keoghan writes down the names of film directors
he’d like to work with and—boom!—it happens.
He writes down the name of magazines he’d like
to cover, and, by God, here we are. ¶ For Keoghan
to accomplish something wild, it seems he simply
has to be bold enough to name it. He just has to
jot it into existence. ¶ Damn, I don’t know about
you, but learning of the Irishman’s incredible
luck made me want to whip out my iPhone and
start filling up the Notes app with my own list of
1 2 G Q . C O M F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4
manifestations. Let’s see here,
I guess I’d like to spend a year
working from Tokyo, and I’d
like the opportunity to
collaborate with Jay-Z on a
cover again. Abracadabra!!
Now, in our self-help-happy
times, you don’t need me to tell
you that manifesting is a real
thing, or that setting goals is a
habit of highly effective
people—even among bad-boy
actors with a case of ADHD.
But what I am here to tell
you (that your favorite
Instagram life coach will not)
is that the power of
manifestation is a gift, and not
everyone has it.
I, for one, don’t have it.
In fact, I spent the first half
of my career wondering what
the hell was wrong with me.
I think it’s fair to say that
I have been consistently
successful, but not a single one
of my personal achievements
or evolutions has come as a
result of setting goals. Over the
years, whenever people have
conspiratorially asked me to
dish on what I want to do next
in my career, I have always told
them the truth: I have no idea.
The plan is to keep working
hard and keep being me and
see where it all leads. (For
the record, this never gets a
good reaction.)
Come to think of it, for all of
the countless blessed things
that have happened to me over
the course of my life and
career, there is not a single one
for which I can fairly say that
I made it happen, from
meeting my wife to getting the
job that grants me the still-
surreal opportunity to address
you from this page.
What I can say, though, is
that I let these things happen.
I allowed them to happen.
This is not the same as being
passive. It’s more like a
doctrine of non-striving. Not
forcing it. I have made the
most of the tools I’ve been
given without overreaching;
I have worked hard,
methodically, and without
fear of failure; and over time
I learned that good things
happen when I am fiercely true
to myself and my instincts.
And when the doors of
opportunity have opened,
whether big or small, I have
paid close enough attention
to notice, and I have walked
through them.
I’m not saying this to
congratulate myself, or to
advise anyone not to dream
dreams or set goals.
But I do think modern
motivational culture fetishizes
one way of thinking about our
relationship to the future that
simply isn’t for everyone,
including me. I can’t relate, so
I’m offering another approach.
My version of motivational
advice? Before you start
making lists and trying to
maneuver or will your dreams
into reality, look carefully at
your personal history—your
successes, your failures, and
all those pivotal moments
that changed the trajectory
of your life—and ask yourself
if you have the power of
manifestation, like Barry, or
the power of work-hard-pay-
attention-and-just-allow, like
me and so many others.
Get it right and you’ll see
doors swing open. Get it
wrong and you’ll bloody your
head from banging it into
brick walls.
As our cover story so
wonderfully shows, the
superpower some people have
to make it all happen is sexy
and almost mystical. But
what I’d like to propose is
that, for others of us, having
the patience and presence
to let life happen can be
equally powerful.
Happy New Year.
JACK BRIDGLAND.
Will Welch
GLOBAL EDITORIAL DIRECTOR
* The alchemy of senses
 GQ
World

Drops

CONTORTED
CARRYALL
You can spend years
personalizing an elegant
Balenciaga purse
yourself, or you can
let Demna do it for you.
The designer’s latest
It bag comes preloaded
with the maximum
amount of kitsch
and a gaggle of jangly
heavy-duty hardware
dangling from its slouchy
body ($10,200).
H
I GO
AN G -Y
By Y

P H O T O G R A P H S B Y B O W E N F E R N I E F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4 G Q . C O M 1 5
 ONE MAN’S
WORKWEAR
This paper-and-linen SULTRY
work jacket is one of the SWEATSHIRT
many handsome, hard- Even with something as
wearing garments that simple as a zip hoodie,
Of-Nothing founder Mowalola’s eponymous
Jack Fullerton designs, designer Mowalola
cuts, and sews entirely Ogunlesi manages
on his own in his Brooklyn to imbue everything
studio ($550). she touches with her
trademark sensuality
(price upon request).

BISECTED
BRACELET
Eliburch Jewelry’s
signature Chameleon
bracelets combine
strings of precious
TURQUOISE stones—like smoky
TICKER quartz and blue topaz—
Audemars Piguet’s with equally enticing
Royal Oak Selfwinding, beads of turquoise and
arguably the hottest ruby ($975 each).
watch model on the
planet right now, is
finally embracing the
most covetable trend in
SQUISHY SHOES
watches: the turquoise
With these crystal-
dial. Rendered in yellow
studded slip-ons,
gold, it’s a timepiece that
Burberry has achieved
feels expressly designed
a rare golden ratio of
to show up on Jay-Z’s SHAPELY
comfort to glam ($5,900).
wrist someday ($61,500). SWEATER
Big sleeves, short waist,
can’t lose. This chunky,
color-block Loewe
pullover is about as
good—and proportionally
daring—as spring knits
come ($1,950).
TWISTER
TROUSERS
Bode livened up its

PROP ST YLING BY FIT Z FIT ZGER ALD AT MARK EDWARD INC. AUDEMARS PIGUE T: COURTESY OF THE BR AND.
consummate spring
trousers—cut double-
BUXOM BAG
pleated in elegant
Louis Vuitton Men’s
ivory linen—with a
creative director Pharrell
technicolored smattering
Williams has applied
of polka dots ($850).
his Midas touch to
the Alma—inspired by
the Parisian label’s Squire
bag that first launched in
1934—playing up its sleek
curvature to transform
it into a bowling-bag-like
duffel ($7,450). CRAGGY CARDI
For his latest Dior Men
ECCENTRIC collection, designer
EYEWEAR Kim Jones leaned on the
Between their warped house’s rich history of
frame and minty- tweeds and developed
fresh hue, Prada’s riveting new takes on
psychedelic new shades the age-old fabric—like
look like they came the speckly, jumbo-size
straight outta The Fifth houndstooth on this
Element’s costume cardigan, which is
department ($750). grandmotherly in the
best way ($3,200).

CLASSY CLOGS
A spiritual sequel
to Loro Piana’s
billionaire-beloved suede
JACKED-UP loafers, these plush
JACKET mules are designed to
Chicano iconoclast look right at home with
Willy Chavarria a polo and trunks on
smashed together a the deck of a St. Tropez
couple of gym-class megayacht ($850).
staples—the track jacket
and the mesh short—to
craft this roomy, drop-
shoulder grail ($845).
1 6 G Q . C O M F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4
 SCARLET SHADES
Ever wonder what the RITZY RUGBY
heart-eyes emoji might JW Anderson has
look like in sunglass a knack for wryly
form? Tiffany & Co. remastering classic
has the surprisingly chic British menswear, like
answer ($425). this soft and drapey
rugby shirt with an
alluring boxy cut ($730).

ZIPPY ZIP-UP
Nobody makes the
practical feel spectacular
quite like Hermès,
which rendered this TIDAL TOTE
otherwise straight- Just when you thought
ahead windbreaker in Bottega Veneta’s
crisp, shimmering iconic woven-leather
peach ($4,975). bags couldn’t get any
radder, designer Matthieu
Blazy dreamed up this
quirky new take with a
gleaming-silver sardine
LUSTY LAYER handle ($5,300).
The sluttiest thing a
man can do is rock this
ultrawide ribbed cardigan
from Sebastien Ami—
with carefully placed
BLOOMING rips for strategic skin
BUTTON-UP exposure—over nothing
Ferragamo designer but a simple tank ($975).
Maximilian Davis bet on
this vivid green as the
color of the season—and
based on the evidence of
this coated linen shirt, he
bet right ($690).

TOUGH TRENCH
The dusty salmon suede,
the flowy knee length,
that rakishly tied belt—if
you’re in the market for
a coat that’ll get you
noticed, you won’t find
one better than this epic
Winnie New York JARRING JEWELRY
trench ($2,000). Rising jeweler Presley
Oldham teamed with
the Croatian designer
Damir Doma on this
vibey coral necklace—all
held together by a
SLENDER tough steel carabiner
SNEAKERS and an elegant loop of
To help make New agate ($390).
Balance’s dad-ish 530
model feel downright
sexy, Miu Miu wrapped
the retro runner in worn- BADASS BELT
bare suede, slimmed the The emo revival is holding
typically burly outsole strong—and Dion Lee’s
to a barely there layer of seductive studded
gum-toned rubber, and belts are proof (price
freaked the upper with a upon request).
quartet of clashing laces
(price upon request).

SWANKY
SLIP-ONS
Fendi Mens’ spin on DESTROYED
the humble gardening DENIM
clog swaps the typical It could take years of
foam for verdant suede sifting through thrift
and an all-wheel-drive store racks to find the
sole—but preserves perfect vintage jeans.
the all-important “sport One shortcut? Cop this
mode” strap ($1,190). hip-hugging, gorgeously
distressed Luar pair
instead ($260).

F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4 G Q . C O M 1 7
 GQ World
Watches
The Return of the Opulent ’80s
The all-gold Piaget Polo, Hublot Classic Original, and Rolex GMT were kings
during the ’80s. Now they’re coming back for their crown. By CAM WOLF
DECADE A G O , when
Menta Watches founder
A Adam Golden first
started working in the
industry, he would
weigh certain historic but undesir-
able pieces, then price them purely
based on their gold value, like he
was some kind of 19th-century pros-
pector. At the time, the titanic steel
sport watches of the ’70s were in
vogue: the Audemars Piguet Royal
Oak, the Patek Philippe Nautilus,
the Vacheron Constantin 222. But
lately, Golden has noticed a change
in the market for these sport watches,
even the classic ones. “Prices have
flatlined on them,” Golden tells me.
Today, many collectors are more
interested in what he calls “jewelry
watches”—tickers that blind with
diamonds, sapphires, precious met-
als, and immaculate stone dials. Gold
is no longer gaudy; it’s cool. Whereas
women were once those primarily
interested in these watches, now, he
says, “it’s literally everybody.”
No era of watchmaking satisfies
these evolving tastes quite like the
’80s, when the maisons of Switzerland
were in an arms race to dazzle their
clients not just with totems of new-
found affluence but also with fear-
less new designs. In the ’70s the
watch industry had been decimated
by the introduction of quartz, the
2 0 G Q . C O M F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4
mechanism that made watches
cheaper and easier to produce, under-
cutting the Swiss. So at the turn of the
decade, the high end of the industry
responded with several models that
put a luxurious spin on the idea of
watches as fashionable accessories.
Piaget typified this move with its
Polo, a gold timekeeper neatly dis-
guised as a bracelet. The year 1980
brought the debut of Patek Philippe’s
reference 3770 Nautilus, colloquially
known as the “Nautellipse” among col-
lectors for its resemblance to a hybrid
of Patek’s sporty Nautilus and elegant
Ellipse. A new brand called Hublot
emerged with a similar recipe: Its
debut reference, the Classic Original,
attached a rubber strap to an all-gold
case—a radical combination. “Eighties
watches were quite optimistic about
the future,” says Phillip Toledano, a
collector well-versed in the period. “In
the ’80s, I feel like no one was inter-
ested in the past at all.”
Such unburdened thinking is visi-
ble in famously daring models. Seiko
worked with car designer Giorgetto
Giugiaro to create asymmetric pieces
for Aliens, while Omega made space-
age Seamasters. And Louis Vuitton
debuted its Monterey II, a 1988 model
with a ceramic case that almost looks
like the size of an inner tube and a
screw shank protruding from 12
o’clock. Largely ignored for decades,
P H O T O I L L U S T R A T I O N
that piece has suddenly become the
reference of the moment. Having
never moved a single one, Golden
sold six over the past few months.
“Everybody’s very design-oriented
now,” he says.
Indeed, it seems collectors every-
where are once again responding to
the siren song of ’80s Swiss excess.
In 1986, IWC put out the first watch
made of ceramic, a material that
appealed to collectors eager to
flaunt something unique and valu-
able. Rolex’s reference 16758, which
came in full yellow gold and featured
the coveted “nipple” dial—with
more gold indices—became one of
the brand’s definitive pieces of the
PIAGET AND HUBLOT: COURTESY OF THE BRANDS. ROLEX: COURTESY OF CHRISTIE’S.
decade. Now, as echoes of that dec-
adent decade grow more audible,
Rolex has announced an all-gold
GMT-II as one of its major releases,
while IWC and Audemars have
returned to ceramic for their most
audacious and coveted releases.
While these blingy, design-forward
watches were once coveted by fusty
collectors, Golden now finds a
younger generation flocking to these
pieces. Bad Bunny has developed one
of the trendiest wrists in the world by
regularly turning to ’80s models.
As connoisseurs return to these
watches—and brands mine this
decade for inspiration—we’re seeing a
larger evolution of taste. Watch lovers
are finally moving on from the same
old sport models and becoming more
receptive to challenging, distinctive
designs. In the process, they’re finding
great watches from a decade when the
industry was redefining itself.
B Y M I C H A E L H O U T Z
 GQ World GQ’s Most Stylish Hotels
Travel
on the Planet 2024:
ESTELLE
ART & DESIGN EDITION
MANOR
Oxfordshire,
England
A Jacobean
estate revived
by owner
Sharan Pasricha
and the design
legends at
Roman and
Williams for the
art-and-fashion
crowd.

MARK ANTHONY FOX.

With the help of some of GQ’s friends, we scoured

the globe to track down the most visually exquisite
hotels we’ve laid eyes on—from an off-the-grid
desert oasis to Kim Jones’s go-to spot in Tokyo.
Because while you can’t prepare for all the
unbeautiful moments of traveling (hello,
canceled flights), you can pick a hotel that makes
the journey well worth it. B y R E B E C C A D O L A N
2 2 G Q . C O M F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4

IN OUR INAUGURAL LIST of the most stylish hotels
in the world, we asked designers, artists, and
editors across the GQ universe to help us
handpick the most absurdly good-looking
places to stay on earth. The creative teams
behind these temples to design are placing
provenance (and, in many cases, sustainability)
over smooth edges, curating details down to
the last lampshade. The result? Twenty-one
destinations that are built like works of art.
(PREVIOUS PAGE)
Estelle Manor Oxfordshire, England
Fashion-world folks aren't often drawn to the
muddy depths of the Cotswolds. But Estelle
Manor has taken the stuffy English-country-
hotel playbook and chucked it out the window.
“One of the things I loved most was the art
collection,” says British fashion designer Daniel
W. Fletcher. “The first piece that struck me when
I walked in was a big Billy Childish painting in the
reception. It was lovely to see one of his works
find a home in the beautiful setting.”

Nine Orchard
New York

B E N E S S E H O U S E : C O U RT E SY O F B E N E S S E H O U S E . H OT E L C O R A ZÓ N : K AT E B E L L M . V I L L A M A B R O U K A : A N D R E W M O N TG O M E RY.
ADRÈRE AMELLAL: BERNARD TOUILLON. NINE ORCHARD: STEVEN KENT JOHNSON. LE COUCOU: COURTESY OF LE COUCOU.
Dimes Square’s first luxury hotel is
known for its perfect details, like
the custom-made Ojas speakers in
each room that play music curated
by DJs Stretch Armstrong and
Devon Turnbull. “I adore walking
into the room or waking up first
thing in the morning and turning
on the radio station,” says singer-
songwriter-actor Moses Sumney.
“It’s so specifically curated for me
and nobody but me. I’m the only
person in the world.”
Adrère Amellal
Siwa Oasis, Egypt
When you want to unplug
for real—without Wi-Fi Le Coucou
(or even light bulbs)—head Méribel, France
to Adrère Amellal. Built on
the saltwater Siwa Oasis in The 10 floors, 55 rooms, and 2
far west Egypt, a seven- chalets that make up Le Coucou
hour drive from Alexandria, could have been ripped from the
this ecolodge is entirely Japanese animation company
LES ROCHES ROUGES: GAËLLE RAPP TRONQUIT.

off-grid. But the monastic Studio Ghibli. Lampshades are

vibes go beyond tech: reminiscent of ice cubes, coat
The hotel’s sandcastle- hooks are shaped like owls, and
esque design is desert armchairs cosplay as characters out
minimalism to the max, of fairy tales. The hotel’s pointed
with several rooms carved gables create an interlocking
out of the neighboring castle, nestled on a hillside near
mountain. “The architecture the ski resort Courchevel in the
is really integrated in its French Alps. Designed by Pierre
surroundings,” New York– Yovanovitch, everything seems
based Egyptian artist playful, opulent, but never vulgar.
Laila Gohar says. “It’s one —TO B I A S F R E R I C K S , H E A D
of the most magical places O F E D I TO R I A L C O N T E N T,
on earth.” GQ GERMANY

2 4 G Q . C O M F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4
 Benesse House
Naoshima, Japan
Think Night at the Museum with
Kusama sculptures. Benesse House
encompasses both a mind-blowing
amount of contemporary art and an
intimate, minimalist hotel. One of its four
accommodations, Oval, is accessible
only by monorail, on a hilltop on Japan’s
remote “art island,” Naoshima. You
can also stay inside the museum itself,
a semisubterranean design from
architectural heavyweight Tadao Ando
that minimizes aesthetic disruption to
the natural surroundings. It’s difficult to
believe that this museum-hotel was built
more than 30 years ago. — K E I S H I I W ATA ,
S E N I O R L I F E S T Y L E E D I TO R , G Q J A PA N

Hotel Corazón Mallorca, Spain

After the runway shows, the European fashion mafia shuts up shop
for the summer. The consiglieres still head en masse to Ibiza, but,
these days, the capos are all in Mallorca, specifically the Tramuntana
mountains and even more specifically, Hotel Corazón, a new 15-room
finca on the winding hill road between Sóller and Deià. It’s the brainchild
of fashion photographer Kate Bellm and her artist-husband, Edgar
Lopez. Famous for her sun-saturated images of beautiful people, Bellm
has channeled that spirit into the hotel, which radiates a welcoming
calm via the dark peach walls, matching bed linen, and retro futuristic
furniture. — D A V I D A N N A N D , B R I T I S H G Q C O N T R I B U TO R

Les Roches Rouges

St. Raphaël, France
Les Roches Rouges feels very,
very far from the shoulder-
rubbing of its neighbors Cannes
and St. Tropez. Situated in what
was once a 17th-century fishing
town, the hotel inhabits an
Villa Mabrouka Tangier, Morocco unusually tranquil pocket of the
jam-packed Côte d’Azur. A vision
After its heyday as a destination for Beat poets, of midcentury modernism on
Tangier—the coastal city a tangerine’s throw the outside, its mellow interiors
from Spain—slipped off many people’s Moroccan are filled with Guy Bareff’s
itinerary. No more. British designer Jasper Conran earthenware wall lights and
recently reimagined Yves Saint Laurent’s old house Rosemarie Auberson’s color-
as a 12-room hotel that overlooks the Strait of block paintings, which don’t
Gibraltar. The earthy vibes extend inside, where distract from the money shot: a
Yves’s signature shades of green and blue abound. cliffside Mediterranean vista.
 Rosemary Marrakech, Morocco
The hotel’s co-owner, Belgian sculptor Laurence Leenaert,
pulled together pieces from 40-odd local artisans to
create a pared-back riad aesthetic.

Aman Tokyo
Tokyo
Aman’s Tokyo outpost is neither
its newest nor its flashiest—but
the hotel is the stuff of dreams
for urban-design fiends.
Floor-to-ceiling windows and a
ruthlessly monochrome color
scheme manage to give off an
air of celestial calm—while
casually looking out over the
most populated city in the world.
“It’s like a home from home,”
says Dior Men and Fendi couture
creator in chief Kim Jones.
Xigera Safari Lodge
Masarwa, Botswana
Safaris can be grim: hordes of
Jeeps chasing harassed-looking
elephants while you swat
mosquitoes. Not so at Xigera,
a luxe lodge on the edge of
Botswana’s Okavango Delta
that doubles as a living gallery
of African art.

AMAN TOKYO: COURTESY OF AMAN. ROSEMARY: MARINA DENISOVA. XIGERA SAFARI: COURTESY
OF XIGER A SAFARI LODGE. VENICE VENICE: COURTESY OF VENICE VENICE CREATIVE TEAM.

The Cōmodo
Bad Gastein, Austria
The Venice Venice Hotel Bad Gastein, once the revered
Venice hub of the Austrian spa scene,
is ushering in a new breed
THE CŌMODO: PION STUDIO.

Alessandro Gallo and Francesca Rinaldo of creatives on the hunt for

recently retrofitted a 13th-century
Byzantine palace with works by Bruce
Nauman and Hanne Darboven, a
suite inspired by Christo, and another
dedicated to the radical arte povera
movement. Now it’s a hotel with a better
collection than many public galleries.
an affordable holiday spot.
The center of the action is
The Cōmodo, a one-time clinic
turned midcentury-style
playhouse by Berlin design
duo Barbara Elwardt and
Piotr Wisniewski.
 Château Voltaire
Paris
The new go-to boutique hotel for a
crowd of au courant city dwellers. Zadig
& Voltaire founder Thierry Gillier is a
newcomer to the hotel business, and
with Voltaire he’s pulled off a festive
and elegant French vibe that’s all warm
tones, antique armchairs, and Art Deco
details. Festen Architecture oversaw
this takeover of three 16th-, 17th-, and
18th-century buildings, transformed into
a hotel and restaurant that are equal
parts unshowy and parfait. It’s Paris’s
answer to London’s Chiltern Firehouse
and LA’s Chateau Marmont. — P I E R R E
ALEXANDRE M’PELÉ, HEAD OF
E D I TO R I A L C O N T E N T, G Q F R A N C E
C H ÂT E AU VO LTA I R E : F R A N Ç O I S H A L A R D. V I L L A PA L L A D I O : AT U L P R ATA P
BARRACUDA: COURTESY OF SMALL LUXURY HOTELS OF THE WORLD.

Barracuda
Itacaré, Brazil
CHAUHAN. DOWNTOWN LA PROPER: COURTESY OF DLX NYC.

Scandinavian
minimalism on Brazil’s
densely forested Bahia
coast sounds like an
odd cultural clash
until you discover
that actual Swedes—
including ABBA’s
Björn Ulvaeus, no
less—were involved.
The result is an
immaculately designed
bolt-hole where
Nordic restraint is a
perfect counterpoint
to the surrounding
lush forest.

Downtown LA Proper Villa Palladio

Los Angeles
“Downtown LA Proper is an interior
design dream,” says chef Ixta Belfrage.
“I fell immediately in love with the colorful,
Mexican-inspired tapestry-style mural
that adorns the vaulted ceilings of the
entrance, flanked by huge cactus trees.
I remember thinking, This is what I want
my house to look like when I grow up.
Special mention to the beautiful, tiled
rooftop pool, surrounded by exotic plants
with incredible views over Downtown.”
Jaipur, India
It’s no easy feat for a crimson
hotel to stand out in India’s
Pink City, Jaipur. But Italian
entrepreneur Barbara Miolini
and Dutch designer Marie-
Anne Oudejans went down the
maximalist route and won. In a
country estate on the edge of the
city, every single wall, ceiling,
bed frame, and pillow is done in
bold vermilion hues.

F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4 G Q . C O M 2 7

Hoshinoya
Tokyo
There’s an onsen on the
roof at the Hoshinoya in
downtown Marunouchi.
Anywhere else this would be
a gimmick, but they don’t do
gimmicks at the Hoshinoya;
they do ultra-high-end
hospitality—omotenashi.
The bath sits atop 17 floors,
which local architect Rie
Azuma conceived as a
series of reimagined ryokan
(traditional inns) stacked
on top of each other, with
a communal tea lounge on
every floor.
The Fife Arms
Highlands, Scotland
Not content with helming one
of the art world’s mega-galleries,
the couple behind Hauser &
Wirth have turned their hand to
hospitality. The Fife Arms, on the
edge of the Cairngorms National
Park, has a hunting lodge–
meets–Tate Modern aesthetic.
At the end of your day, you can
down your dram of whisky under
a Man Ray photograph. Or a
Picasso painting. Or a Lucian
Freud portrait.
HOSHINOYA: COURTESY OF HOSHINO RESORTS. THE FIFE ARMS: SIM CANET T Y-CL ARKE. SUN RANCH: ANSON SMART. BOCA DE AGUA: CÉSAR BÉ JAR.
Boca de Agua
Bacalar, Mexico
Mexican architect Frida
Escobedo masterminded this
box-fresh collection of tree
houses in Quintana Roo—a
textbook example of her
light-touch Latin modernism.
The raised rooms minimize
the resort’s footprint, while
her signature straight-lined
latticework keeps the spaces
cool and breezy.
Sun Ranch Byron Bay, Australia
Nowhere with a badminton court can take itself
too seriously—and so it is at the Sun Ranch, a
new hotel 15 minutes inland from Byron Bay,
where the decor is 1970s meets Californian
farmhouse meets festival after-party. Set in 55
acres of regenerated farmland, the hotel was
cofounded by creative director Julia Ashwood
and former fashion designer Jamie Blakey, who
enlisted the help of their creative friends to
give the space the feel of a welcoming luxury
commune, from hilltop firepit to the wood-fired
floating sauna.
Additional reporting by David Annand.
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 He’s one of our
most exciting
actors—a
combustible
shape-shifter
onscreen, a
moon-howling
dynamo off it.
And he spent
the last couple
years achieving
his Hollywood
aspirations at an
absurd clip.

Now, Barry
Keoghan is
confronting a
rather novel
dilemma: deciding
which dreams to
manifest next.

By Alex
Pappademas
Photographs
by Jason Nocito
Styled by
Taylor McNeill
Barry Keoghan at 9:30 in the morning at
a boxing club just off Melrose Avenue in
Hollywood, so I can watch him do the thing
he loved most to do before he started act-
ing, and maybe do it with him. We’d met for
the first time the day before, and at the end
of that hang I admitted that I’d never actu-
ally boxed. “I’ll show you a good jab or two,
my man,” the Dublin-born actor had prom-
ised, or cheerfully threatened. But when
I roll up at 9:27, Keoghan is
already sweaty, invigorated,
and finished working out for
the day; he’d like to go some-
place else.
Around 20 minutes later,
he’s stepping onto the rooftop
pool deck at the Four Seasons.
This is more like it. He’s feel-
ing good—“Feckin’ happy, for
once,” he says, sounding like
he means it. He drops his box-
ing gloves under a chaise and
stretches out for some sun.
Keoghan lives in London,
has a baby son there, but he’s
been staying here a while,
living the abstract pampered
life of an actor doing the
promo rounds for a buzzy
awards-season movie that’s
expanding from seven screens
to 1,500-plus on the day we
meet. He digs LA, a good place
to howl at the moon: “I howl
every night, man. Wooooo.”
He laughs—maybe not every
night. (The root of “Keoghan”
is “cano,” which means “wolf
cub” in Gaelic. “It’s crazy,
man,” Keoghan says. “It’s
crazy, the connection—me
and wolves.”) But last night,
he says, he just looked out at
the Hollywood sign, having a
moment: “Just takin’ it all in,
man. There’s a gorgeous feelin’
here. This mystic kind of haze.
This subtle thing I feel here—
it’s like a romance I hold with
it. I’m in love with it.”
His movie is called Saltburn, it’s directed
to maximum provocative effect by Emerald
Fennell, and Keoghan is in every scene as
Oliver, a nerd who annihilates a family of
upper-crusty British twits from within. The
reviews have been all over the place, but most
everybody agrees that he’s phenomenal in
it, which is true—it’s like watching Marlon
Brando’s Last Tango in Paris character
slowly take over the body of McLovin. It’s a
3 2 G Q . C O M F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4
performance that feels decisive, defining, des-
tined to figure in Keoghan’s lifetime-achieve-
ment montages the way, say, The Graduate
does in Dustin Hoffman’s, except that Dustin
Hoffman does not hang dong on camera at the
end of The Graduate, nor does he slurp resid-
ual spooge from a bathtub drain, nor does he
tearfully fuck the dirt of the fresh grave of a
sweet dumb Oxford boy (Jacob Elordi) his
character may in some twisted way have loved.
In Fennell’s script, the last stage direc-
tion in that scene reads: “Then slowly,
weeping, he undresses,” dot dot dot. On the
day, Fennell said, she told Keoghan, “I just
have the feeling that Oliver would unzip.”
Keoghan said, “Yep,” and Fennell cleared
the set—not quite knowing where Keoghan
would take it. “Unzipping is one thing,” she
said—but dot, dot, dot.
“Both of us are really interested in pushing
things really far,” Fennell said. “Not in a way
that’s just supposed to be deliberately shock-
ing, but because especially if you’re talking
about desire, if you’re talking about obsession,
you need to get somewhere that feels really
hard to watch, because that’s what it feels like.
So I think for both of us, the whole time, it
was about the understanding between us, and
pushing each other always to do something
more interesting, more surprising.”
Keoghan is 31, and has been making movies
for 13 years, but emerged as an
unignorable and undeniable
screen presence around 2017,
when he turned up in Yorgos
Lanthimos’s The Killing of a
Sacred Deer, another film about
a nice rich family brought low
by a deceptively polite socio-
path played by Barry Keoghan.
It’s best-of-the-decade work—
fearlessly unsympathetic, free
of histrionics, and rivetingly
real, a showcase for the hon-
esty Keoghan’s past collabo-
rators all say is his greatest
quality as an actor.
“He’s creepy and he freaks
you out, but it’s truthful
and it’s honest,” said Martin
McDonagh, who wrote the
part of Dominic in 2022’s
The Banshees of Inisherin for
Keoghan. “He always inhabits
a person, warts and all, I think,
and he doesn’t try to make you
love them. He doesn’t sweeten
the pill.”
“Give me truth over craft
any day,” said Colin Farrell,
Keoghan’s costar in both
Sacred Deer and Banshees,
“and that’s what Barry brings.
Truth. It’s innate. He lays it
all out there in an instinctual
way and it just gets deeper
and deeper.”
“Not everybody is willing
to show the world who they
are,” said director Chloé Zhao,
who cast Keoghan as an age-
less Marvel Universe superbeing in 2021’s
Eternals. “I’ve dealt with actors like that. But
Barry, right away, I thought, This is not some-
one who’s afraid to put everything that he is
onscreen—the good, bad, and ugly. That’s actu-
ally a lot rarer than you think. And he doesn’t
protect himself with techniques. He doesn’t
fall behind conventions that keep him safe.”
Eternals, sprawling and mythic and mel-
ancholy, worlds away in tone from the zingy,
synergized noisiness of the MCU, was still a
 ←←
ON PREVIOUS PAGE
tank top
Martin Keehn
shorts
Prada
necklaces
(on top, and
bottom two,
throughout)
David Yurman
necklace
(second from
top, throughout),
his own
necklace
(third from top,
throughout)
Miansai

THESE PAGES
tank top
Giorgio Armani
pants
Martine Rose
sneakers
(throughout)
Nike
socks
(throughout)
Gucci
bracelet
(throughout),
his own

F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4 G Q . C O M 3 3
Marvel movie, a mammoth money-burning
machine—but Keoghan gives a funny, mercu-
rial performance in it. He’s not there to pad
his résumé; he actually acts.
“He’s so present that he brought out
things—whether the other cast members
like it or not, he pushed them. He’s able to
bring things out of them, because he’s not
completely predictable,” Zhao said. On a film
of Eternals’ scope, with the meter running,
there’s something to be said for predictable
actors. “When he shows up, it’s not always
what you expect, and there are challenges
around that. But the life force he brings in
is a kind of wildness that keeps a lot of those
moments alive.”
“It’s just this unique, unique spirit that’s
almost like his body can’t contain it. It’s got to
be channeled out in a way that’s healthy,” Zhao
said. “This is someone that carries so much
trauma, and so much generational emotion,
and I feel for him, so much more than just as
an actor, but as a person. So I’m so glad to see
that he’s found a way to channel that.”

EVEN BEFORE CIVILIANS could see it last

fall, Saltburn was already a cultural moment,
and Keoghan’s on- and off-screen chemistry
with Elordi had become the stuff of memes.
Many of these riff on how fun-sized Keoghan,
five-foot-eight, looks when he’s photographed
with the towering Elordi; people post, like,
Gandalf hanging out with Frodo, or Joe Biden
dwarfing Rosalynn Carter, and write, “Every
photo of Barry Keoghan and Jacob Elordi
looks like this.” Keoghan has seen these, finds
them funny; the other day he even reposted
one on his Instagram: a shot of Timothée
Chalamet cradling a Paddington Bear.

But some of the attention paid Elordi and
Keoghan online comes from a slightly less
innocent place, born of daydreams about
these two men being, let’s say, the big and
little spoon in a relationship that transcends
the professional. It’s a notion the actors have
done a fair amount to encourage: Not since
Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix on the
My Own Private Idaho press tour have two
ostensibly straight actors been so unselfcon-
sciously coquettish (bro-quettish?) while
promoting a movie; when Keoghan and
Elordi leaned in for a jovial almost-kiss on
the red carpet at Saltburn’s LA premiere, the
thirst this stoked on social media could have
drained the Irish Sea.
If they seem flirtatious, Keoghan tells
me, there’s a good explanation: “I’m really
flirtin’, ” he says with a smile. “We were
constantly close,” Keoghan says. “It ain’t just
for the cameras and the premiere[s]. Me and
Jacob—he’s like a brother to me, honestly.
I think when you’re comfortable with some-
one, you can be as close as you want, you
know what I mean? It’s not like, ‘Oh, don’t
come near me’—it’s like, I’m comfortable.
When I’m comfortable around people,
I’m comfy.”
Did you have anything like that with guys
you knew growing up?
“Yeah, no,” Keoghan says, then chuckles,
presumably imagining how all this comfi-
ness would’ve gone over in Irish Catholic
Dublin. “But I’m comfortable with Jacob.
Messin’ about. Havin’ a laugh. We’re bein’
lads. We’ve just done a movie where we had
to kiss, man. Look at the scenes we’ve done.
You have to be comfortable with yourself.”

Some critics have pointed out that
Keoghan—who was almost 30 when Saltburn
began shooting—is a hair too old and maybe
a bit too ripped to be fully convincing as a
nerdy Oxford freshman. It’s a choice that
doesn’t fully make sense until the end of the
film, when Oliver, now a grown adult who’s
taken possession of a stately English manor
by picking off anyone else with a claim to it,
dances through that house’s halls with his
dick out. This perverse coming-of-age movie
feels like a coming-of-age moment for its star
as well; it’s Keoghan showing his manhood
figuratively as well as literally.
I ask Keoghan what it feels like to be pre-
sented onscreen—for the first time, really—as
something other than a boy.
“It’s nice, man,” he says. “It’s nice not just
being looked at as the weird-looking guy, the
unique feckin’ freaky little freak man-child,
freak child-man, whatever you want to call
it. It’s nice to see people kind of look at you in
that way. I’ll be honest. It is nice.
“My prettiness didn’t get me this far,” he says,
but he’s conscious that being someone audi-
ences want to look at “opens up other lanes
for me—it’s part of the leading man thing.”
You mastered the “little freak” era…
←
OPPOSITE PAGE,
BOT TOM
tank top
Martin Keehn
“Little freak child-man era, as we OPPOSITE PAGE, place of fulfillment, weirdly. I want
call it. And now I’m just Man. Freak- TOP to keep chasing this fucking thing,
Man. Man-Freak.” vest whatever it is.”
The Man-Freak picks up my Prada He wants to be challenged,
digital recorder from the table and jeans respected, remembered, recog-
speaks right into the mic, announc- (throughout) nized for his craft, for pushing
Magliano
ing his readiness to go deep: himself, pushing his limits. “Those
“Hello, GQ,” he says. “I am pres- ↓ boundaries within yourself—like,
ent today, let me tell ya—I’m pres- sweater Can I do this? This role is physical,
ent.” The p’s pop loud, distorting Giorgio Armani this role requires this accent,” he
into the red. “I’m gonna give ya says. “I’d love to do a part where
more than what you asked for.” I’ve physically transformed.”
“It’s a big moment for me—it’s GQ. It’s You want to Christian Bale it, I say. Inside
a massive moment,” he says. “I wrote this and out.
down in my to-do list—to be onna cover Keoghan laughs. “I’m-a Christian Bale
of GQ. I’m not even shittin’ you. I wrote that. Daniel Day-Lewis that!”
that down.” He met Day-Lewis once. Keoghan was in the
Keoghan does this: puts things on to-do reception area at a steam room in Brooklyn,
lists, so as to call them forth from the universe, and this young guy recognized him, and said
or hypnotize himself into walking toward he was a fan of Keoghan’s work, and that his
that goal. He believes in manifesting, in part father was a fan, too, and when the guy men-
because it seems to have worked for him. In tioned that his father was an actor, Keoghan
his phone, he keeps a list of directors he’d like said, Oh, really? What’s he done, and the guy
to work with, and once upon a time Martin said, “Uh, My Left Foot…” and Keoghan said,
McDonagh and Chloé Zhao and Emerald Nahhhhh. And then the guy—Day-Lewis’s
Fennell were all on it. I ask if he’s having son Gabriel-Kane, also an actor—said he’d
trouble coming up with new things to dream be glad to introduce them, and Keoghan said
toward, and he says no: “I don’t want to get to a he’d love that, (text continued on page 38)
 hoodie
Los Angeles
Apparel
pants
Giorgio Armani
 ↓
sweater
Loewe

→
and thought nothing more about tank top it themselves. “It’s just to start your
it until the next day, when he again Martin Keehn day good, to kind of bring you back
found himself waiting outside the shorts to gravity,” he says. “At least I’ve
same steam room and up walked Prada made it. It’s small, simple stuff like
a figure in “this lovely gray coat,” that, keeps you from floating away.”
Keoghan remembers. It was Day-Lewis— He reaches up, fingers a quarter-inch nick
Lincoln and Daniel Plainview and Bill the just below his eyebrow. “Got a little cut in
Butcher himself. “He’s like, ‘Barry, I just want sparring,” he says.
to say I’m a massive fan—I watch all your Don’t touch it, I say. “Is it bad?” Keoghan
work,’ ” Keoghan says. “I was like, ‘Gimme a asks. I tell him no, that it looks fine, like it’ll
second, Daniel—I can’t really talk.’ He was close up if he leaves it alone. I joke that he
nothing but nice, man—I think he said, Come needs a cut man in his corner; Keoghan says,
over and have dinner with us sometime. And “Funny you should mention that.” He tells me
then COVID hit and I went back to Ireland. about a movie he wants to make. “It’s called
But that was a great one, man. He’s the top, The Cut Man. It’s about my upbringing.”
for me.” The project is in its early days, Keoghan
The thirst tweets, the accolades, Daniel says, but the story will be “sort of centered
feckin’ Day-Lewis giving you props: Keoghan around my life,” which means—assuming it’s
is honest about enjoying it, but knows he’s mostly faithful to Keoghan’s actual arc—that
not supposed to enjoy it too much. “You can it’ll be about a kid from the dead center of
get caught up in it, and it’s kind of dangerous Dublin who grows up without a father, loses with his grandmother, becomes fascinated
in that sense,” he says. This is why he makes his mother, Debbie, to a heroin overdose, for reasons he at first can’t articulate by
his hotel bed every morning, even though he bounces around the foster-care system with old films on television, stays up late eating
knows the staff will come around and change his brother for seven years, finally moves in Rice Krispies and watching the way Marlon
Brando and James Dean and Paul Newman
speak and move and hold the screen, and
eventually finds himself, first in a boxing
ring and eventually on a film set. If you were
writing this movie, chances are you’d end
it there, where the Dickensian rough-and-
tumble of the underdog protagonist’s youth
gives way to the wide-openness of a life in art,
to once-unthinkable possibilities; ending it,
say, at the Oscars—where his performance
in The Banshees of Inisherin took him—or
with Keoghan posted up at the Four Seasons,
might strain credulity.
“It’s crazy when I think of it,” Keoghan
says of the ride he’s on. “I was saying to my
friend last night—I was just looking out at
the [Hollywood] sign and, y’know, I wanted
this as a kid. I dunno why I wanted it, but I
wanted it. It brings back memories, in a weird
way—it’s hard to have memories of a place
you’ve not been in, but I watched all those old
movies, and was fascinated by Old Hollywood.
This was stuff I dreamt of, as a kid.”
Which is not to say it feels good all the
time, necessarily.
“There’s a loneliness as well, that comes
with this,” Keoghan says. “A massive lone-
liness. It’s hard not to talk about that, or to
pretend that’s not there.” It caught up with
him in November when he walked the red
carpet in Prada at the Saltburn premiere in
New York. “One of the noisiest, busiest cities
in the world,” he says, “but for me it was like,
I’m in that place on my own—the only person
in New York, at some points.”
Who do you think about, when you’re alone
like that?
“When I’m isolated?” Keoghan says.
“Obviously, my mother. My mother, always.
She’s many years passed now, but I always
think about her anyway. It’s always just in
and around achievements that it’s really
prominent—’cause you’d like to celebrate
that wit’ ’er, y’know?”
Did she know you wanted to do this kind
of work?
“No, no, no,” Keoghan says, and laughs,
as if Debbie would be tickled to see it. She
did know he liked performing, he says. She
always called him “little Timmy”—“I don’t
know why,” Keoghan says. “She’d be like,
‘Where’s my little Timmy?’ I’d love to make
her laugh, and just dance for her.”
She died when he was 12. She wasn’t really
in his life by the time it happened. “She was
in the hospital,” Keoghan says. “She was bat-
tlin’ a lot of stuff.”
Later, Keoghan will tell me about meet-
ing Leonardo DiCaprio—who was very
cool, he says: “They say never meet your
heroes, but nah”—and when I ask him what
his favorite DiCaprio performance is, he’ll
say The Basketball Diaries. “I loved What’s
Eating Gilbert Grape,” he tells me, “but
Basketball Diaries, for me, there was a per-
sonal connection—with my mother being
on heroin. I really could relate to it, a lot.
There’s a scene where he comes to the door
and he’s begging his mom, can he come in?
I was witness to that—that happened at my
granny’s house, ’cause my granny was my
mother’s mother. And it was similar. It hit
home for me.”
By then he was out of foster care, living full-
time with his grandmother, his aunt, and his
cousin, who moved into her mother’s room
so Keoghan and his brother could have hers.
Keoghan laughs. “Now she has her bed-
room back, finally,” he says. “Not that I’ve got
them their own house yet—but now that’s
coming. At some point. Definitely making
that happen.”
A lot of people have a story like this one,
in Keoghan’s neighborhood. “Dublin 1, we
call it—the postcode is 1,” he says. “It’s proper
inner city. It’s the heart, man. And y’know,
every inner city has its problems and faces its
battles. Everyone’s kind of going through the
same stuff there.” hoodie
He looks out at the pool water, sun-kissed Balenciaga
and blue. “This is such a contrast to where
I come from,” he says. “I mean, this is such
a contrast to where anyone comes from. It’s
not real. This is not real, is it? It can’t be real. movie, 2011’s Between the Canals. He knows that control. Time was almost not moving, if
I’m gonna wake up right now. In a second, I’ll how far-fetched it sounds, how feckin’ you get what I’m saying—when I was onstage,
be like, ‘Fuck, man—that was some dream.’ ” corny: “But it’s not like I rang the number it was like a timeless feeling.”
He knows how it sounds. A kid from and instantly, y’know, I’m in Hollywood, a But when he wasn’t acting, he was acting
painful circumstances sees a flyer in a shop star.” He did 10-plus years of work, between out. “Not in a bad way—just being a little
window next door to the local boxing club, there and here. brat, basically, and not payin’ attention,”
somebody looking to cast a little film. “They He wasn’t, strictly speaking, a nonactor Keoghan says. “Playin’ characters, drawin’
were looking for, like, nonactors,” Keoghan when he called. He’d been in school plays stuff on the walls, imitating teachers, being
says, “and they were looking to see if you every Christmas—silly parts, kid stuff, rap- the class clown.” At some point, seeking dis-
had a dirt bike. And I had two of those—I scallions tormenting the babysitter. The cipline that might hurt, the school barred
was a nonactor, and I had a dirt bike.” He material was not the point. “I loved getting up him from the stage for a while. “I was like,
calls the number from his granny’s mobile there,” he says, “and being someone else and Oh, that’s my acting career over,” Keoghan
phone, auditions, gets cast in his first having that engagement with the audience, says. “And I really thought it was.”

F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4 G Q . C O M 3 9

For the past few years he’s taken medica-
tion for ADHD; I suggest that he had it back
then and nobody knew it. Keoghan laughs.
“Everyone knew it,” he says, “but I didn’t
know it.”
I ask him about that word—control—and if
what he means is self-control.
“No,” he says. “Like, I can deliver the lines
when I want. I can control the pace of how
the dialogue’s going. I can do anything I want
up here, basically. Like, they’re waiting on
me. And when you get laughs—it made me
feel relevant…. You feel heard and seen. At
the center of it. Where I was supposed to be.
That’s the best way to put it. Nothing else
mattered at that time. I get that with box-
ing—I get that looseness, that feeling of time-
lessness. That present feeling. It’s magical.
And you chase that.”
THESE PAGES
jacket
Balenciaga
hoodie
Los Angeles
THE SUN’S DIRECTLY above the Apparel we don’t know. McDonagh remem-
pool now. Barry says he’d like to pants bers coming to see him just before
move—into the shade, I’m assum- Giorgio Armani shooting was set to begin.
ing, but no: “I was thinking we “I’m not sure if he was on a
could sit over there in the sun! I wanna sit lot of meds, but he seemed to shrug it off,”
directly in it—I wanna get a bit of color, man, McDonagh said. “We were only about four
you know what I mean?” days out from shooting, and his arm was
We stake out a cabana with better, hotter puffed up. But he was like, ‘Yeah, no, I’m
exposure. Keoghan peels off his shirt, reveal- going to be fine—I’ll see you on Tuesday.’ I
ing a slightly pale, compactly muscled chest went to the hospital thinking, Shit—is he
and the gnarly scar tissue that winds its way going to die? Let alone, is he going to make
up his arm like a snake tattoo. A souvenir the movie. But I came out of there energized
from a case of necrotizing fasciitis—a.k.a. and looking forward to it.”
flesh-eating disease—he caught a few years Keoghan remembers the heart monitor
ago, right before The Banshees of Inisherin beeping in the background and McDonagh
started shooting. One in five cases are fatal; saying, Just remember this when you’ve been
amputation, he says, was on the table. He nominated for an Oscar. Which of course is
remembers saying to the doctors, But I’m not exactly what happened. He lost, to Ke Huy
gonna die, right? and the doctors saying, Well, Quan, but it’s an honor just to be nominated,
plus he got to keep his arm.
Say something out loud, call it forth
from the universe. Because he’s done it in
every interview, often prophetically, I ask
him to run down who’s left on the list of
directors in his phone. “Barry Jenkins,” he
says. “Paul Thomas Anderson. Christopher
Nolan, again. Yorgos again, obviously.
Lynne Ramsay. Chloé Zhao again. Martin
McDonagh, obviously, again. Greta Gerwig,
as well—I’d love to work with Greta. I think
she’s fucking incredible.”
He’d like to work with Steven Spielberg
too. They’ve met a few times—the first was
years ago, when Spielberg was casting
Ready Player One. “I remember doing the
screen test, and he had a little camcorder
in his hand, and I was like, This is insane.
Steven Spielberg is filming me doing a
scene, on a camcorder. ”
He didn’t get that part, but this year he’s
come one step closer to working with the
man—Spielberg and Tom Hanks produced
the Apple TV+ series Masters of the Air,
about the World War II–era B-17 bomber
pilots of the Air Force’s 100th Bombardment
Group, known as the Bloody Hundredth,
and in that series Keoghan plays Lt. Curtis
R. Biddick, fictionalized here as a scrapper
with a Brooklyn accent. Between setups, on
a massive set outside London, he and costar
Austin Butler knocked each other around a
little. “I learned him how to box,” Keoghan
says. “He was pretty good.”
“I always wanted to play a pilot,” Keoghan
says. He was in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk,
years ago, as poor doomed George Mills, who
sails across the English Channel in a pleasure
boat to rescue trapped British soldiers —but
the coolest role in that film is Tom Hardy, up
there in that fighter plane, emoting through
an oxygen mask, which was part of why
Keoghan wanted to be in Masters: “If you can
convey your emotions, what you’re feeling,
with just your eyes, it’s powerful. I’d con-
stantly say to (continued on page 84)
F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4 G Q . C O M 4 1
 The
world’s most
legendary
freeskier is on a
multiyear mission to
become the first person
to climb and ski down the 50
most storied routes in North
America. But he’s not that young
anymore, and inevitably the mountains
that remain just keep getting deadlier.

By GRAYSON SCHAFFER Photographs by BJARNE SALEN


rules that govern the life of Cody Townsend,
one of the greatest skiers on the planet, are
pretty simple these days. Rule number one:
Don’t die. That’s mandatory, especially now
that Townsend and his wife, fellow world-
class skier Elyse Saugstad, are parents to two-
year-old Indiana. Rule number two: Have fun.
That’s pretty much a given when Townsend, a
prolific star of extreme-skiing films, is flying
down a mountain on two planks. Rule num-
ber three is where it gets interesting, because
he’s decided to do something that’s never
been done, or even attempted. Something
almost unfathomable.
Townsend is a freeskier—a practitioner
of a kind of alpine daredevilry that involves
high-flying jumps and breakneck descents.
The trouble with the discipline is that you’re
beholden to something known as “the pro-
gression,” a driving force in the ski universe
that requires each year’s feats to be a little
more difficult, a little more complex than
what came before. The term gets mentioned
in X Games commentary, social media posts,
and ski magazines as part of the vernacular.
And here’s the thing about the progression:
There are no stopwatches or judges in free-
skiing. Athletes who progress stay relevant
and get paid. Those who plateau fade away
or become influencers. And Townsend was
never going to fade away.
As a freeskier, Townsend—a six-foot-one,
195-pound Sasquatch of a man—has spent
his entire career helicoptering to the tops
of powder-draped mountains in Alaska
and British Columbia and wowing ski-film
audiences by hucking himself artfully from
towering cliffs. For the latest step in his pro-
gression, though, he’s ditched the choppers,
downshifted to human power, and embarked
on an unprecedented quest, one that has
consumed the past five years of his life. That
brings us to rule number three: Ski 50 of the
most daunting lines in North America, a mis-
sion that originated with a now mythic book.
Fifty Classic Ski Descents of North America
is a tome you’ll find on the coffee tables of
4 4 G Q . C O M F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4
In some ways, this is how modern skiing
Rockies and the shelves of started: trudging up and swooping down the
Alps with minimal gear. But now the tech-
Hole. Every serious skier is nology behind skis, boots, and especially
aware of it. Self-published bindings has allowed modern ski mountain-
eers to tackle slopes that the early pioneers
Davenport and longtime would never have even considered. Interest
in backcountry skiing, which had been on
experts Art Burrows and the rise for decades as gear became lighter
Penn Newhard, the book and more reliable, suddenly spiked by over
has become a kind of aspi- 50 percent during the pandemic. That means
rational compendium for bigger crowds in the backcountry—and also
more avalanche fatalities.
are the adventurous people There’s even a sportified version of skimo—
for whom ski resorts—with Townsend describes it as “cross-country
their clear-cut runs, expen- racing uphill”—that will debut at the 2026
sive chairlifts, and entitled Winter Olympics in Cortina d’Ampezzo,
crowds—feel like amusement Italy. It’s part of a general mood shift toward
parks. Any backcountry skiers leafing through human-powered recreation that comes in
the book will immediately picture themselves response to both climate change and over-
standing atop its remote peaks; edging del- crowding on trails, mountains, rivers, and
icate turns down steep hallways of rocks, surf breaks around the world. And Townsend
called couloirs; and blasting through endless has emerged as human-powered skiing’s pre-
untracked powder in wilderness bowls. eminent practitioner.
Unlike some other famous lists of moun- His quest is a grueling feat of persistence
tains—the Seven Summits, the 8,000ers, and logistics, further complicated by the
and Colorado’s Fourteeners, all of which technical challenge of skiing at a level that
are grouped by elevation—the 50 peaks in requires an elite gymnast’s lifelong commit-
Davenport et al.’s book are a purely aesthetic ment to the craft and a free-soloist’s tolerance
conglomeration. The authors leaned on local for risk. (Alex Honnold even makes a cameo
backcountry legends like Jimmy Chin, Glen in The Fifty, joining Townsend for No. 33,
Plake, and the late Hilaree Nelson to curate Mount Whitney.) If you had to choose the
the project. “If you were to stand below most dangerous career in sports, it would be
any of them, their elegance and beauty and BASE jumping, alpinism, or freeskiing. Ski
power would be undeniable,” said coauthor mountaineering combines the last two.
Penn Newhard, 59, founder For the past five years,
of Backbone Media, based in Opening pages, left: Townsend has led viewers up and
Carbondale, Colorado. Cody Townsend turns down 46 of those 50 fabled ski
down the Split
For even the most elite back- lines—from Mount Tukuhnikivatz
Couloir, in
country skiers, to descend a California’s eastern (No. 15) in southern Utah to the
handful of these lines would Sierras. Opening Polar Star Couloir (No. 45) among
be a career accomplishment. pages, right: With the fjords of Canada’s Baffin
Townsend has dedicated himself teammates Dan Corn Island, a place so remote it might
to skiing them all. The footage and Nick Russell, he as well be the ice planet Hoth.
ascends the Haydon
from these endeavors—all shot Shoulder, on Alaska’s Some of the lines are horrifying
by Bjarne Salen, a 34-year-old 18,008-foot Mount ribbons of white death pasted
Swedish expat, skier, and vet- Saint Elias. to the sides of windswept faces
eran filmmaker—gets edited steeper than your grandparents’
into a series on Townsend’s YouTube channel basement stairs. Others, like California’s
called The Fifty. Bloody Couloir (No. 46), evoke towering ver-
In contrast to the cliffs he used to soar sions of the double black diamonds you might
off in his heli-skiing days, the lines of The find in-bounds at a ski area. That is, just mel-
Fifty sit at the sport’s lonely antipode. low enough to invite a reporter to tag along.
Townsend’s method of conquering them is
a pastime known as ski mountaineering, or “ L E T ’ S S W I T C H T O crampons,” said
“skimo” for short. The term simply means Townsend. Our crew of 10 stopped chatting,
that you climb up the mountain before ski- and then we stepped out of our touring skis
ing down. It’s both the sport’s past and its and into metal spikes for the last thousand
future, a wildly adventuresome offshoot of feet of our bootpack up a narrow couloir that
skiing that recalls an era before chairlifts would steepen to 45 degrees just before roll-
and tramways—a time of climbing jagged ing onto the summit ridge.
peaks under your own power in order to ski It was Memorial Day weekend, and
them, typically in terrible conditions. The we were climbing Bloody Mountain, a
thrills are free, the risks are legion, and the 12,533-foot pyramid of red rhyolite rising
help is often distant. from the John Muir Wilderness south of
Mammoth Lakes, California. Townsend, 40,
with shoulder-length golden locks forever
pinned behind a pair of wraparound Smith
sunglasses, is one of the most recognizable
freeskiers in the world. But in his latest incar-
nation as a convert to ski mountaineering,
he was spending more time just getting to
summits than he was making his famously
adrenalized descents from them.
Townsend was fond of saying that the
climbing part is often more difficult than the
skiing. For him, anyway. Near the top of the
couloir, I looked down and fought the pre-
monition of toppling thousands of feet after
a clumsy step.
Among our mostly Lake Tahoe–based crew
on Bloody Mountain were professional skiers
Josh Daiek, Michelle Parker, Drew Petersen,
and JT Holmes, who in the early aughts pio-
neered the perilous sport of ski-BASE jump-
ing, along with the late Shane McConkey.
Bjarne Salen had signed on with Townsend
as his dedicated cameraman and suffer buddy
for the entire Fifty project. And, of course,
there was Saugstad, 44, Townsend’s wife and
life partner of two decades, among the most
talented freeskiers ever to schuss and huck.
After snacking and lounging at the sum-
mit, waiting for the hard spring névé to soften
into corn snow, we switched from crampons
back to skis. Holmes dug a tiny parachute,
called a speed wing, out of his daypack and
went first. He skied the first quarter of the
run, scraping loudly on hard snow, then sailed
off a 200-foot cliff and glided neatly into the
run-out. Next came Townsend and Saugstad.
I clicked in and followed Salen down the gully
to his camera vantage to see the couple the
way Townsend’s 144,000 YouTube channel
subscribers would when the episode rolled
out. Saugstad and Townsend skied playfully
together, evoking the old Powder 8 competi-
tions, in which pairs of skiers vied with the
seriousness of ice dancers to see which team Robson—could give anyone, even him, a panic two. Back then they’d arrange for a babysit-
could make the most perfect tracks. attack. Saint Elias and Robson are so ill-tem- ter to supervise nap time at the cabin. “He
Saugstad urged him to go faster. pered that they’ve only been skied twice. Ever. wouldn’t go to sleep unless he had his skis in
“You can make your turns a little bigger!” the crib with him,” recalled Peggy, who’s now
she shouted. A T T H E T U R N of the millennium, at Aptos a mystery novelist. At age eight, Townsend
“I was trying to make hop turns!” he High School, in Santa Cruz County, California, attempted to ski jump over a snowcat road
shouted toward her. The hop turn is essentially Townsend’s nickname was the Ghost. “I would while his dad watched. “He hits the frozen
skiing’s French accent, a highly specific safety disappear every weekend,” he said. “I didn’t go road and does a huge slap with the skis,” said
maneuver for steep couloirs that’s ubiquitous to parties.” This, despite the fact that he was Jamie. One of them actually snapped in half.
in Chamonix, but Townsend was performing the starting quarterback his junior and senior “I skied down to him and asked, ‘What hurts
them gratuitously on a gentle 40-degree slope. years. Instead, his mother, Peggy, a reporter the most?’ And he says, ‘My leg!’ ” Townsend
He displays the body-aware movements of the at the Santa Cruz Sentinel, and his father, wasn’t seriously injured, though. When he
great professional athlete—poised, efficient, Jamie, Aptos’s freshman football coach, would and his father explained the crash to Peggy,
powerful—that would show anyone he’s world- pack their Jeep and head up Highway 80 to she asked her son what he’d learned. “Mom,”
class, even when he’s just noodling. Lake Tahoe. There, after scraping together he replied, “next time I have to go faster.”
“Hey, stop skiing like a sissy!” shouted $35,000 in 1960, the family had Skiing in Lake Tahoe isn’t
Daiek from the ridge. Townsend could purchased a tiny Forest Service Townsend, 40 and newly like other places. It’s a region
afford to goof off a bit on the mellow slopes cabin a mile from the legendary a father, has devoted that famously produces more
himself to skiing a fabled
of Bloody Couloir. But the remaining four KT-22 chairlift at the resort now Winter Olympians than any-
list of North America’s
lines in the book—among them Alaska’s known as Palisades Tahoe. greatest routes. The where else in the US, including
Mount Saint Elias and University Peak, and That had been the weekly handful that remain are 18 athletes who competed in
British Columbia’s near-vertical Mount routine since Townsend was notoriously unforgiving. Beijing in 2022. “I remember

F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4 G Q . C O M 4 5
thinking, I just want to be a skier,” Townsend
said. The trouble was, in the early ’90s, there
was really only one kind of professional
skier: Olympic racers like Tommy Moe,
whose 1994 gold-medal-winning downhill
run in Lillehammer converted a genera-
tion of enthusiasts, including Townsend.
He joined the mountain’s youth team at age
nine. “I did well enough at racing—espe-
cially for skiing eight days in a month,”
Townsend said.
Around the same time Moe was winning
gold, a ski-film company called Matchstick
Productions released its first movie, a music
video montage of self-described “hippies,
derelicts, and dirtbags.” Among Matchstick’s
biggest stars was Shane McConkey, a red-
headed bon vivant who was a decade older
than Townsend and a regular on the KT-22
lift. Like Townsend, McConkey had started
as a racer but was inevitably drawn to the
adrenaline and creativity of freeskiing. “All of
a sudden, the freeride revolution happened,”
said Townsend, referring to the shifting pin-
nacle of skiing from a prescribed race with
a finish line to a death-defying performance
art. “I watched my first Matchstick movie and
thought, Shane McConkey is probably the
coolest person on the planet.”
Scott Gaffney, 54, one of Matchstick’s
longtime directors, remembers a 17-year-
old Townsend clad in bright, stretchy racing
gear. “I’d be trying to get first tracks on KT-22
and this kid’s getting here earlier than I am,”
Gaffney told me. “It got a little irritating.”
Townsend was on pace to make the US crap out of Cody for skiing with me. Like,
Ski Team when a manager at his sponsor, ‘Loser, what are you doing skiing with your
Salomon, pointed out that he could win girlfriend on a powder day?’ I’m like, Wow,
$20,000 by competing at the X Games in these guys are total dicks. But he didn’t get
the nascent sport of ski cross. (In ski cross— embarrassed and ditch me or anything.”
like motocross—racers concurrently nav- Townsend tried to show off by hitting a
igate a course of banked turns and jumps.) 30-foot cliff he’d been saving for fresh snow.
Townsend wanted the money to help his After landing it, he wanted to be sure Saugstad
parents cover his racing expenses, but at the had seen him. “I look back up and she’s in the
event he went out too fast, crashed, and broke air off the exact same cliff I hit and just stomps
his femur. Worse, his coaches from the US Ski it perfectly. It was at that moment I was like,
Team saw his participation as a sign that he Okay, I guess she might be the girl for me.”
wasn’t serious about real racing. “They were That winter, Townsend finally got the
pissed at me for doing ski cross even though chance to ski in one of Gaffney’s Matchstick
I was doing it to try to commit more to the films. But when the premiere rolled
sport,” recalled Townsend. around—held in California’s Olympic Valley,
Broken and wounded, Townsend enrolled in front of his friends and family—Townsend
in college, eventually graduating as a linguis- wasn’t in the film, except for some anony-
tics major at UC Santa Cruz, and worked a mous crashes near the end. Nobody had told
series of restaurant jobs to keep himself in him he didn’t make the cut.
lift tickets. Salomon stuck with him, and he “He might have been trying too hard,”
tried to market himself as a freeskier like his recalled Gaffney. “Maybe he wasn’t quite
idol McConkey. He met Saugstad at a 2005 ski- ready. He just kept splattering.”
industry trade show in Las Vegas, where he “I remember crying,” said Townsend of the
handed out envelopes containing his résumé, screening. His racing career had bombed and
photos, and a homemade DVD of himself ski- it was looking like his chances as a freeskier
ing. As he recalled, “I remember meeting her weren’t much better. “Elyse was matter-of-
and she’s like, ‘Yeah, I live in Tahoe.’ I’m like, fact in her analysis. She’s like, ‘What else are
‘No, you don’t. I know every hot girl in Tahoe.’ ” you going to do? You love skiing. You’re good
After the show, it was Saugstad at it. You’ll be fine.’ ”
who called Townsend to go skiing. Townsend and And he was. It just took
Russell reading in
“It was a powder day with another five years working in
their tent on Mount
Shane and JT and Scott Gaffney,” Saint Elias as they restaurants, during which time
she recalled. “We’re in the lift line, acclimatize for a Saugstad became the first and
and those guys start heckling the summit push. only American woman to win

the Freeride World Tour championship, a
big-mountain competition series that’s judged
sort of like pro surfing. Finally, in Matchstick’s
2010 movie, The Way I See It, Townsend got
called up to pinch-hit on a heli trip to Alaska
after a veteran skier blew out his knee. This
time he was ready.
“He took his racing background and went
really fast down big mountains,” Gaffney
said. “Off huge cliffs, and stomped them,
with the whole mountain coming down
beside him.”
Townsend had no problem one-upping
himself. Between 2011 and 2014, nobody skied
faster or more aggressively in big terrain than
he did. He won all the awards the freeskiing
world had to offer, but it was a line known
as the Crack that sticks in people’s minds.
Footage of his descent went nuclear online in
2014 and catapulted Townsend into the main-
stream. The Today show had him on and ran
a segment titled “Man Films Himself Riding
‘Most Insane Ski Line Ever.’ ”
Townsend and a film crew from Matchstick
were helicoptering through a remote zone in
Alaska’s Tordrillo Mountains, scoping out
lines for that year’s Days of Our Youth, when
it came into view. “It felt like this was all my
experience and knowledge coming together
for a line I’d been dreaming of my whole life,”
Townsend told me.
The Crack descends a thousand-vertical-
foot chimney in the side of an otherwise
solid piece of granite. It starts as a narrow,
funnel-shaped snowfield and then necks
down to a ski’s width as the walls tighten
over it. Townsend, looking like an ant amid
the Alaska-size relief, dropped into what was
essentially a controlled free fall and man-
aged to make one speed-checking turn in the
snowfield before firing down the barrel and
emerging—literally screaming—at roughly
70 miles per hour.
“It was the only line I got more scared while
in it,” Townsend said. He stayed up late that
night, staring at the blood moon, still amped
on adrenaline but knowing that he needed to
change directions. “The path of a professional
skier is every year you have to top yourself. I’m
like, I ain’t topping that. Sorry.”
THAT WAS WHEN he first picked up a copy of
Fifty Classic Ski Descents of North America.
The book’s cover features a pair of weather-
hardened mountaineers ascending Alaska’s
University Peak, ice axes in hand, skis
strapped to their backs. There’s not a heli-
copter or movie camera in sight.
The snowboarder Jeremy Jones, 48,
another Tahoe film star, had recently given
up helicopters in favor of climbing the lines
he wanted to ride. “I was massively influ-
enced by him,” Townsend said. The move
brought Jones even more acclaim as a rider
willing to confront the hypocrisy of athletes
“It was the only line where I
got more scared while I was in it.
The path of a professional
skier is every year you have
to top yourself. I’m like,
I ain’t topping that. Sorry.”
talking about climate change while also
burning 50 gallons of jet fuel per hour.
Beyond species-level extinction, Townsend
was also interested in his own personal sur-
vival. “It’s like, Dude, you’re going to die if you
try to keep going down this path,” he said of
his progression. It’s hard to overstate just how
dangerous the sport is. Freeskiing loses several
of its top performers each year—to avalanches,
crevasse falls, blunt impact, and despair.
In 2009, Townsend’s role model, McConkey,
full of life and newly a father, died at age 39 in
a ski-BASE accident in the Italian Dolomites
after a technical malfunction threw him
into an unrecoverable spin that prevented
him from opening his parachute. In 2012,
Saugstad, then 33, narrowly survived the
Tunnel Creek avalanche, near Stevens Pass,
Washington, that killed three prominent
industry pros and became the basis for The
New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize–winning mul-
timedia story “Snow Fall.” And there have
been others: Doug Coombs, among the found-
ing fathers of extreme skiing, fell over a 500-
foot cliff in La Grave, France, in 2006 while
trying to help a friend. Canadian journeyman
Dave Treadway fell into a crevasse in 2019.
Hilaree Nelson, 49, was swept to her death by
a small avalanche near the summit of Nepal’s
26,781-foot Manaslu in 2022. And last April,
Olympic racer and freeskier Jeremy Nobis was
found dead in a Utah jail cell, where he had
been awaiting sentencing for a DUI.
Townsend, who is also an accomplished
surfer, explained that it would be like having
Kelly Slater and “five of the top 15 surfers of
all time dead through the sport.”
“I stopped counting once I hit 20,”
Townsend said of the friends he’s lost to ski-
ing. “It depresses me. I inevitably forget peo-
ple, and it’s just fucked up.”
After the Crack, he tried to lean into cre-
ative endeavors rather than death-defying
ones. Townsend did stunts for Vin Diesel
in XXX: Return of Xander Cage, skiing and
jumping through the steep wooded for-
ests of Puerto Rico on wood-chipped ice,
and accompanied a Salomon film crew to
Svalbard, the Norwegian archipelago, to ski
while silhouetted by the fiery ring of the 2015
Arctic solar eclipse.
It was in Svalbard that Townsend first
slept in a tent in the winter and used ski-
mountaineering gear to hike for his thrills. It
was also the expedition where he met Bjarne
Salen. The soft-spoken Swedish filmmaker
and athlete was just coming off his own trag-
edy. He’d been working as the full-time cam-
eraman to his steep-skiing mentor, Andreas
Fransson. “I could ski where all my profes-
sional skier friends could ski, but most camera
people could not,” Salen told me. The previous
September, in 2014, Fransson and Canadian
freeskiing great JP Auclair had both been
swept to their deaths in an avalanche while
ascending Monte San Lorenzo, along the bor-
der of Chile and Argentina. Salen was filming
on an opposing ridgeline when it happened.
Fransson, 31, had always attacked the
world’s steepest, iciest couloirs far from civi-
lization, either with Salen or solo. He’d culti-
vated a reputation as the guy who pushed the
limit more than anyone, often with Salen as
his only witness. Auclair, on the other hand,
was a 37-year-old ski-film star, much like
Townsend. At the time of his death, he had
an infant son.
“I lose friends every fucking year,” Salen
told me. “It’s crazy. It just brings me to a place
where I take less risk.”
If rock and roll is known for the curse of
27—the age when so many famously troubled
musicians meet their end—skiers tend to
struggle with the edge of 40 and the descent
into middle age. There’s no hard data on the
riskiest time in a professional freeskier’s life,
but anecdotally, many of the great ones have
died long after their prefrontal cortices are
fully capable of complex risk management.
They were all world-class experts in snow
safety. Did they lose a step without noticing
it? Fail to retire at the right time?
Townsend points to a theory called “the nor-
malization of deviance” that was put forward
by sociologist Diane Vaughan to help explain
NASA’s 1986 Challenger disaster. Initially,
NASA management and faulty O-rings were
blamed for the explosion. But Vaughan dug
deeper and theorized that the O-rings were
merely a symptom of a culture in which engi-
neers had begun to bend their own safety
rules—just a little—in order to launch when
conditions were outside their parameters.
“They kept having success with it, until the
whole thing failed,” Townsend said.
Skiing works the same way. “In the moun-
tains, most of the time you get away with it,”
he continued. But over decades, repeatedly
taking small risks that have major conse-
quences catches up with people. Still, if you
F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4 G Q . C O M 4 7

were able to ask them, most any deceased
skier would likely tell you that risk manage-
ment was their highest priority.
Townsend hopes he’s cracked the code. “It’s
a lot about following your own fucking rules,”
he told me, “and not breaking those rules.”
WITHIN TOWNSEND’S JOCULAR “rule number
one” are decades of more granular guidelines
that help bring him home from each outing.
He got his first taste of the consequences
of his decisions at age 15, when two of his
friends urged him to ski out of bounds off
the KT-22 lift. He felt unsure about the ava-
lanche stability and stayed in-bounds. That
afternoon, his friends’ mothers called Peggy
Townsend to ask if she’d seen them. As they’d
later learn, the boys had died in an avalanche
shortly after leaving the ski area.
Townsend now focuses on things like snow
safety, group size, and summit fever, among
dozens of other factors that might corrupt
his decision-making. He thinks about certain
rules of thumb, known as heuristic traps, that
can get you into trouble if you follow them
blindly, and prefers to ski in terrible hard-
pack conditions—“the green brick” he calls
it, referring to the color coding of avalanche
forecasts—rather than on powder days, which
are more fun but also far riskier.
All of these rules add up to a willingness to do
the one thing that goal-oriented professionals
hate to do: turn around. Even if it’s taken weeks
of planning, effort, and money to get within
range of completing a line, Townsend has and
will abort with little hesitation or regret.
He knew that Salen had the temperament
to suffer and also the discipline to follow the
rules and make good decisions. So, with a
pact of conservatism, they rolled out the first
YouTube episode of The Fifty in January 2019.
It was a rerun—sort of. Townsend delivered a
campy monologue, including both bedroom
and candlelit bathtub scenes, to explain the
project, and then left viewers with footage
of his 2017 climb and ski descent of Alaska’s
20,310-foot Denali via the Messner Couloir.
“I don’t feel like I need to do it again, if you
know what I mean,” he tells the camera. And
so the quest actually begins in Utah’s Little
Cottonwood Canyon with Mount Superior,
the iconic monolith that looms across the
valley from the Snowbird and Alta ski resorts.
The Fifty is anything but the ski porn
viewers are accustomed to seeing from
Townsend. He’s always running into friends,
sometimes on purpose, sometimes through
serendipity. They dig avalanche pits and
analyze the snowpack. Townsend talks about
his decision-making process and nerds out
on gear. Rather than the wide, heavy pow-
der boards he’d been skiing his entire career,
he was suddenly getting acquainted with
his sponsor Salomon’s carbon-fiber tour-
ing skis and the lightweight Dynafit-style
4 8 G Q . C O M F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4
“Coming home at the end of the
day is still the most important
thing. But people have done
what I’m trying to do and have
lived great lives—have raised
families. There is a way through.”
pin-binding systems that backcountry skiers
have relied upon since the early ’90s.
What makes Townsend so compelling
to watch is that he feels like that one ski
buddy we all have—the one who’s always
psyched to go out for a rip, drink a beer, and
unpack the day. The stories unfold slowly,
with the assumption that most viewers care
about skiing and not just adrenaline-fueled
highlight reels. One thing that Townsend
quickly discovered was that learning to
climb mixed rock and ice, often without a
rope, was much harder than cruising back
down again. “Skiing’s always been the easy
part,” Townsend said. “In freeride, once you
push off, you’re in full flow-state mode. With
this, I’m scared for three hours.”
In February 2019, Townsend got some advice
from an Alaska heli-outfitter that Pontoon
Peak, a classic in the Chugach Range that often
appears in ski films, was in shape to climb and
ski. Townsend and Salen scrambled north to
catch a weather window with two guides, Jeff
Dostie and Brennan Lagasse, and Tahoe snow-
boarder and photographer Ming Poon. But the
conditions turned out to be dicey.
About 150 feet from the summit, Dostie, an
elite guide, voiced concern about whether the
snow on the 55-degree slope was so hard that
their skis might not be able to hold an edge.
“What do you think, Bjarne?” asked
Lagasse.
“Do you want me to be honest?” Salen said.
“Yeah, you’re the man.”
“I already decided…that I’m not going to
go all the way up.”
“Dude, I respect the fuck out of you,” said
Lagasse. “That makes me want to bail.”
“If Bjarne says that, we’re done,” shouted
Townsend from below, making a cutting
motion with his glove.
The team put their skis on and carefully
picked their way down the icy steeps, know-
ing they’d have to come back again if they
wanted to complete The Fifty.
When they were safely in the run-out,
Townsend reminded Salen of their original
adage: “Rule number one: Don’t die.”
EVEN WITH THEIR FIRST ALASKA trip a bust,
Townsend and Salen managed to knock off
27 of the lines by March 2020. Funding from
Townsend’s sponsors Salomon, Yeti, and
Swatch nearly covered the cost of the project.
That year included a successful descent of
Idaho’s Sickle Couloir with Saugstad. While
scouting the Sickle, Saugstad peered through
a spotting scope at their objective. “It’s got a
nice curve to it. Nice and tight.”
“That’s what she said,” Townsend blurted
reflexively.
“That’s what he said,” Saugstad corrected
him. Saugstad is widely regarded as a quick
wit with little patience for the sexism that’s as
pervasive in freeskiing as it is in other sports.
When she and Townsend met, she was still
hoping to attend law school before they both
went all in. “I was like, Damn it, I could have
had a sugar mama lawyer,” said Townsend,
who often plays the role of a lovable meathead,
even though he’s in fact wickedly sharp and
passably self-aware. “She always reminds me
that we would’ve broken up [if she’d attended
law school]. But I can dream.”
Shortly after the Sickle, the pandemic set in
and everything ground to a halt. Ski resorts,
which improbably played an outsize role in
spreading the virus (an early strain spread at
a French ski chalet), shut down immediately
for the remainder of the season.
In the late spring of 2020, Townsend and
his childhood friend Michelle Parker, a Red
Bull–sponsored skier, loaded their bicycles
and bike trailers with skis and camping gear.
They set out from Tahoe and rode a thousand
miles north, ticking off Mount Hood (No. 28),
Mount Rainier (No. 29), and Eldorado Peak
(No. 30), in the Cascades, north of Seattle.
In March 2021, Townsend’s and Saugstad’s
lives changed when she found out she was
pregnant. Nonetheless, a couple of weeks
later, in April, Townsend, a 38-year-old
father-to-be, set his sights on a tricky line
called the Patriarch (No. 36), on Glacier Peak,
deep in Montana’s Beartooth Range. The
Patriarch requires a 15-mile approach, two
nights of winter camping, technical ropework
to rappel into the 55-degree couloir, and iron
nerves to ski both below a dangerous hanging
cornice and above a huge cliff, all the while
knowing that any slip would likely be fatal.
In addition to Salen, Townsend’s part-
ners on that expedition were North Face pro
Jim Morrison and North Face team captain
Hilaree Nelson, the late matriarch of extreme
skiing. The quartet made the rarely skied line
look almost routine.
What would have been line No. 37 was even
more difficult: Alaska’s Mount Saint Elias,
which straddles the US-Canadian border and
rises directly from the Gulf of Alaska. At 18,008 pick them up. For Townsend to finish his his approach to the mountains. “Coming
feet, it’s the second-highest peak in both coun- quest, they’d have to go back. home at the end of the day is still the most
tries, a mountain known for horrible and That was May 2021. In October of that important thing,” he told me. “But people
unpredictable weather, monster avalanches, year, Indiana Townsend was born. “There have done what I’m trying to do and have
and a labyrinth of gullies and ridgelines. was something in my brain that’s never lived great lives—have raised families. There
Townsend and Salen teamed up with Tahoe fired before,” Townsend said about becom- is a way through.”
snowboarder Nick Russell and Alaska guide ing a dad. “I just can’t wait for that age from
Dan Corn, and were dropped off via ski plane 5 to 12 when I can actually take him out and FIVE YEARS INTO his quest, Townsend has
on the glacier with supplies for three weeks. do stuff.” Indy is a happy kid who never goes ticked off all the lines that get skied with
They made it to 13,000 feet before an omi- anywhere without his plastic Lamborghini any regularity. He returned to Alaska’s
nous weather report forced them to retreat. and loves to terrorize Theo, the family’s Chugach Range months after his unsuccess-
With 70-pound packs, they attempted to toy Yorkie. ful first attempt and bagged Pontoon Peak
descend to their pickup location on the “I’ve wanted to keep Indy out of my pro- (No. 18), along with the ultra-classic
beach. But they soon got lost and found their file,” Townsend told me, referring to his social 4,000-vertical-foot ramp down the other-
path blocked by cliffs and a maze of gullies. media presence. “There is a line between my wise sheer Meteorite Mountain (No. 17). For
Worse, heat-induced avalanches began rain- household and who I am and what is out that outing, he teamed up with Jeremy Jones,
ing down all around them. there in the media.” the pioneer of the human-powered adven-
“Not a great situation,” said Townsend. Saugstad, on the other hand, readily ture renaissance.
“Pretty serious,” Russell replied as Corn embraced Indy as part of her professional The mountains that remain place
scouted for a way out the side of the gully. image. In May, she was just wrapping up Townsend in something of a conundrum
“These are the moments you kind of shooting a mockumentary with fellow as a new father. When we were on Bloody
regret the decisions you’ve made,” said freeride luminary and new mom Jackie Mountain in May 2023, Townsend and Salen
Townsend. “I’m not proud of this at all.” Pasao, which they titled Here, Hold My Kid. were planning to leave two days later for
Corn found them an escape route down an It’s about two veteran pros who give birth Alaska and another attempt on Saint Elias.
adjacent gully, and moments after they’d skied and suddenly realize their sponsor has room On the skin track up that morning,
it to safety, the entire thing ripped out above for only one mommy shredder on the roster. I’d slid in beside JT Holmes, who was
them in what Townsend called “the largest A charming death match and pointed indus- wearing a short-sleeve Hawaiian shirt and
avalanche I’ve ever personally witnessed.” try critique ensues. “Luckily, it’s so over-the- Magnum, P.I. aviators. He had just landed
“If we were in that couloir, we all would top that you realize this really isn’t us,” said his own jump in 2009 when, seconds behind
have gotten smoked, straight up,” Saugstad. “At least I hope so.” him, Shane McConkey made his tragic last
Townsend descends
said Russell. It took seven more from Mount Saint
Townsend may keep Indy off ski jump, and yet he retained his lust for
days of waiting on the socked-in Elias’s base camp to his own social media feeds, but adventure. Townsend called him “the eter-
beach before a plane could safely the lower mountain. fatherhood has inevitably shifted nal bachelor.” (continued on page 84)
 Anna’s
ADVENTURES
in

In recent years, 28-year-old

painter Anna Weyant has found
herself at the center of the art world
circus thanks to soaring demand for
her paintings, a surge in her
auction prices, and a relationship
with her gallerist, Larry Gagosian.
When you cut through all the
noise and hype, who is Weyant, and
what’s at the heart of her work?

Carrie Battan
BY
PHOTOGRAPHS BY Roe Ethridge
F E B R U A R Y 5 0 5 4 G Q . C O M 5 1

One Day
in
LATE
OCTOBER,
the painter Anna Weyant took a friend with
her to shop for a coat to wear to LACMA’s
annual Art + Film Gala. Even by the con-
temporary art world’s extravagant stan-
dards, this gala creates a uniquely powerful
blizzard of money, glamour, and prestige
by bringing together just the right blend
of Hollywood celebrity and adjacent art
world royalty—which is to say, heavy on
the Hollywood. For the evening, Dolce &
Gabbana dressed the 28-year-old Weyant in
a sheer black mesh dress, floor-length and
dotted with crystals. A pair of black satin
high-rise panties and a matching plunge bra
would be plainly visible underneath. With
this ensemble, her butter blond coif, and del-
icately contoured features, Weyant would,
perhaps, look more like a young actress than
a humble New York painter.
Now she needed a matching overcoat.
Weyant summoned her friend to the chang-
ing room to give her opinion on her selec-
tions. She wore the dress underneath to get
a sense of how the pieces would jibe. “My
friend opened the door to the room, and
she goes: Absolutely not. You cannot wear
that to LACMA,” Weyant tells me, about a
week after the gala. “And I was like, ‘Oh, I’m
wearing it. It’s the coat I want your opinion
on—not the dress.’ ”
It’s a Sunday afternoon, and we’re sitting
at a table at the Carlyle for afternoon tea.
Weyant has just flown in from her hometown
of Calgary. She is one of the youngest people
here in this romantic Upper East Side legacy
establishment, a feeling she is accustomed to.
In 2022, she became the youngest artist to
sign with the mega-gallery Gagosian. Rather
than try to play down her youth and beauty as
a means of assimilating, Weyant likes to lean
in to her natural girlishness. She is tiny, with
a bright blond bob and a high, sweet voice. Or
as her friend, the podcaster Eileen Kelly, puts
it: “She’s like a little doll. I just want to put her
in my pocket sometimes.”
But after a few minutes of conversation,
Weyant reveals herself to be wickedly savvy,
unexpectedly blunt, and sometimes a bit
vulgar. She tells me of her recent obsessions
that have fed into her paintings, including
5 2 G Q . C O M F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4
Lifetime movies and vintage Playboy. “I’m
interested in the lifestyle and the dark, syn-
thetic parts of it, from that era of my youth—
before I should have been interested in it,” she
says. “I love the big, blond hair, and the giant,
really bulby tits.”
I know why Weyant’s friend protested the
dress: It could fuel the fire hose of attention
that the glamorous, photogenic, and pre-
cocious painter has generated over the last
several years for her ultrafast rise in the art
world, her staggering secondary market
prices, and her personal life. Weyant is not
only represented by Gagosian, but she is also
dating the gallery’s owner, the man widely
recognized as the most formidable art dealer
in the world. At 78, Larry Gagosian is 50 years
Weyant’s senior, a fact that has generated
chatter around dinner parties and gallery
openings for the last few years. It is too easy
to assume that the success is an outgrowth
of the connection between an extremely
powerful man and a much younger woman.
Weyant’s talent transcends this limited narra-
tive, but there’s still a lot of noise crowding it.
“I think my friend knew that I should dress
for a business event,” Weyant explains. She
looks down at the outfit she’s chosen for after-
noon tea today—a black miniskirt and nude
tights with knee-high black leather boots, and
an oversized black turtleneck. “I know this
skirt is probably too short to be wearing to an
interview. That kind of thing,” she admits. But
Weyant has survived the gauntlet she’s been
put through thus far—the roller coaster of her
market, the critique of her work, the snick-
ering both online and off about her dating
life—and she’s come out the other side feel-
ing emboldened to have a little fun. I won-
der aloud to her: Did the disapproval of the
sheer dress make her more excited to wear
it? Weyant’s huge blue eyes light up. “Fuck,
yeah,” she says. “I’m like: I’m going to wear
it harder.”
“I heard it was sort of a costume party and
that people would wear outrageous outfits.
Then I got there and it was just black-tie,
which was sort of mortifying,” she tells me.
“But there were so many other people there
in cool dresses, and it was dark, so nobody
noticed me.”
This is a scenario that produces the exact
kind of emotional textures that Weyant
explores through the subjects featured in her
paintings: precocious figures in the limbo
between girl- and womanhood, maybe a bit
out of place and feeling a flash of devilish
energy, lingering in the shadows of a social
event. Weyant uses her obvious technical
skill to bring together an old-world formal-
ism—chiaroscuro used to deepen mood and
mystery, muted color palettes, and the rich,
dark backgrounds of Dutch Masters’ por-
traits—with a modern sensibility oriented
toward the youthful, the female, and the
internet native. Many of her paintings evoke
the energy of a party that is being suffered
through rather than enjoyed: a girl draped
like a rag doll over a cake-like stack of gift
boxes, a pair of hands clinking broken wine
glasses, even a painting that is actually called
Girl Crying at a Party.
“You meet her, and you’re like, ‘That tiny
girl in the platform heels in the corner painted
that?’” Kelly says. “You’re also like, ‘Wow. You
are one of the girls in your paintings.’ ”
There are detractors, of course, like the
critic who, in one prominent review, accused
her of “playing it much too safe” when she
debuted at Gagosian. But the market has
been staunchly resistant to any critiques.
Her paintings, which are titillatingly cov-
eted and number about 100, decorate the
homes of some of the most powerful peo-
ple in the world. Venus Williams once sat
for a Weyant portrait titled Venus, in which
the tennis player appears twice, as a pair
of twins. Now Williams owns the painting.
Glenn Fuhrman, the investor and blue-chip
art collector, gazes proudly upon a painting
that features two versions of Eileen Kelly,
one of Weyant’s muses, every time he walks
to his bedroom. Another painting of Kelly
sits in Wendi Murdoch’s study. “I was drawn
to the way she seamlessly combines tradi-
tional techniques with a contemporary flair,”
says Murdoch, who caught Weyant’s work
while browsing on Artsy (an art-dealing plat-
form Murdoch cofounded) a few years back.
Today the two are friends who take walks in
the park together. Marc Jacobs and his hus-
band have installed Weyant’s She Drives Me
Crazy in the office nook of the bedroom suite
in their $9.175 million Frank Lloyd Wright
home. If you pay close enough attention to
Kris Jenner’s decor, as Weyant did during
a recent episode of The Kardashians, you
might see a work of hers—a painting of a
basket of eggs—hung on one of the walls.
(Jenner, Weyant says, “is such a cheerleader
for other women.”)
The best part about being a successful
painter, says Weyant, is still the opportunity
to paint. Her friend and portrait subject, the
writer Emma Cline, remembers being at a
dinner party with the artist. “She kept slip-
ping off to the bathroom to look at photos on
her phone of a painting in progress—basically
so she could continue ‘painting’ in her mind
while still being at the dinner.”
But at this level, there is a risk that paint-
ing will take a backseat to other duties. She
describes to me the period following her
Gagosian solo debut, in late 2022. “All of life
felt like work,” she says. “Parties and dinners
and schmoozing. I just felt like I was losing
the plot of it.” The existential dread crept in.
“I felt like I had crossed all these lines and
goals…. And I didn’t feel any better than
I did before. It was a weird feeling: This isn’t
feeding me in the way I wanted. I don’t like
it.” Then she got to work on her most recent
show, which opened at Gagosian’s Paris out-
post last fall. One painting features a stark
question, painted in bubbly capital letters,
suspended over a vase of flowers. “THIS IS A
LIFE?” the painting wonders.
“I was painting it thinking, Is this a fuck-
ing life? All I do is work, and I hate my life,”
Weyant says. “I started to reject the invita-
tions, and it felt really good.” Now, though,
she is beginning to find a bit of room for
public life and enjoyment again. What is the
point of achieving this level of success in such
a glamorous universe if you can’t savor any of
its pleasurable fruits? If you can’t look hot in
a see-through dress while hanging out with
a bunch of other hot, rich people? “I could
fully say, ‘Fuck it,’ and go live on a farm in
Martha’s Vineyard and never see anyone,”
Weyant admits. “But I choose to do it. And
sometimes it’s super fun.”
I MEET WEYANT a few days later at Larry’s
compound in Amagansett, which sits on one
of the most expensive stretches of property
in the country. (Jerry Seinfeld and Barry
Rosenstein have both been neighbors here.)
My Uber driver and I, snaking through gigan-
tic outdoor art installations as we creep closer
to the shoreline, struggle to find my drop-off
point, until we spot Weyant. There she is, in
front of the guesthouse, carrying her senior
Cavalier King Charles spaniel, Sprout, belly
up in her arms like a baby. She’s dressed in
sexy-cozy-casual attire again: a checkered
navy miniskirt with an oversized navy cash-
mere sweater emblazoned with the Ritz
Paris logo and white Converse sneakers. Her
bare legs have an unseasonal bronzed glow,
the product of the St. Tropez self-tanner she
admits to applying constantly.
Once inside, Weyant plops Sprout down
on the floor and leads me cheerfully into the
kitchen, where a trio of Gagosian employ-
ees scurry about, typing on laptops, fielding
calls, or cooing over the dog. I am offered
tea, cookies, and a mimosa. No tour will be
offered of the property, though, which is said
to be home to more significant contemporary
art than most museums. Weyant leads me
past the palatial living room and up the stairs
to a petite top-floor space that functions as
her studio.
Weyant’s shop is a humble one for an artist
whose work one-percenters will debase them-
selves to own. She has yet to hire an assis-
tant. Every brushstroke is her own. For many
years, she worked from her ground floor one-
bedroom apartment in Manhattan, where she
would invite young women in her life to sit
for portraits. Earlier this year, she moved out
of that space and into Larry’s Upper East Side
mansion and started using this little upstairs
Amagansett nook as a studio.
5 4 G Q . C O M F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4
Weyant is on the hunt for a new studio
space in the city, which I assume is because
she wants to create some distance between
her personal life and her work life. When
I suggest this, Weyant corrects me. “Larry is
so busy doing his own thing that that’s not
something I really have to worry about,” she
says. “He’s not a helicopter mom. He never
comes here, he sort of does his own thing,
and I have my own people who help me do
my own thing. He’s a great sounding board
for ideas, but I’ve never worried about getting
too close.” (Larry Gagosian declined to speak
with me for this story.)
“I need a place that I can fuck up a bit,”
she continues, pointing out the fleece blan-
ket laid out over the expensive-looking
couch. (Sprout likes to buck and dig into
the leather.) “This place is so beautiful, and
I love working here, but I spill on the rug and I
feel horrible. I need a rough box that I can get
dirty.” With her Paris solo show about to close,
Weyant has been at work on a tiny painting
of a pair of Mary Janes for Art Basel Miami
Beach. But today her desktop easel sits empty
next to a flat, half-drunk bottle of Corona—the
sort of maudlin tableau that Weyant might
paint as a still life if she were compelled to
make her work a few notches more literal.
Sprout assumes her position on the floor
and begins to let out her signature honk-
ing wheeze of a snore. I ask Weyant if it was
intimidating to come out here for the first
time. “Not really,” she says. “I’m pretty neu-
tral. I’m easily scared, but scared of every-
thing and so, scared of nothing.”
If anything, the last couple of years have
steeled Weyant against intimidation by giv-
ing her a crash course in the occupational
hazards of being a young, successful artist.
Her career should be taught in graduate
programs as a case study about the complex
network of financial and social levers that
make up the contemporary art world. Trying
to remember everything that’s happened
since her first gallery show is like “trying to
“Larry is so busy
doing his own thing
that that’s not
something I really have
to worry about. He’s
not a helicopter mom.
He’s a great sounding
board for ideas,
but I’ve never worried
about getting too close.”
remember every drama that happened in a
sorority house or some shit,” says Ellie Rines,
the founder of 56 Henry, an influential down-
town space and Weyant’s first gallery. “The
whole thing is so fantastical. You almost can’t
even imagine it being real…. It’s been like
watching a pop star go through something.”
Weyant does not exactly have the biogra-
phy of someone destined for high drama and
art world renown. Her father is a lawyer and
her mother is a judge, and while she dabbled
in drawing and painting as an adolescent in
Calgary, there was no sense of inevitability
about an art career. “I didn’t really know
where I wanted to go or where I could go, or
what I could do. I was always like, I wanna go
to New York, I wanna be a painter, but I don’t
know anyone who does that, and it’s such a
world away and I don’t think it’s possible but
I really want it.”
Weyant remembers being wait-listed to
RISD, and writing the school a letter outlining
the reasons she should be accepted. “And then
I got in, and I was like, I really don’t like it.”
As an art-school student, Weyant was a fan of
Lucian Freud, the British painter known for
his inimitable portraiture and thick impasto.
She says that she was making paintings that
were “goopy—but not good.” Still, the seeds of
her current work were there. Weyant did her
thesis on tweenhood. “The awkwardness and
brutality of it. The idea was of rebellion, soft
rebellion, contained rebellion.” She was not
exactly thinking about the market yet, though.
RISD was a place, she says, that instilled an
anti-commercial ethos in its students. “Don’t
be a sellout! Don’t make work that people want
to buy!” she remembers. “That was sort of the
undercurrent there.”
After moving to New York, she says she was
rejected from Yale’s MFA program, a place she
romanticized because her icons, like John
Currin and Lisa Yuskavage, had gone there.
Instead, she studied painting in China for a
brief spell, later returning to New York and
taking up jobs in events at Lincoln Center and
working as a studio assistant to the young art-
ist Cynthia Talmadge. After Talmadge told
Rines about her talented assistant, Rines
paid Weyant a visit. “I saw a few that had
this chiaroscuro in them, and I was like, ‘Oh,
that’s so cool,’ ” remembers Rines, who offered
Weyant a solo show immediately. “This is a
voice that’s different. Who else is making
these incredibly nerdy Dutch masterpieces
that are also very uniquely from a 24-year-
old on the Upper West Side?”
The money and melodrama that come
with buzz were present early, even before
Rines and Weyant put on that first solo show
together. At one point in those early days,
Weyant says, she was offered something like
$10,000 for 10 yet-to-be-created paintings, to
be delivered over the next several years. To an
art world novice in her early 20s, it sounded
FETED, 2020, OIL ON CANVAS, 60 X 48 INCHES. THIS IS A LIFE?, 2022-23, OIL ON CANVAS, 48 X 36 X 1 1/2 INCHES; PHOTOGRAPH, ROB MCKEEVER. PEARLS, OIL ON CANVAS, 12 X 9 1/8 INCHES;
PHOTOGRAPH, ROB MCKEEVER. HEAD, 2020, OIL ON CANVAS, 24 X 20 1/8 X 1 1/4 INCHES; PHOTOGRAPH, ROB MCKEEVER. ALL: ©ANNA WEYANT/COURTESY OF GAGOSIAN.
like a dream offer: “I remember saying, this is
as good as it’s going to get! I’ve gotta take this
offer,” Weyant says. Absolutely not, Rines told
her—the collector was a known flipper. They
would own a vast swath of Weyant’s oeuvre
and would control her market. “I never would
have known that,” she says.
Rines delights in telling stories about her
earliest encounters with Weyant, in part
because they demonstrate how drastically
she’s been able to evolve in such a short span
of time. “I can tell you the first time Anna
brought me a painting from her studio to
sell, it was wrapped like a cake,” she says,
underlining the innocence of Weyant’s early
approach. “She’s from a small town in Canada
that has a big bear statue. She barely knew
who Larry Gagosian was. She really had no
fucking clue.” She continues, affectionately
recalling that Weyant once left her laptop at
56 Henry, and when Rines called her to alert
her, she replied, “Oh, perfect. I’m sitting out-
side Rite Aid eating candy around the corner.”
“Whether there’s something really dark
and twisted about that innocence, I’m not
sure,” Rines says. “That’s what keeps us
guessing. I’d rather never know, because
I love the mystery.”
R I N E S R E M E M B E R S that the hype before
the 2019 solo show at 56 Henry was thick,
thanks to word of mouth between the right
people and a growing fandom of Weyant’s
work. Collectors were flying in from around
the country, elbowing their way toward one
of the 11 paintings. “The joke was, everyone
had to do something extraordinary for me to
get the work,” Rines says, laughing. One col-
lector, she remembers, offered her his home
in East Hampton for two months. Named for
Todd Solondz’s offbeat coming-of-age movie,
the show—“Welcome to the Dollhouse”—
was heavy on muddy green colors and fea-
tured paintings of literal dollhouses along
with grim portraits of young girls in scant
clothing, suspended in the various stages of
gloom, solitude, and private craftiness.
Given the success of the show, it was only
a matter of time before Weyant would have
bigger representation calling. Larry was
interested in the work before he and Weyant
struck up a relationship, or even met, though
the art dealer’s first purchase might raise a
few eyebrows. The painting of Weyant’s that
he bought was a work from 2020 called Head,
which is a zoom-in of a busty blonde. “It’s a
crop of a bent-over chest, and it’s somebody
Anna Weyant’s
work from recent
years blends an
old-world formalism
with a modern
sensibility oriented
toward the youthful,
the female, and
the internet native.
Clockwise from
far left: Feted (2020);
This Is a Life?
(2022–2023); Pearls
(2021); and Head
(2020).
giving a blow job. The head is cut out, but it’s
called Head,” Weyant tells me without flinch-
ing. “That was the first painting where I was
really playing with light and shadow dramat-
ically. I had kept it for myself, but I was easily
talked into selling it.”
Before landing at Gagosian in 2022,
Weyant was represented by Blum & Poe
(now Blum), a much larger gallery than 56
Henry run out of Los Angeles. “Loose Screw,”
her first show at Blum & Poe’s LA location,
featured works that would define the com-
mercial and aesthetic trajectory of her career.
Most important was Falling Woman, a jarring
portrait of a young woman, her huge and sus-
piciously bulby tits pushed up above a white
peasant top, falling backward down a flight of
stairs with her mouth agape. It’s an arresting
depiction of a young woman in a state that
could be self-inflicted free fall or violence
at the hands of someone else, and no mat-
ter what direction you rotate the painting, it
is difficult to tell if the subject is coughing,
screaming, laughing, or singing.
But it wasn’t just the content of the
painting that made Falling Woman such a
memorable work. In the spring of 2022, just
after Weyant left for Gagosian, Blum & Poe
F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4 G Q . C O M 5 5
5 6 G Q . C O M F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4
 “Whether there’s
something really dark
and twisted about
that innocence, I’m not
sure. That’s what
keeps us guessing. I’d
rather never know, because
I love the mystery.”
—ELLIE RINES

cofounder Tim Blum put Falling Woman—a

painting he’d purchased from Weyant for
just $15,000 for his private collection—up for
auction at Sotheby’s, an unusual move that
broke with art world norms. One of the art
world’s many perverse paradoxes seems to be
that prices should be restrained, particularly
early on in an artist’s career, so that prices
can rise gradually, forever. Art dealers typ-
ically steward this process, directing paint-
ings into the hands of responsible collectors
who will hold onto the work long-term.
Putting a young artist’s work up for auction
at the wrong time can be detrimental: Once
prices balloon on the secondary market,
opportunistic owners of the artist’s other
works can get greedy and flood the auctions.
And once prices are inflated, they can only
go down, creating the perception of failure.
“The moment people are talking about your
prices instead of your work, then things are
really challenging,” says Rines.
That night at Sotheby’s in May 2022,
Falling Woman sold for $1.6 million—eight
times the high estimate for the work. After
the sale, old works of hers started surfacing
on the secondary market. Legitimate contem-
porary Weyant paintings were scarce, and so
old amateur works came back to haunt her.
Drawings she’d gifted and paintings from
college she’d long forgotten about started
popping up on the market.
“It’s a touchy subject that I probably
shouldn’t talk about so much,” Weyant
says, clearly angry. “But I don’t know—if it’s
between feeding your family and keeping a
print, fucking sell the print. It’s fine.”
What was less fine, though, was the
personal attention that followed the sale
of Falling Woman. News of Weyant’s rela-
tionship with Gagosian morphed into gen-
eral-interest gossip, and photographs of the
couple began showing up in the Daily Mail.
Around this time, a rumor started circulat-
ing that Weyant was pregnant with his baby.
Online, a meme of a photo with Larry’s head
on top of a baby’s (continued on page 85)

F E B R U A R Y 5 0 5 4 G Q . C O M 5 7
 house. I park behind his well-loved pickup
truck, with its shaka bumper sticker on the
tailgate, on the side of the highway. We zip
ourselves into wetsuits, and pause on the
beach to consider the Pacific. Wright is not
quite six feet tall and is solidly built, his head
shaved and his salt-and-pepper beard tidily
cropped at his jaw. The matte-gray spectacles
he usually wears are tucked away in the truck.
I notice he’s got a tiny black hoop in one ear,
and chipping dark-blue nail polish on his toes.
Over the nearly 40 years since he began
acting professionally, Wright has worked
constantly, in a litany of styles. He’s been
in three Bonds, three Hunger Games, and
Y O U C A N T E L L a surfer by the unreasonable one Batman. He’s made two films with Wes
things they’ll do to get in the water. A few Anderson and starred on two different HBO
years back, when the actor Jeffrey Wright series. He’s played Jean-Michel Basquiat,
was playing one of the leading roles in HBO’s Colin Powell, Muddy Waters, Martin Luther
Westworld, he got into the habit of bolting King Jr., and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. He’s
from set during production breaks and driv- managed to avoid getting pinned down or
ing an hour to the beach—and then driving stuck in a box by following the role-choosing
an hour back to work. “Even if I could get just advice a friend gave him long ago: If you can’t
45 minutes in the water,” he tells me, “I would beat ’em, confuse ’em. He’s the sort of actor
get down here every day that I could.” who can do—who wants to do—a little bit of
Westworld ran for four seasons, and even- everything. “I have only managed to do this
tually Wright began renting a place way out as long as I have done it, I think, because I’ve
on the far western edge of Malibu, a white- found strength in flexibility,” he says. “I enjoy
washed surf shack so close to the ocean that re-creating the wheel every chance I can.”
he can basically paddle out from his back As a result, Wright tells me, audiences don’t
porch when the waves allow it. seem to associate him with any one role in
Wright’s character was often paired with particular. People who know him from Bond,
one played by Luke Hemsworth, and so they say, seem not to know that he played James
spent a lot of time sitting around on set, shoot- Gordon in 2022’s The Batman. “There are
ing the shit. Hemsworth, it turned out, was a many people who have seen me in one movie
born-and-bred surfer, so the two started hit- and didn’t realize it was me in the other movie
ting the beach together. Wright was still a little that they saw,” he says. “And they say, ‘Oh, he
new to the sport, having gotten himself fully needs to work more.’ You just saw him in four
obsessed after some lessons with his daughter fucking movies, and you didn’t even realize
on vacation in Hawaii. Watching Wright fig- that you were looking at the same guy! I like
ure things out, Hemsworth recalls, was “kind that, because the actors that I was drawn to
of like watching a baby giraffe early on were those kind of theat-
←←
walk. It’s cute!” Over the years, rical chameleon actors who had a
OPENING PAGES,
Hemsworth has been impressed LEF T
base in theater and who liked to
by the strides Wright, now 58, has sweater and pants play characters.” Theater-trained
made. “I think he’s actually pro- Ferragamo stars like Dustin Hoffman, he
gressed faster than anyone I’ve hat elaborates, and Brits like Alec
seen,” he says. Hemsworth can’t The Elder Statesman Guinness, Peter Sellers, and Gary
resist another joke: “Especially glasses (throughout), Oldman. Pioneering Black actors
for an older gentleman.” his own like Redd Foxx and Adolph Caesar.
Finding a foothold in some- Unclassifiables like Don Knotts
OPENING PAGES,
thing difficult; wowing those RIGHT
and Dennis Hopper.
around him: It’s the same play- wetsuit But I don’t think Don Knotts
book Wright employed in his day Bantu Wax surfed. After we stretch and
job. Today, he occupies a tier all observe the break for a few
→
his own in Hollywood—a char- minutes, Wright leads us into
OPPOSITE PAGE
acter actor who ranges across sweater the ocean and almost immedi-
blockbusters and prestige TV, and, Séfr ately catches a wave, leaning
as will become clear this awards pants gently into its face as he cruises
season, is also worthy of the most Bode down the line. His upper body is
interesting, complex leading roles hat quiet. He’s concentrating fiercely
that we put onscreen. Merz b. Schwanen but looks impossibly relaxed.
On this late-fall day, in search earring (throughout) “Just super cruise-y, all style”
of waves, Wright leads me to and sneakers, is how Hemsworth describes
a spot he likes, not far from his his own Wright’s technique.
6 0 G Q . C O M F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4
We are meeting at a time I’d call less than
super cruise-y. This is a good thing, mostly:
When we talk, Wright finds himself staring
down the barrel not of a wave but an Oscar
campaign. His film American Fiction, released
in December, is many things: a deep-hearted
satire; a race-conscious comedy of manners;
an adult drama of the sort Hollywood doesn’t
really make anymore. It is also the vehicle for
perhaps the strongest work of Wright’s career,
playing the irascible, self-sabotaging novelist
Thelonious “Monk” Ellison. It is one of the
ironies of his line of work that doing his job
exceptionally well now threatens to disrupt
the careful, spotlight-averse career-life bal-
ance he’s managed to achieve.
For the past two decades, Wright has lived
in Brooklyn, in part because of its distance,
both physical and spiritual, from Hollywood.
When he has to be in LA, Wright says, “I try to
stay out of the mix of the weird frequencies in
this town.” The dangers of his job are manifold:
“Too much light, too much attention. It’s weird;
it can be. It’s a bit unnatural.” Spending time
in the water is protection against all that. “The
water has become a really healthy companion,”
he says. “The water grounds me.” Now, in the
maw of Oscar season, and at the beginning of
who knows what kind of new career trajectory,
Wright retains the hope that surfing, among
other things, can help give order and sanity to
a life he finds himself living at both the center
of the madness and at its periphery.
Toward the end of our morning, he’s caught
four or five waves. I’ve been thrown off of two.
We’re both exultant. “The ocean is therapist
and high priestess,” he says, beatific, after
another clean ride. He paddles into one more,
looking to end our session on a high note. The
high priestess has a sense of humor: He wipes
out and gets a face full of salt water. He shakes
it off and paddles back out to me. He laughs,
and shouts: “And dentist!”
ANOTHER PERFECT DAY in Malibu, the sun
reflecting silvery white off the Pacific. Only
the waves aren’t firing, so we jump into
Wright’s car and head out to a nearby break-
fast spot. One measure of Wright’s unease
with Los Angeles is that getting there from
his place takes nearly an hour.
Amusingly, for such a versatile actor,
Wright often plays smart, savvy characters:
detectives, scientists, writers, politicians. The
director George C. Wolfe cast Wright in the
original Broadway run of Angels in America
in 1993 as Belize, the drag queen turned nurse
tasked with caring for the AIDS-stricken Roy
Cohn. “I was very determined to make sure
that not just the other characters but the
audience was acutely aware of just how smart
Belize was,” Wolfe says. “I didn’t want him to
just be warm and wise. It was very import-
ant to me that the character have a ferocious
intellect.” (text continued on page 64)
THIS PAGE
top and pants
Ferragamo
sunglasses
Ahlem
watch, his own

→
OPPOSITE PAGE
jacket and tank top
Zegna
sunglasses
Saint Laurent
by Anthony
Vaccarello

6 2 G Q . C O M F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4

Wright, it turned out, was perfect for the
part. “Certain things, you don’t act,” explains
Wolfe, who also directed Wright in 2023’s
Rustin, among other projects, and is the
godfather to Wright’s children. “I don’t think
you can act vulnerability. I think you embody
vulnerability. And I don’t think you can act
intelligence. I think it’s a quality, it’s a feel-
ing. There’s a ferocity of how the brain works,
and some people who are very smart are not
necessarily able to embody that intelligence
in their work. Jeffrey, I think, is very rare in
that. I don’t think he acts intelligence, I think
he just embodies it.”
That intellect was present, it seems, basi-
cally from the moment Wright decided to
become an actor. He first gave it a try in col-
lege, at Amherst, and spent two months in the
graduate program at NYU before dropping
out to perform in a play in Boston—getting
called straight up to the big leagues while
still in school. Sterling K. Brown, who stars
alongside Wright in American Fiction, went
to NYU a decade later, and remembers hear-
ing about the guy who’d blazed out of the pro-
gram. “There were stories about how Jeffrey
came and he was so good that he didn’t even
have to go to grad school, and he left after his
first semester,” he tells me.
But Wright spent the first years of the ’90s
trying hard to find his niche, shuttling back
and forth between New York and Los Angeles
and struggling to find work that was either
meaningful or well paying. Getting both felt
like a lot to ask for. The chance to play Belize
in Tony Kushner’s two-part AIDS-era epic
arrived at the perfect time. “Angels,” Wright
says, “is really…I mean, that’s the epicenter
of my career. It changed me as an artist, as
human and a citizen.”
Like lots of artists who came of age in the
1980s, Wright lost friends and mentors to
AIDS, which only deepened the intensity of
his experience working on Angels. “It wasn’t
just a successful play on Broadway,” he says.
“It was in response to what was happening,
not only in the country but for me personally,
too, and I could be a part of acknowledging
it.” He won a Tony for his performance, and an
Emmy and a Golden Globe when he reprised
the role nearly a decade later in HBO’s TV
adaptation. “You have these moments
where you realize that you are where you’re
6 4 G Q . C O M F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4
he’s come to occupy in Hollywood. He’s savvy,
and funny, and gruff—albeit in a layered,
knowing sort of way. In the wrong hands,
Leiter is forgettable. In Wright’s, the charac-
ter is indelible. Wright is the rare actor who
is more often than not—nearly always, I’d
venture—the best part of any movie he’s in.
Brown sums it all up rather neatly. “As suc-
cinctly as I can put it, he’s one of the best,
whether it is onstage, on the small screen, on
the large screen,” he says. “He has an artistic
ingenuity beyond integrity. He just makes
supposed to be, and I felt that then,” he says. choices that most people don’t consider. He
He’d been acting professionally for years, thinks outside of the box, and he always chal-
but Angels—“this perfect marriage of my lenges what you think is going to transpire
interests in storytelling, and in politics, and with his performance.”
performance and in theater”—scratched a
unique itch, and seemed to unfold new possi- A F E W Y E A R S ago, the writer and director
bilities and frontiers for his work. “It was just Cord Jefferson was reading Percival Everett’s
like this incredible fated gift to me.” The best novel Erasure when a funny thing happened:
kind of acting, it turned out, could engage He began to hear the book in Jeffrey Wright’s
you on spiritual, philosophical, and political voice. The novel is narrated by Thelonious
levels. After a few years of work, Wright had “Monk” Ellison, an English professor and
earned a reputation as a talented, high-toned, novelist dealing with both the stresses of mid-
theater-loving, and art-house-minded actor. dle age and the information that the mostly
Which made it surprising, and compel- white publishing industry doesn’t think his
ling, that in the years that followed, Wright work is “Black enough.” Monk, under the
started showing up in big, popcorn-y movies pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh, decides to write
with increasing frequency—as seamless a a spoof of the trauma-heavy work that the
turn to blockbuster work as you could hope world seems to expect from Black authors.
to architect. The size of a film, as Wright sees He first calls it My Pafology, then Fuck. It’s
it, doesn’t have any real bearing on its quality, meant as both prank and protest but becomes
or his enjoyment of working on it. “It’s not the a bestseller. The joke is on…everyone, really,
size of the movie, it’s the size of the egos in including Monk.
the movie” that foretell headaches, he says. Jefferson would eventually adapt the book—
When I note that, historically, the bigger mov- as American Fiction—imagining Wright at
ies tend to have the bigger egos, he responds the film’s center the whole time. The script
that that can be the case, but isn’t always. arrived at an opportune moment, and Wright,
And, anyway, “so long as the ego matches the too, noticed connections between Monk and
talent, then you’re okay. When that gets out himself. For one thing, they are both artists
of balance, then there’s problems.” uninterested in conforming to anyone’s idea
Take the James Bond franchise, for of what Black art ought to look like. But the
instance. Moviemaking on a planetary scale. similarities go deeper. “Our work is sometimes
Lavish locations, major stars, and the British strange in good ways. Also, at times, strange in
self-image riding on the whole thing, to boot. ways that are less good. But one of the inter-
Doesn’t matter. “I found it to be an oddly inti- esting phenomena often is the way the stories
mate place,” Wright says. “Biggest franchise we choose to tell overlap with our own stories,”
in the history of the world. Huge sets. But at Wright says. One strand of both Erasure and
the same time, it’s a family business. And it’s American Fiction finds Monk shouldering a
also beloved. Not just by the movie lovers; number of family burdens. Wright explains to
it’s been loved by people who work on it. A me that his own mother, along with his aunt,
lot of the crew have worked for decades on raised him. Shortly before he got the script,
Bond movies. And there’s this sense of British his mother passed away and his aunt came to
pride within it—the most benev- live with him in Brooklyn. “I very
olent type of national pride. And → much appreciated this story of
I’m the American on set, and hoodie this man who suddenly becomes
so I know what that means too. Greg Lauren the unwitting pillar of his family,”
And yeah, it’s good. There’s an shorts Wright says. “It’s a story of a guy
intimacy to it, despite the scale. Levi’s Skate who has reached that point in his
That’s good fun.” hat life where the pressure’s coming
It’s a comparatively small part The Elder Statesman from all sides. And so then the
of his body of work, but Wright’s sunglasses trajectory for him becomes about
time as Felix Leiter—CIA opera- Gentle Monster reconciling himself with the sac-
tive and the rare friend of Bond— watch rifices that he’s willing to make,
is illustrative of the unique place Omega whether it be creative or personal,

on behalf of family. That’s where the emotional
richness was.” He decided to take the part.
Ultimately, Wright delivered a quietly
shattering performance—one that anchors
a movie radical in its plainspokenness. It’s
an occasionally funny and deeply felt story
about a middle-aged man who happens to be
Black coming to terms with the choices he’s
made, and the consequences they’ve had for
his family, in his pursuit of art. Brown puts
the achievement into perspective for me.
“Cord wrote a really sharp, very smart satire
of what stories literature and Hollywood are
willing and wanting to explore with regards
to the Black experience, while at the same
time giving them a Black family drama in the
midst of it,” he says. “And because we give you
a spoonful of sugar with this dose of comedy,
you don’t even realize that, like, ‘Oh, man, I
can see myself in that family even though I’m
not Black.’ I think for the longest time we felt
as if people who did not look like us could not
see themselves in our lives. But I think that
we’re all human beings, and if we are able to
be specific, the universal appeal of humanity
comes through. But you have to be able to go
in a very specific way.” Wright is the guiding
force at the center of it all.
It augurs, perhaps, a new and exciting
phase for his career: one where Wright’s all-
time character-actor skills are placed right at
the center of the frame. In the 30 years they’ve
6 6 G Q . C O M F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4
They’re nearly mauled by a tiger, and hustle
back to the boat, where Chef loses it. Never get
out of the boat! Never get out of the boat! I got to
remember: Never get out of the boat!
For Wright, “never get out of the boat”
has become something like a mantra. One
night over dinner, I ask him to explain the
phrase’s appeal.
“It’s an all-around, equal-opportunity
metaphor,” he says. “I don’t know if I always
abide by it, but it’s a good one.” The boat, he
explains, “is like, that’s home, man. And that’s
also a home away from the madding crowd,
and the madness. And it’s also in proxim-
ity to your people.” Outside of the boat are
things like distraction, unhappiness, fame.
Surfing, paradoxically, is one of those things
that makes Wright feel like he’s in the boat—
grounded, rooted, where he’s supposed to be.
In recent years, as he won bigger and more
prominent roles, and packed his two kids off
to college, the demands of both life and work
began closing in on all sides, and the appeal
of not leaving the boat has only grown. “In
the last several years, just out of necessity,
[I’ve been] moving pretty fast,” he explains.
“Not living in the limelight so much, but just
living a very logistically complicated life of
going from one job to another, or one con-
tinent to another. Then trying to manage
things at home. So, yeah, I’m liking the idea
now of simplifying again.”
Nothing threatens to rock the boat, I sug-
known each other, his friend George C. Wolfe gest, quite like an Oscar race. Wright responds
has clocked the way Wright’s opportunities by zooming out. “I think I’ve always been wary
have expanded and deepened—the way that of the potential trappings of what I do,” he
executives and audiences have learned to says. “From the beginning, it’s informed the
pick up precisely what the actor is capable of choices that I’ve made. I’ve tried to ground
putting down. “I’m glad that, over time, peo- myself in something beyond the superficial
ple don’t want to just have him aspects of this business, because
cast as ‘noble Negro in the corner ↑ I don’t believe in them. I don’t
saying smart things,’ because his cardigan have faith in them. This work…it’s
range and his versatility are so Missoni done right if you’re breathing at
exciting and so expansive,” he shirt the center of it, and if you can find
says. “I’m glad that the roles he’s Ferragamo a balance and find something that
being given are becoming more pants keeps you connected to the things
and more exciting and more dan- R13 that are less shiny.”
gerous and more interesting.” sunglasses Before dinner, I’d pulled
Saint Laurent by the original scene up, and was
N O T L O N G A G O , the night before Anthony Vaccarello reminded that Chef isn’t the
he dropped his daughter off for → only one who delivers Wright’s
her freshman year of college, blanket favorite saying. There is, it turns
Wright sat down with her to The Elder Statesman out, one scenario in which it’s
watch one of his very favorite pants acceptable to get out of the boat.
movies: Apocalypse Now. Zegna In voiceover, Martin Sheen’s
Francis Ford Coppola’s shoes Captain Willard repeats it—with
Vietnam War epic came up fre- Birkenstock Tekla his own addition. “Never get out
quently during my conversations of the boat,” Willard intones.
with Wright, mostly in the form of grooming by hee Wright finishes the line for me.
a line he repeated, both out loud soo kwon using “Absolutely goddamn right,”
and under his breath: “Never get la mer. set design he says. “Unless you’re going all
by heath mattioli
out of the boat.” The line comes in the way.”
for frank reps.
a scene where Willard and Chef, produced by patrick
on their journey upriver, head into mapel at camp SAM SCHUBE is the director of
the jungle in search of mangoes. productions. GQ SPORTS .

As thousands of hockey fans poured in to
watch the Washington Capitals, Leonsis stood
near the turnstiles, handing out thousands
of dollars’ worth of rinkside tickets to some
kids who caught his eye on their climb to the
cheap seats. As the arena filled, not everybody
recognized the owner of their team, but those
who did patted Leonsis on the arm or else
walked up and blurted, “You’re Ted!” the way
one might on meeting Santa at the hearth.
Outgoing, approachable, Leonsis came over
like the grandfather he is, ruddy and gray with
a high, papery voice that often dissipates to
giggles when he talks about the wonders and
absurdities of owning sports teams. He loves
owning sports teams. As well as the Caps,
Leonsis controls the Washington Wizards
of the NBA and the Washington Mystics of
the WNBA. “When you leave after the game,”
he had told me, “you’ll say to yourself, Gosh!
I wish I owned sports teams.”
Of late, the planetary super rich have been
subject to many such “Gosh!” moments of
their own. Since the turn of the decade, money
has flooded into the strange and cramped mar-
ket for teams, big money, so much money that
an owner like Leonsis—the former vice chair-
man of AOL, who on this night registers as the
1,355th richest person in the world, according
to a ghoulish online wealth tracker I keep on
my phone—seems poor by comparison to his
incoming peers. A group led by some of the
Waltons of Walmart recently picked up the
Denver Broncos for $4.65 billion. Jeff Bezos is
presumed to be coming for one of the Broncos’
NFL rivals, and if he does he will almost cer-
tainly pay more. When the Phoenix Suns of the
NBA were on the block in 2022, as a group, the
rumored bidders put in mind an alumni gath-
ering of Billionaires U: Larry Ellison, Laurene
Powell Jobs, Peter Thiel. The Ottawa Senators
of the NHL recently sold in a fevered many-
way auction that included the Canadian actor
Ryan Reynolds and resulted in a final sale
price of $950 million. For the Ottawa Senators.
The night I met Leonsis, Manchester
United of the English Premier League, one of
the most beloved franchises in global sport,
was being advertised for sale through a New
York merchant bank. A Qatari sheikh was
said to have offered at one point a 10-figure
sum to the selling family, the Glazers, who
also own the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Lately,
7 0 G Q . C O M F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4
“high-net-worth individuals,” to use the
phrase of the bankers and lawyers who buzz
around them, have been collecting teams
like Monopoly cards, with private equity get-
ting involved in the action—also celebrities,
corporations, whole countries. For the past
couple of years, Chelsea and AC Milan, two
jewels of European football, have belonged,
at least in part, to American private-equity
firms. McLaren, the famed British F1 team,
is controlled by the royal family—of Bahrain.
Patrick Mahomes has a piece of an F1 team
too. LeBron James is a minority owner of the
Red Sox. Tom Brady bought in to pickleball.
Amid this frenzy I recently traveled to
four cities in three countries, meeting own-
ers old and new, as well as brokers, bank-
ers, lawyers, and all the other deal-sniffing
matchmakers who try to pair buyers with
stakes in available teams. Leonsis was my
first appointment. He used to joke that he
bought in to the Capitals for free back in
1999, because the shares he sold to raise the
funds—peak AOL stock—would plummet in
value. Leonsis didn’t even haggle when he
got the chance to transform himself from
a first-generation internet executive into a
team owner. He paid the $85 million asking
price with a cheerful “Okay!”
Back then, he said, “teams used to be boats
you put a sail on. The wind blew and you kind
of sat in the back and got some sun.” For ages,
many such teams were regional concerns,
owned by some wealthy family, entrepreneurs-
made-good, whichever minimart baron had
swept away his local competitors. Leonsis’s
generation crashed that cozy, folksy owners’
circle at the turn of the century. In league
meetings, Leonsis said, he used to feel like
“the youngest kid in the class.” Twenty-five
years later, he is a tenured veteran, facing
disruption himself as a new-new generation
arrives: the decabillionaires with fortunes
made in petrochemicals or tech booms, the
princes and emirs and athletes and actors
who command small private armies of hired
consultants. Since Leonsis sprang for the
Caps, the team’s value has swelled by a multi-
ple of nearly 17—to an estimated $1.4 billion.
Price tags like that are bound to change the
buying process. “Everything is different,” he
said. “The tenor of meetings. The back chan-
nels. The entry fee.” Leonsis was as curious as
me where it all might lead.
On the arena concourse, he checked
his watch and weaved between hurrying
fans to get to his box. We watched some
of the game from there, then we watched
some from his private dining room, where
a chef had put out steaks on a sideboard
and the tables were immaculately clothed.
Alex Ovechkin, the Caps’ star, was in the
first weeks of his 19th season for Leonsis.
Adoring of Ovechkin, considering him a
sort of adopted son, Leonsis put down his
knife and fork to watch when Ovechkin
was awarded a penalty shot. The goalie
denied him: Leonsis bowed his head. Later,
when the Caps conceded a goal, the arena
DJ started playing Chumbawamba: “I get
knocked down / but I get up again.” Leonsis
did quickly get his good cheer back. We
missed the start of the third period because
he wanted to stroll down to the street-level
sportsbook, where, among the betting ter-
minals and screwed-up pieces of paper, he
jawed with the gamblers, telling them not to
be discouraged.
Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks
for about as long as Leonsis has had his port-
folio in Washington, tried to explain to me the
appeal of buying teams: “Your life changes.
No one throws a parade for Apple or Google,
but win a championship and you will ride
in a float and never buy a drink.” (Recently,
Cuban agreed to sell a majority stake in the
Mavericks for a valuation in the range of $3.5
billion without surrendering control of the
team’s operations. The result: He was able to
realize a return of more than 1,100 percent on
his original $285 million—without having to
relinquish decision-making power on basket-
ball matters.)
Leonsis was in broad agreement that the
allure here was about more than money, and
he reminisced, happily, about the moment in
2018 when his Capitals won the Stanley Cup.
Washington became a sea of people wearing
team red. “You have such a position in your
city,” he said, “you hold the psyches of a com-
munity in your hand.” Clearly, this was another
part of the appeal, at least for an extrovert like
Leonsis—getting to do the unscheduled walk-
arounds, handing out ticket upgrades, playing
the mayor of Sportstown.
I found myself wondering, Gosh, how did
one go about owning a sports team in the
2020s? Where did the process start, and how
did it work, all through? Let’s say I somehow
laid a preposterous bet in the sportsbook on
Ovechkin’s penalty shot and the puck found
the back of the net. Let’s say I’d become a
decabillionaire in a heartbeat, another Bezos
or Ellison or Powell Jobs. Now I wanted in on
ownership as well, like the athletes and the
emirs and the Wall Street bros—who should
I speak to first? Leonsis threw out several
names of bankers and banks. Eventually,
we got talking about a banker in Manhattan
named Sal Galatioto, a well-known bro-
ker of teams, “old-school, trusted,” Leonsis
said, adding: “He gets shit done.” Galatioto
had handled that many-way auction for the
Ottawa Senators. Next morning, I was on an
Amtrak to New York.
SO YOU WANT to buy a sports team too?
You might find yourself ascending to an
upper floor of 22 Vanderbilt, a skyscraper
on 43rd and Madison. Here, Galatioto has a
 warrenlike network of offices. A baby-faced
71-year-old, expressive and salty, Galatioto is
a survivor of stage IV cancer. As the head of
his own investment bank, Galatioto Sports
Partners, he handles the buying and selling
of sports teams and nothing else. It’s what
he lives for. A few years back, Galatioto was
on a quick turnaround to Sacramento to
sniff around a possible deal involving the
Kings when he first felt lumps on his neck.
After his diagnosis, it was the thought of get-
ting back to work in time to trade pieces of Actors Rob
McElhenney and
the Chicago Cubs that got him through his Ryan Reynolds,
brutal cancer treatment. “I love what I do,” who bought the
Galatioto said with a shrug. once-bedraggled
By his count, he has been involved in 126 Welsh soccer
deals to date, including the auction of the team Wrexham
AFC in 2021.
REYNOLDS AND MCELHENNEY: JAN KRUGER. JOHNSON: SAM HODDE. BECKHAM: JOHN WILKINSON/ISI PHOTOS. CUBAN: GARRETT ELLWOOD/NBAE. ALL GETTY IMAGES.

Golden State Warriors in 2010. Back then,

the basketball team fetched $450 million. It
would cost you more than $7 billion today.
Estimated team valuations are available for
anybody to read via Forbes or the sports-busi-
ness website Sportico, and according to
analyses by these organizations, the Dallas
Cowboys—worth more than $9 billion—is the
highest-valued franchise in the NFL, the NBA,
MLB, and the NHL. By comparison, the NHL’s
Arizona Coyotes are the lowest-valued team
in all of the major American leagues, the bot-
tom of Sportico’s menu at $675 million. The
Cincinnati Bengals, cheapest in the NFL, are
still worth $4 billion: as much as or more than
all but a few NBA and MLB teams and more
than every NHL team.
Galatioto has watched the numbers pop
like everybody else—in astonishment. He
told me, “When I got into this in the 1990s,
it was a mom-and-pop business. People were
Counterclockwise
from top: Inter
Miami CF
co-owner David
Beckham; Gerry
Cardinale, whose
firm owns AC
Milan, pictured
with his XFL
partners including
Dwayne Johnson;
longtime Dallas
Mavericks owner
Mark Cuban.
could you differentiate? ‘All my friends have
private jets. All my friends have boats. None
of my friends have a sports team. None of my
friends own something that has a dedicated
section in the newspaper every day.’ You were
buying visibility.”
Then, in an era of increasingly fragmented
entertainment options where live sports can
seem like the last remaining appointment
viewing, league media rights deals soared
with traditional broadcasters and new
streaming platforms alike. Observers out-
side sports began to notice that the price of
major-league teams kept rising whenever
there was an auction, whatever the weather,
through economic downturns, wars, tech-
nological advances, a pandemic. For reasons
that still baffle well-informed insiders, it took
Galatioto said, “I have never seen the level
of demand I’m seeing. The pent-up hunger is
incredible.” He pointed out the importance of
scarcity in driving prices. Unlike the markets
for real estate (“If you run out, you just build
more of it”) or tech companies (“There are a
bazillion of them”), when it comes to sports
teams, demand vastly exceeds supply. There
are only 30 MLB teams, 30 NBA teams, 32
NFL teams, and 32 NHL teams. Including
MLS and the WNBA, there are only 165 of
these assets in circulation. This at a moment
when over 2,600 global billionaires prowl
the earth, hunting for one of a kind trophies.
Charles Baker, a lawyer at Sidley Austin who
specializes in sports acquisitions, expressed
the scarcity aspect thusly: “You might have the
biggest boat, biggest house, biggest jet—but
there’s only one Yankees, only one Cowboys.
They’re collector’s items.”
The people who make their way to
Galatioto’s office tend to be wealthy, now, in
ways they were not before. “Even if you’re a rich
dude, you may not be rich enough,” Galatioto

F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4 G Q . C O M 7 1

for three hours. You wanna get home.”
The world of sports-team acquisitions is
insular, gossipy, small. Insiders tell a joke
about an owner who was ready to buy any-
where, Missouri, Mars, so long as their head
could hit the pillow by half past midnight.
Sometimes, buyers are willing to put in
more air miles. A couple of years ago I wrote
a story for this magazine about Wrexham
AFC, a small soccer team in Wales that was
bought by the actors Ryan Reynolds and
Rob McElhenney. Living in LA, McElhenney
told me, meant he had to get up before dawn
just to watch his team play on an internet
stream. He grew up a Philadelphia Eagles
fan. Reynolds rooted for the BC Lions in
“It’s not gonna stop,” financier and AC Milan president
gets involved, there is no moderating it. It’s an arms
Vancouver. You buy what’s available, though,
and they settled on Wrexham after one of
McElhenney’s friends drew up a list of teams
he’d come to admire via a video game called
Football Manager.
If you come to Galatioto about making
an acquisition, he’ll want to know, is it your
team you have your eye on? “If it’s the only
team you’ve ever loved, and you have one
opportunity to buy it,” he said, “you’ll push
harder to win that bidding at auction.”
Auctions are mostly unavoidable. In
2019, the outgoing owner of the Kansas
City Royals sold his baseball team to a local
businessman he respected without inviting
further bids. The Utah Jazz changed own-
ers, last time out, with a similarly breezy
exchange. Leonsis told me he almost didn’t
get one of his Washington teams when the
previous owner considered selling to a guy
who went to the same synagogue. But most
teams go to whomever will pay the most.
Rob Tilliss, the founder of an investment
bank called Inner Circle Sports, which
assisted Reynolds and McElhenney in buy-
ing Wrexham, explained why auctions are
preferred: “To get the best price.”
Like Galatioto, Tilliss takes meetings with
prospective team buyers all the time. He
has his own list of questions. What’s your
7 2 G Q . C O M F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4
first place. “We’ll tell people [at what price] we
think a team should trade,” Tilliss said. “And
they can always agree to pay more, that’s up to
them.” Galatioto doesn’t have much patience
for this genteel crap. “Look,” he said to me,
“if my favorite team came on the market and
I missed it? Even though I knew I could buy it?
But I just didn’t want to pay that incremental
extra amount? I would be pretty upset. I don’t
think I’d allow that to happen.”
Famous teams, East Coast teams, teams
that are an hour, private, from New York or
Connecticut or Florida—teams like these are
like comets streaking across the sky when
they come to market. Blink at the wrong
time and it could be another 20-year wait.
just offered $50 million more.
Group. Galatioto Sports Partners. Sidley
Austin. Proskauer Rose. Latham & Watkins.
These and other organizations are the ones
you want to be buttering up if you expect to
have a chance. You need to be thought well of
by league commissioners and other owners
too. Sometimes teams come to market because
an owner has been ejected, overtly or tacitly,
due to personal controversy. It happened with
the Carolina Panthers in 2017, when then-
owner Jerry Richardson announced he was
selling his team in the wake of misconduct
allegations. It happened again in 2022, after
misconduct allegations were leveled at Robert
Sarver, then the owner of the Phoenix Suns.
The cadre of brokers keeps a close eye on these
events. Maybe a chyron crosses the screen,
announcing a scandal that will end someone’s
tenure. Maybe an owner is pictured looking
glum and disillusioned, courtside, rinkside,
up in the sky box. An attentive broker sits up
straighter—mentally matchmaking already.
“We have clients in our database, right now,
who are very, very interested in certain teams,”
Galatioto told me, “and if those teams ever
come on the market, my instructions are to
contact them immediately.”
Texts and calls go around. Oblique phrases
are used, vaguely encouraging, promising
nothing. “In process… Stand by… Is so-and-so
interested?… You’re my guy.” Hopeful parties
begin to sign nondisclosure agreements. It’s
almost auction time.
A FEW MONTHS AGO, a silver-haired busi-
nessman named Thomas Zilliacus was sitting
on the terrace of an Austrian ski lodge when,
idly scrolling through the news on his phone,
he read an item that said Manchester United
just as they were accustomed to receiving
offers from every type of bidder, whether
plausible or fantastic.
After my meeting with Galatioto, I walked
a dozen blocks north to visit Raine’s head-
quarters in a dun-colored midtown sky-
scraper. There I met cofounder Joe Ravitch
and his colleague Colin Neville. Ravitch, a
former Goldman Sachs senior partner, is
experienced, anecdotal, blunt—tan with a
shock of white hair. Neville, younger and qui-
eter, bears evidence of the a cappella group
and lacrosse-playing Ivy Leaguer he used
to be. When Neville got his start at the bank
 under Ravitch, he keyed in on Raine’s nascent
sports practice. Lucky break. These days,
Neville is among the most significant dealers
of teams, a young Gagosian or Geffen who
has found himself in the middle of a noisy,
booming bazaar. With Ravitch, Neville helped
David Beckham become an MLS owner with
Inter Miami CF. He represented Joe Tsai of
Alibaba in his about $3.4 billion purchase of
the Brooklyn Nets. He oversaw the auction
sell Manchester United.
hectic sifting. “Our job is usu
ally to vet and determine the
credibility of someone that
is expressing an interest,”
Gerry Cardinale said of the frenzy. “Once capitalism
race. Capitalism will find its way into the cracks.”
field. Auctions can tempt charlatans. Neville
told me: “You just never know. So our job is to
investigate every single inquiry that we get.”
Evidently, Zilliacus’s offer for United didn’t
get the job done, because after some initial
contact, the Finn says he never heard back
from the Raine Group. Later, Zilliacus told
me, he read in the news that a Qatari sheikh
and a British petrochemicals czar were the
only serious contenders left in the running.
Getting canned from a sports-team auction
can feel like a ghosting after a date. “If you
get bounced early on,” one insider told me,
“forget it. Obviously, you weren’t ever con-
sidered. And if you do get bounced early, you
likely won’t hear.” Losers in these auctions
might lick their wounds—and look elsewhere.
Zilliacus was unperturbed by his apparent
rebuff from the auctioneers at Raine, and
before the United sale was through he’d
already had his head turned by another
club, this time one in Italy. As for United, in
December it was reported that the sale of a
25 percent stake to the petrochemicals czar, a
man named Jim Ratcliffe, would eventually
be confirmed for about $1.6 billion.
A measure of secretiveness tends to
surround these auctions. Bidders who
progress to the later stages are typically
gagged by NDAs, in part to stop them from
teaming up and diluting an auction’s inten-
sity. “Frothiness,” insiders call it.
When it comes to froth, few recent sales
top the auction for Chelsea, which played
out rapidly in the wake of Russia’s invasion
of Ukraine. In the weeks after Vladimir
Putin sent troops over the border, the UK
government announced sanctions against a
number of Russian oligarchs it claimed were
associated with Putin. This included Roman
- if you’re a serious contender you’ll already
severe were the sanctions against Abramovich
that fears abounded that mighty Chelsea
could run out of money unless a buyer was
found quickly. In less than a month, the ini-
tial pool of 200 interested parties was shaved
down like Broadway auditionees until three
or four final groups were left standing.
Ravitch and Neville were at pains to stress
to me that the circumstances of the Chelsea
sale were atypical. Insiders I spoke to filled in
the gaps and explained how the winnowing
phase of an auction normally plays out. In
the Broncos auction, I was told, there were
maybe half a dozen realistic bidders or bid-
ding groups identified from the initial rush
of inbounds. Same with the Suns, roughly the
same with the Commanders last year, after
involved, shit-talking
one another, strat-
egizing. Usually, the
about a team. Gossip intensifies between the
interconnected brokers: who’s still in, who’s
been bounced?…
Around the time when the winnowed bid-
ders can be counted on one hand, proposed
purchase agreements get sent around to the
would-be buyers spelling out the terms and
conditions of the sale. Bidders’ lawyers get to
work revising, adding pages of fine print—
warranties, clarifications, indemnifications,
and stipulations about dollars and cents.
Meanwhile, the bidder’s thoughts will turn to
the separate application for ownership they’re
required to submit to the league commission-
ers or fellow owners they hope to join. All the
major US leagues require such approval, and
have spent time breakfasting the Krafts and
Leonsises and Ballmers, bookmarking their
endorsement for precisely this moment. As
if making a college application, bidders fre-
quently feel moved to layer in something of
a testimonial about their fitness to own the
team throughout the process—a sort of per-
sonal essay about themselves, if you will.
(Webster’s Dictionary defines “ownership”
as… ) Investigatory firms will already be run-
ning background checks. “Not necessarily
looking through your garbage, but a bit of a
proctology,” I was told.
Having earlier been dissuaded from team-
ing into consortiums, bidders might be urged
to team up after all. Reputation matters in
ownership, but more so, liquidity. To be a lead
buyer of an NFL team you’d now need to be so
farcically rich you could sign a $1.5 billion or
$2 billion personal check the moment a deal
closes. “Garden-variety billionaires,” as I’ve
heard them described, might find themselves
shepherded into consortiums just to pool the
needed cash. Ravitch said of the Chelsea bid-
ders: “Colin and I patched together a bunch.”
(continued on page 86)
F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4 G Q . C O M 7 3
 A chaotic weekend on the road with the musician
known as Ekkstacy, a 21-year-old Canadian who is
tying together two of Gen Z’s most pervasive musical
threads—emo punk and SoundCloud rap—in a whole new way.

B Y C H R I S G AY O M A L I P H O T O G R A P H S BY JA S O N N O C I T O ST YLED BY MARCUS ALLEN

 either. He writes the songs himself using
a drum machine before adding guitar and
other instruments. And his music is big with
kids on TikTok, an app he abstains from,
who use his songs to soundtrack their vid-
eos. In a way, Ekkstacy sounds like what you
might get if in a petri dish you swirled the
everyone agrees, was a total nightmare. And dude, lemme tell you: the music. The indie-pop surf rhythms of the Drums circa
The scene: The When We Were Young music of Ekkstacy is gauzy and doomy, cool 2012 along with Lil Peep’s moody sad-boy
music festival, in Las Vegas, the world’s fore- and brash, and maybe even a little danger- production. Now imagine if out of that cul-
most emo-and-pop-punk revivalist destina- ous. An Ekkstacy chorus like “I just want to ture emerged a model-handsome Zoomer
tion where the twin forces of nostalgia and die I just want to kill myself / I don’t give with an anarchy-star tattoo scratched into
capitalism convene to coax bands that peaked a fuckkkkkk about anyone else” might scan his cheek.
in the 2000s—acts like Yellowcard and the as jejune and melodramatic to most people In addition to the vocal problems on the
Offspring and Bowling for Soup—out of their over 25, but then again Morrissey’s lyrics festival’s first night, the evening was further
McMansions for two days of performances in haven’t exactly aged well in the Genius era marred by the slight dustup Stacy and his
front of a vast ocean of elder millennials who
once had gauges and lip piercings but now get
sleepy after two beers.
The dilemma: It’s nearly 3 p.m. on Sunday
and his voice is gone. That would be the
voice belonging to the ascendant 21-year-
old singer-songwriter Ekkstacy, who, along
with his band, represents one of the hand-
ful of young acts appearing at the festival—
here ostensibly to provide variety and also
because they can stay up past 10 and fill the
later time slots. But there was trouble last
night as Ekkstacy’s voice started to fray
three songs into his set. Ekkstacy, by his own
admission, “sounded like shit.” It was a bum-
mer of the highest magnitude.
Which is why we—Ekkstacy, his man-
ager, his three bandmates, and I—are now
crammed into a Ford Expedition, feverishly
racing around Las Vegas in search of a steroid
injection to fix his ailing vocal cords.
“I’m worried,” says Ekkstacy—or Stacy,
when he isn’t performing. He’s sitting shot-
gun and his voice sounds soft and gravelly,
like it belongs to a retiree who has a memory
to share about his first Werther’s. Not great
for an emerging rock star with a show in a few
hours. Behind the wheel, the band’s manager,
Andrew Mishko, is on the phone dialing every
urgent care within a 25-mile radius, but no
one seems to have what they need.
“Are you worried about singing like shit, or
are you worried about getting a shot in your
ass?” asks Andrew, who’s become a friend and
is, in his mid-30s, a de facto father figure on
tour. “How about—I’ll do it with you, bro.”
Stacy considers Andrew’s offer to also get a
butt shot and suggests a proposal: “We should
use the same needle too.”
Stacy is a funny guy. Profane and smart
and vexing, yet gentle, with the attention
span of a goldendoodle. He is tall, and much
of his body and face is covered in faint
tattoos that he likes to pick at. He’s wear-
ing dirty black Levi’s, a belt with square
metal studs, checkered Vans, and a ratty
Descendents tee with the sleeves and collar
chopped off, looking very much like some-
one who should be selling or making music.
←←
ON PREVIOUS PAGE
coat
Balenciaga
tank top
Dolce & Gabbana
sunglasses
(throughout)
Oakley
necklace (on top)
Tiffany & Co.
all other jewelry,
his own

THESE PAGES
shirt
Jean Paul Gaultier
Tattoo Collection
pants
Willy Chavarria
shoes
Ferragamo
socks
Philip Huang
hat
Emily Dawn Long
necklace (on top)
Bond Hardware
wallet chain
Chrome Hearts
all other jewelry,
his own

band had with an older, more established act as Ekkstacy prepared
to perform. “We heard Lit from backstage,” says Gigi Giobbi, who
plays drums. “They yelled at us.”
“They were like, Who the fuck is sound checking?” says Caleb
Goldstick, the bassist. “But that’s how it works!”
“Lit sucks, bro,” says Stacy, as he produces his phone and googles
“who is lit”—and, presumably, “who is lit band.” “Yeah, these guys
look so dumb.”
“I just looked at that dude and I was like, if he comes over here, I’m
just going to sock him,” says Andrew, protective instincts coming to
the fore. “That would be a funny story.”
Someone suggests they shouldn’t worry about these guys and
instead claim the moral high ground, as Lit hasn’t had a hit song
since Stacy and company were all in diapers. Caleb starts humming
the guitar intro to said hit song, “My Own Worst Enemy.”
“Get this, their two biggest songs on Spotify are that,” says Erez Potok-
Holmes, Ekkstacy’s bleach-blond guitarist, “and then that song again.”
Everyone folds into cackles. They have an easy camaraderie, which
is surprising since they’ve been playing together for only five months.
I should also note that everyone in the car, aside from Stacy and myself,
is white. Ordinarily, this would not be worth mentioning, but Stacy,
who is Black, likes to deploy the N-word with a soft “a” at the end as a

F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4 G Q . C O M 7 7
sign of endearment, and the asymmetrical nature of the transaction is (1) pretty
funny, and (2) shows that he’s attuned to whatever fusty distinctions might still
come with being a Black kid who could present as a SoundCloud rapper but plays
mostly sad guitar music. It’s a role he seems to relish, deviating from the mean. In
fact, he’s quick to share his list of Top 10 White People: “Tony Hawk, Matt Damon,
Michael Cera, and then just all my homies after that.” (Later, he will amend his
answer to include Jennifer Aniston.)
Another term he likes to use is goated, which he applies freely and lavishly to
all manner of things worthy of esteem. Among the goated on planet Ekkstacy:
Blink-182 (“But it took them three albums”); the Las Vegas Sphere; the song “Hey
There Delilah”; his growing closet of vintage clothing; the musician and pro-
ducer Eyedress (“Asian guy from LA, super goated”); Fred Durst and Limp Bizkit;
Morrissey (“An asshole and a little racist, but goated, though”); a bowl of chicken
teriyaki; the band Joyce Manor; his father’s favorite musician, Tupac Shakur
(“I don’t fucking like his music, but seeing videos of him just moving and talking,
you could tell he was goated”).
At long last, we pull into a strip mall parking lot. Someone on the phone told
Andrew that this particular urgent care had the necessary cortisone in stock, but
it fell to the very nice front-desk woman behind the computer to break the bad
news that it, in fact, did not.

I’M NEARLY 40 and, on paper, well within the opportunity quadrant of whatever
McKinsified SWOT analysis brought When We Were Young to fruition, someone
who understands how and why the lyrics “Is that what you call tact? / You’re as
subtle as a brick in the small of my back” appears in songs from two different
Long Island emo bands. But the emo of my youth is a vestige of the MySpace era,
which is to say: mostly embarrassing. Nostalgia, especially when there’s money
attached, is usually just a honeypot. I try to maintain a healthy distance.

At the same time, it’s rare that I encounter new music

that gets me in my feelings or inspires curiosity about who
made it. But earlier this year, I heard an Ekkstacy track—
specifically, “Then I Met Her,” a distorted, fast, and woozy
love song about meeting a girl. I was floored. It was one
of the most beautiful and transportive songs I’ve heard
in years. It lulls you back to a time when cruising around
aimlessly with your friends while listening to music was
the most life-affirming thing you could do. And, somehow,
it sounded fresh? I couldn’t help but wonder: Who was
this kid making this stuff?
Stacy didn’t really grow up around music that he was
drawn to. He spent his youth in the suburbs of Vancouver,
the eldest of three kids. Mom works as a paralegal, while
Dad works as a building inspector and is big into hip-hop,
with a CD collection in the thousands.
 “Nineties rap,” says Stacy. “I’ll get home after not
being home for months, and he’ll be like, ‘Look at this
shit I just got,’ and it’s Young Black Brotha Records.”
Dad, I should mention, is white. Mom is from the UK
and has Jamaican ancestry. “We would go to the Nike
outlet and my dad would go snap in there, bro,” Stacy
remembers, laughing. “White fool, Jordans, hella baggy
clothes, fucking rap music. Fucking loc sunglasses, bro.
That fool’s got it on lock.”
Stacy was a happy kid, largely because his childhood
was happy and uneventful. The family wasn’t exactly rich,
but they did well enough to vacation often in Palm Springs.
Young Stacy was big into soccer and started skateboard-
ing when he was six. (He recently added surfing to his
short list of hobbies.) Despite his dad’s CD collection, Stacy
found his own influences. Most of his early encounters
with music were through those audio-only Stingray cable
TV stations and the soundtracks from EA’s Skate video
games. “I really got no musical influence at all from my
parents,” he says. “I had no friends that were older than me ←
putting me on shit either. I had to find that shit by myself.” OPPOSITE PAGE
Before he got into punk as a teenager, he was into pop- coat
pier music and loved the clothes of designers like Jerry Burberry
Lorenzo. “When I was young, I used to dress like that earring, his own
and listen to R&B,” says Stacy. His favorite artist? “Chris ↑
Brown. Dude, that whole X album was my favorite.” Stacy THIS PAGE
would try to learn the dances in his bathroom, despite his coat
mom’s protestations about adoring somebody like Chris Balenciaga
Brown. “I was the worst. I was horrible. I was cringe.” necklace (on top)
Early in his high school career, Stacy’s parents decided Tiffany & Co.
to get a divorce, and the happy, young Stacy that everyone all other jewelry,
knew seemed to disappear. He retreated into himself. He his own

F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4 G Q . C O M 7 9
 ←
jacket
Saint Laurent
by Anthony
Vaccarello
hoodie from
The Society
Archive
tank top
Dolce & Gabbana
jeans
Telfar
necklace (on top)
Tiffany & Co.
all other jewelry,
his own

→
OPPOSITE
PAGE, TOP
shirt
Jean Paul Gaultier
Tattoo Collection
pants
Willy Chavarria
necklace (on top)
Bond Hardware
all other jewelry,
his own
OPPOSITE PAGE,
BOT TOM
shirt
Gucci
necklace
(on top)
Tiffany & Co.
all other jewelry,
his own

8 0 G Q . C O M F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4
says he started hanging out with “skaters and
SoundCloud rappers and shit, just all weird
assholes who would get, like, hella bitches.
But I got no bitches and was just a loser.”
One night, Stacy took a drug—he declines
to specify what it was—which, he says, sent
him into a state of psychosis. Just destroying
shit, breaking everything in the house, before
leaping through a second-story window.
“I was near death, bro. I was very near
death,” he says. He has scars from deep gashes
to his arms and stomach; he says that doctors
told him that if the glass had gone any deeper
it would’ve penetrated his liver.
When Stacy woke up at the hospital, he
vowed to never do drugs like that again.
Not long afterward he dropped out of high
school and started working a miserable
job at Amazon, processing returns. “It was
horrible,” says Stacy, explaining how he’d
hide that he was listening to music while he
worked. “I’d have to wear beanies and then
AirPods underneath so that they didn’t see
them.” At the time he was living with his dad
and paying $500 a month for rent. Stacy
worked the night shift, from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m.
Every day, he would walk 20 minutes to the
bus stop, ride the bus for 20 minutes to the
SkyTrain, and then take the train for 25 min-
utes to work. Then he’d commute home in
reverse, sleep, wake up at four or five in the
afternoon, and do it all over again. A tragic
doom loop.
He considers the dull monotony of that
time in his life a blessing in disguise. “It was
almost the best thing that ever happened to
me, bro,” he says. “Really showed me how
shit would be if I didn’t make music properly.
I just heard a lot of music when I was there.
Listened to a lot of interviews of artists.”
What were you listening to during that
time?
“Only the Drums,” he says before quickly
amending his answer to include bands that
are not the Drums. “Only the Drums and Surf
Curse and Current Joys. Just really sad shit.”
Stacy was messing around with beats and
still trying to find his sound, but Current
Joys, the moniker of the Reno, Nevada–
based multi-instrumentalist songwriter Nick
Rattigan, was a revelation: spare 808 drums
layered with whatever guitars or keyboards
and vocals you wanted on top. It was music
that you could make alone in your bedroom.
“I studied it,” says Stacy, “and I was like, I’m
going to do this.”
Two months into his Amazon job, Stacy
realized that a few songs he had uploaded
to Spotify on a whim as Ekkstacy were
blowing up a little—in particular, a Peep-
esque track with a booming trap beat called
“Uncomparable.” Stacy realized the math was
favorable: The streaming residuals were earn-
ing him around $500 a month, enough that
he figured he could quit Amazon and focus on
making music.
Which is exactly what he did. After mak-
ing the long trek home for the last time, he
wrote what would become his first big single,
“I Walk This Earth All by Myself.”
BACK IN THE Ford Expedition. A desperate
Andrew calls his contact at the festival look-
ing for help scoring a last-minute cortisone
shot. The guy on the phone says that yes, in
fact, they should have a doctor at the festival
who can handle that. We floor it to the Las
Vegas Festival Grounds.
Ekkstacy’s trailer backstage is toward
the back-back, next to trailers marked for
Something Corporate, the Ataris, Tony
Hawk’s Vert Jam, and, as fate would have
it, Lit. The trailers are tiny. Ekkstacy’s is
stocked with snacks and liquor; a fridge
full of energy drinks, Modelos, and enough
Liquid Death to fill an aquarium. Stacy
opens a bag of Takis and waits for the doctor.
F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4 G Q . C O M 8 1
 Stacy’s life these days is pretty surreal. He’s become
friends with people like Travis Barker. He lives in a big
party house in Universal City overlooking Los Angeles
with five other guys, most of them musicians in an indie
band called AlexSucks. Stacy finds this situation ideal for
his creative process, and his description of a typical day
is a hilariously Gen Z distillation of what it’s like to be a
modern rock star.
“I’ll make music for, like, three, four hours,” he explains.
“And then I’ll play video games. And then I’ll doomscroll.
And then I’ll be like, ‘Oh, man, I gotta do something
important.’ And I’ll make music.… I’ll jerk off like two or
three times in there. That’s pretty good, you know? I get
music done.”
Andrew jumps in. “You know what the craziest thing
is?” he says. “I’ll hit this fool up and he’ll be like, ‘Yo, you’re
asking me to do too much! I’m too busy.’ ”
Stacy: “This fool calls me when I’m jerking off some-
times. I see myself [on FaceTime] and I’m like, Oh, shit.
I look crazy. Under my covers. Sweating. Headphones on.”
Andrew: “It’ll be, like, 2 p.m. and he’ll be like, ‘Dude, tank top
you can’t just expect me to have an answer right now!’ ” Dolce & Gabbana
Stacy, unbothered, the rest of the room already in bracelets and ring
stitches: “For my late-night jerk, I gotta make sure my (on ring finger, top)
doors are locked. So I’ll like zoom in with my camera onto Chrome Hearts
the locks to see if they’re vertical.” necklace (on top)
Their relationship is a special one, and Andrew is Tiffany & Co.
in some ways an ideal mentor. He grew up in Venice, all other jewelry,
California, when it was still gnarly, surfing in the tail- his own
winds of the Z-Boys. Andrew has worked with a bunch
of bands, including Everlast and the Drums, before he hair by nero using
oribe. grooming
and Stacy met over DMs in December 2020. Andrew’s old by ai yokomizo using
business partner had come across Ekkstacy on his Explore mac cosmetics.
page, saw that this kid was really into the Drums, and tailoring by
sent the post as a joke to Andrew, who was still managing ksenia golub.
them at the time and was like, Lol…but wow, this shit is
really good.
Now he’s like another father to Stacy, someone who’s
always putting him onto new stuff, new foods to try, new
music. Andrew’s birthday dedication on Instagram to
Stacy this year is particularly instructive.
It reads, in part: “Happy Birthday to my
brother, the son I never wanted, my best bud.
Sometimes we hate each other, but it’s always
with love. Been a true honor watching you
grow into the idiot you are today.”
A knock on the door. The doctor rushes in,
introduces himself, and prepares to admin-
ister the voice-saving shot into Stacy’s pos-
terior. The mission is nearly complete as
Andrew produces for the doctor a cheek of
his own and—in no need of a steroid—gamely
takes a B12 shot. A man of his word.
AS D A R K N E S S D E S C E N D S over Vegas, the
Ekkstacy crew starts trading in their canned
waters for booze. We cart over to the stage
at around 9 p.m. for sound check. We watch,
carefully, as Lit performs, from stage right. The
live set is fine, and then the first lick of “My
Own Worst Enemy” hits the festival speakers,
and Stacy and the crew start moshing around,
arms draped over one another, scream-
shouting their hearts out. It’s cute. What starts
as ironic mockery has suddenly transformed
into something resembling a real appreci-
ation. (A few weeks later, Stacy will post the
song without comment in his Stories.)
Then Ekkstacy and the band take the stage,
and, well, they kill it. Just a bonkers perfor-
mance. Stacy’s voice sounds incredible, and
he throws his body around like someone
who’s never experienced lumbar back pain.
His aura is magnetic. Curious festival-goers
leaving Green Day early glom on to the
Ekkstacy crowd, which doubles in size by the
time they’re finished.
“That was so much better than last night,
bro,” a very sweaty and out of breath Stacy
says after the set. Gigi says she saw Charli
d’Amelio and Landon Barker in the front,
bopping along. I ask Stacy if he noticed
anything different about this crowd versus
last night’s. “I usually got my eyes closed,
bro,” he says, adrenaline coursing through
him. “I’m honestly shoegaze. Fools don’t
understand. I’m not looking at the crowd.
I’m looking at my fucking cup, bro! I’m cup-
gaze, fool. I just look at my cup and where
the next cup is at.”
Why don’t you look at the crowd?
“I’m too nervous to look at the crowd,” he
says, pausing. “If there’s a thousand people
stoked but I see one dude hella bummed? I’m
seeing that one guy.”
That night, the band flew home while
Stacy and Andrew stayed up late playing
(and losing) at roulette. They’re nonetheless
up early the next morning, and I meet them
both at eight as they prepare for the long
drive back to Los Angeles. They’ve invited
me along. Stacy is wearing the same thread-
bare T-shirt he was wearing last night,
along with Naruto pajama bottoms. “That
shit changed my life,” he says of the show. “It
ruined my anime career. I couldn’t find any-
thing I liked as much after that.” A little later
he applies another amendment: “I liked
Chainsaw Man.” In the car, pointed toward
California, he allows that he’s sort of over
Los Angeles—that he wants to uproot him-
self and try something different. “I’m about
to move to New York, bro,” he says. “I’ve got
six more months in LA, at least if I don’t find
somewhere sick to live in Europe. I know a
couple of chicks I can move in with.”
On that five-hour trip west, we talk about
everything: his family, surfing in Malibu, cars
he wants to buy, girls. “You know who’s so
hot and I walked past her in Chicago?” he
says excitedly of another young shoegaze-y
musician. “Beabadoobee. We walked past
each other, made hard eye contact, turned
around, and we were both looking at each
other. And I was like, bro! I ran away!
I jumped into a garbage can.” As he tells me
this, he hits follow on her Instagram, just to
see what happens.
Mostly, though, we listen to music—which
is as useful an exercise as any to try and
understand how Ekkstacy’s mind operates.
We listen to some stuff from his forthcom-
ing album, which has this first single called
“Bella” that’s brighter and grittier yet some-
how more optimistic than his doomy shit.
The song is once again about falling in love—
the Bella in the song is a composite of three
different real-life girlfriends, Stacy says—and
as far as perfect songs go, it is perfect.
There are a few old bands that I love that
he swears he’ll “never fuck with,” like Rage
Against the Machine. (“It’s just like fake
heavy,” he says.) But we really get into it when
we start discussing another band that epito-
mized Southern California in the ’90s.
“I’ ll never fuck with Sublime, bro,”
says Stacy.
“Low-key bro, you’re tripping,” says
Andrew from the driver’s seat, defiantly. “You
know that most punk shit is derivative from
ska, which was derivative from reggae—”
“Ska is fucking lame.”
I catch Andrew’s eyes twinkling in the
rearview mirror. He seems to see in Stacy’s
youthful assertion an opportunity to show
him something new, and scours Spotify for
Sublime’s posthumous release, Everything
Under the Sun, a collection of live perfor-
mances and B-sides from the band’s early
punk days. “It’s the only Sublime shit I ever go
back to,” says Andrew. “They would do, like,
Descendents covers.”
“Everything I’ve heard just made me
angry,” says Stacy.
“Yeah, bro. Because ‘Santeria’ is one of
the most played-out white-dreadlocks songs
of all time,” says Andrew. He puts on the
demo “Ebennz Change.” Unlike the overpro-
duced, sped-up version of “Ebin” on 40oz. to
Freedom, the demo is raw and hard-charging,
with a groovy bass line. (It’s a song ostensibly
about a friend who’s changed—into a Nazi.) A
few bars in, Stacy can’t help but furiously bop
his head to the beat.
“This is cool,” Stacy admits. “This makes
me want to surf.”
“Yeah, bro,” says Andrew. “They’re just
surfers.”
“Ughhh, this is why you can’t fucking say
dumb shit!” says Stacy, amending himself
one more time. He runs his fingers down
his face like someone studying for an all-
nighter, tugging his skin and exposing the
white in his eyes. “Then you hear some shit
like this.…”
He shakes his head, as if to recalibrate how
his brain is wired.
“This is fresh. I take it back.”
CHRIS GAYOMALI is a GQ articles editor.
F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4 G Q . C O M 8 3
 BARRY K EO GH A N
C O N T I N U E D F RO M PAG E 4 0
Austin, I’m Tom Hardy today, right? You think
it? He’d be like, Yeah, you’re definitely Tom
Hardy today.”
He knows his eyes are an asset. They’re
pretty, but they’re also precision instruments.
He’s got this uncanny way of purging them of
all empathy. Emerald Fennell compares them
to a shark’s eyes.
“It’s like the double lid that sharks have,”
Fennell said. “The attack mode. The actual
change is on a molecular level, but it’s pro-
found. And when you’re that close—because
I love shooting very, very, very close up—you
need somebody who’s that kind of gifted, where
the tiniest things can change everything.”
Keoghan’s son, in photos, looks to have
the Keoghan eyes. His name is Brando. He
was born right in the middle of shooting on
Saltburn; Keoghan managed to get away for
that one day. “They gave me a day off,” he says,
laughing. “Good on them! Day off, and straight
on to night shoots and night feedings—boom!”
You can see it on his face, he thinks. “You
see me tired,” he says. “Yeah. Brando. Good
ol’ Brando.”
He gets a little quieter, pulling inward. “It
was probably the best time of my life, to be quite
fair. Havin’ a baby boy, and leadin’ a movie. It
was the best time of my life, I must say—yeah.”
This was barely a year and a half ago, but
he talks about that time like it’s very far away,
which is maybe how it feels. Brando’s mother,
Alyson Sandro, was Keoghan’s girlfriend at
the time; in July the UK tabloids reported that
they’d split. “She’s done a great job and she’s
an incredible mother,” Keoghan says, offering
nothing further.
He says it hasn’t changed him, but it does
affect the choices he makes, how long he’s will-
ing to be off somewhere on location. “I feel a
responsibility. I feel an enormous amount of
pressure, which is good. And I can’t get the lit-
tle boy off my mind. It’s beautiful. Y’know, it’s
crazy, but when he looks at you, you feel like
the most important person in the world. That’s
the effect he has on me. He smiles at you and
you’re like, Wow. You’re smiling at me like that?
I don’t deserve that, but anyways, thanks.”
How old is he now?
“Fifteen months. Brando Keoghan. Imagine
that, for a name! I set him up. Brando Keoghan,
piano player! I obviously love Marlon Brando,
but I just, yeah—for a first name I thought it
was quite cool. To have Brando in your name—
feckin’ hell, man! He’s got a lot to live up to,
that kid,” Keoghan says, then adds, confidently,
grinning: “But he’ll live up to it. He has to have
that leather jacket and that rock-star attitude,
you know what I mean? He’ll have a motorbike
when he’s 12, I think.”
8 4 G Q . C O M F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4
Right. It seemed like a good idea when he
was a little baby, but when he’s 12, and walk-
ing around like he’s in The Wild One…
“He’ll have a toothpick [in his mouth] walk-
ing around seventh grade,” Keoghan says,
laughing. “He’ll probably have a toothpick
when I get home!”
They grow up so fast. “Fuck you, Dad!”
“Aww, God,” Keoghan says. “Dad, you’re a
shit actor. You can’t do accents.”
And maybe this is where Keoghan’s movie
should really end—Barry in the mystic haze
on some far-off golden shore, his son’s name
rolling off his tongue, sleeping in a bed he’ll
make tomorrow.
He does not know what’s next. He has one
more movie in the can—it’s called Bird, and
he made it right after Saltburn, with Andrea
Arnold, who made Fish Tank and American
Honey, and he won’t say what it’s about. He
dropped out of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator 2 to
make it—which was a scheduling decision, he
says, not a what-kind-of-actor-am-I decision,
although Andrea Arnold was one of the direc-
tors on his list. After that, he’ll wait and see
what comes of Saltburn, now that it’s out there.
There is one script he’s excited about,
he says, for a movie about the life of Henry
McCarty, who went by William H. Bonney
and went down in history as Billy the Kid.
It’s by Hunter Andrews, who also wrote The
Cut Man for Keoghan; Bart Layton, who
made American Animals with Keoghan, is
set to direct. “We’re looking at which stu-
dio we want to settle with,” Keoghan says.
“We wanted to wait till Saltburn came out,
because we want to surround me with really
good, interesting actors—but we want those
actors to also feel that the person leading that
movie can lead a movie. It was a question I
wanted to ask as well—can I lead a movie?
Can I keep [people] engaged? And the reac-
tion’s been good so far, so now we’re gonna
approach the actors we want.”
He’s been a Billy fan since childhood, he
says. Feels some kinship. Billy was of Irish
descent, lost his mother young and his father
even younger. “And he kind of went around
the care system as well, a little. But the Billy
the Kid version we’re trying to tell is, y’know,
beneath the façade, beneath that mythical
character. Not making it so cool, like, Oh, my
God, he’s the best gunslinger. Humanizing him,
making him real.”
“That is happening,” Keoghan says, “so
expect to see these baby blues with the cow-
boy hat.”
He pulls out his phone. “There’s actually
only one picture of him out there, ever—one
picture, and I kind of look like him. It’s crazy.
He’s got dark hair. Let’s see. I’ll show you.”
He googles, scrolls, hands me the phone,
a grainy colorized ferrotype photo on the
screen—Billy in a slouch hat, leaning on a
Winchester rifle.
“Look from the eyes,” Keoghan says, “like
from the nose up. You know what I’m saying?
It’s crazy. There’s the one picture of him and,
like, that feckin’ looks like me. And I’m a bit of
a Billy the Kid, in life. So we’re gonna do that.
The outlaw! And the kid. The kid inside him.”
ALEX PAPPADEMAS is GQ ’s senior
culture editor.
C O DY TOWN SE N D
C O N T I N U E D F RO M PAG E 4 9
“I remember, you’d ask him about getting
married,” Townsend recalled, “and he would
say, ‘I’ll be 40 and she’ll be 20, and it’ll just
make sense one day.’ Jesus, dude.”
Holmes is 43 now, about the same age as
me. I’ve similarly managed to prolong ado-
lescence deep into middle age. But Holmes,
who’d parlayed his good looks and career as
a BASE jumper into Hollywood stunt work,
was buzzing that he and Tahoe ultrarunning
champion Rory Bosio were soon-to-be par-
ents. “I’d been firing missiles downrange for
years with Rory,” he said, opting out of sub-
tlety in his fertility metaphors. But if he was
afraid of losing his identity as a ski bro, he
didn’t show it.
“Guys like us will be doing this kind of stuff
when we’re 60,” he said, nodding at the peak.
When we’d all grouped up for a breather,
Saugstad asked, “Does Cody know yet?”
“Know what?” Townsend said.
“I’m going to be a dad,” said Holmes.
“No way!” said Townsend. “I’m so excited
for you!”
It was surreal watching two of the perma-
bros, whose careers I’d followed as a reporter
over the past two decades, gush over father-
hood. At the same time, it was clear they’d
never willingly slow down or stop taking risks.
It’s just not who they are.
Yet time, as they say, is undefeated.
garage in
T O W N S E N D A N D S A U G S TA D ’ S
Tahoe is stacked six deep with skis and snow-
boards—mounted and unmounted, touring
and alpine. There’s even a monoski in there
somewhere. Out front, the couple keeps its
small fleet of adventure vehicles: a kitted-out
Sprinter camper van, a lifted Toyota Tundra,
and a new Bronco that Saugstad drives as part
of a sponsorship deal with the automaker.
They were able to ski together on Bloody
Mountain because they’d managed to find a
sitter who’d take Indy overnight. Townsend’s
parents frequently make the drive up from
Santa Cruz as well.
When I visited, the day after the Bloody
Mountain expedition, Townsend and Salen
were busying themselves stacking neat piles
of freeze-dried food and energy bars, enough
for three weeks in Alaska. Salen is vegetarian
and Townsend is allergic to gluten, which
means everyone needs their own provisions.
They were piling it all into white Hyperlite
Mountain Gear pouches and duffel bags that
seem as thin as paper but, I’m told, are actually
stronger than steel. Townsend has been con-
sulting with the backpacking company in the
hope of getting them to make ski packs.
 C O DY TOW N S E N D C O NT IN UED
Indy was never far away, playing with his
Lamborghini and getting into things. He had
just gotten his first pair of skis, and Townsend
was eager to get him on the slopes. “It’s going
to be one of the top 10 ski days of my life,” he
told me.
Nick Russell was making the trip to Alaska
again, and Dan Corn signed up for more
suffering despite the last effort’s near-death
experience.
At one point, Townsend was on the phone
with the pilot who’d scheduled to land them
on the glacier. Apparently, he had a sudden
conflict and might not be able to fly them
out to Wrangell-Saint Elias National Park.
“You are plan B,” Townsend said with a tone
of exasperation.
If they succeed, Townsend will have
only three lines remaining in his quest.
Unfortunately, two of them are even more
difficult than Saint Elias. University Peak—on
the cover of Fifty Classic Ski Descents of North
America—also sits within Wrangell–Saint
Elias National Park. Unlike Saint Elias itself,
with its mess of ridges and glaciated faces,
University is perhaps the most aesthetic ski
line on the planet. The 14,470-foot mountain
is shaped like a wedge doorstop turned on
its end. The 7,000-vertical-foot south face
descends an unrelenting 55-degree slope. Fall
anywhere on it and you’re going all the way to
the bottom.
The other peak, Mount Robson, in east-
ern British Columbia, rises like an incisor.
It’s a favorite among Canadian mixed-rock-
and-ice climbers for its sheer walls and ice-
draped ledges. Yet it has a single ramp of
snow and ice, nearly 60 degrees in places,
that sometimes fills in. It’s been skied exactly
twice, once in 1995 by Troy Jungen and Ptor
Spricenieks, and again in 2017 by Dylan
Cunningham. “I don’t know if it’s ever going
to be skiable again,” Townsend said. “It takes
such a miracle to get snow to stick on top of
blue ice.”
Unlike merely climbing these routes, skiing
some of them requires conditions that may
only arise once every 5 or 10 years. Townsend
had failed to get to the true top of Combatant
Couloir (No. 41), in British Columbia’s
Waddington Range, because it had melted out,
and noted that climate change would soon
make some of the lines impossible to repeat.
Many skiers pride themselves on first descents,
and he was now reckoning with a perverse twist
to the concept: “It’s crazy to think we’re living in
a time when we’re starting to see the potential
for last descents,” he said.
Two weeks after Bloody Couloir, I heard
one more time from Townsend: “Didn’t even
set foot on Saint Elias!” The weather had
been so bad that they couldn’t get a flight to
the mountain, let alone climb it. If they want
to finish The Fifty, they’ll have to go back
a third time. Townsend is settling into the
mindset of a patient big-game hunter. The
last four lines may take as long to complete
as the first 46. But when his shot materializes,
he’ll be ready. As he told me, “I’ve never felt
more prepared for these lines.”
GRAYSON SCHAFFER is a contributing editor
at ‘Outside.’ He last wrote for GQ about the
mountaineer Nims Purja.
A N N A WE YAN T
C O N T I N U E D F RO M PAG E 57
body circulated with text announcing the
birth. Although there wasn’t any truth to
the meme, Weyant says she started receiv-
ing texts about it, and people started con-
tacting her artist liaison at the gallery to
find out more information. Weyant says that
acquaintances began congratulating her at
dinner parties.
“I think part of it, too, was that it was
intended to be a little bit of a market hit,”
Weyant explains. “ ‘This woman is now
becoming a mother, and there goes her
career.’ ” Weyant says the situation became
like a game of telephone, where she became
aware of “spin-off rumors” that she was keep-
ing the supposed baby in a separate apart-
ment. “At the time, I was struggling and had
gained weight and was so self-conscious.
I thought that maybe someone saw me and
thought…. I don’t know where the fuck it
came from.”
The worst part, though? “It was hard, too,
for my family. They put up with a lot of my bull-
shit, and they’re very patient,” she says. “My
parents sort of knew [about her relationship
with Larry], but it was a sensitive situation.”
“I was so ill-equipped and so vulnerable
that it crushed me,” she says. “I thought about
killing myself. I was so mortified.”
Weyant is not totally closed off about her
relationship, but she has been mindful of
Larry, who rarely talks to the press about his
personal life. What she has told me about the
relationship is that “it’s weird and it’s great”
and that she takes his opinion of her work
so seriously that she couldn’t bear to show
him the paintings for her recent show in Paris
until the show’s opening. (She works with
a team at the gallery that he’s not part of.)
Eventually, I ask how these pregnancy rumors
impacted Larry and their relationship.
“God, I don’t even remember,” she says.
“I don’t think we really spoke about it. He’s
such a tough cookie about that stuff that noth-
ing gets through to him.”
“If I go to him and say, ‘I’m sad because
someone was mean to me on the internet…’ ”
she says, “he would just not understand.”
One thing Larry, and his Gagosian employ-
ees, surely must understand, is the process
of protecting an artist whose market may be
under threat. But instead of having a nega-
tive effect on her market, the sale of Falling
Woman ultimately seems to have helped raise
her primary market prices. Rines says she
worked to direct responsible collectors to the
secondary market to mitigate the damage.
Meanwhile, Weyant toiled to ready her
first solo show at Gagosian so there would
be new work on the primary market.
“I don’t know if I should admit that, but what
I thought was: I have so much old work that
I don’t stand behind, and that’s how people
are assessing me. Based on paintings I made
when I was 23. So I want to make new work
I can get behind.”
But when an artist’s market rises suddenly,
it can change the way she regards her new
work. How do you prevent the million-dollar
price tags from creeping into the process?
Weyant doesn’t pretend to be naive to the mar-
ket. She doesn’t have that luxury. “I’m pretty
good at tuning out the price idea,” she says.
“For example, my still lifes, on the primary
market, don’t sell for as much as the portraits,
because they’re just priced differently. So
sometimes I have to resist the urge to make a
portrait instead of a still life. I love still life, but
sometimes I’m like, Oh, this is going to take
the same amount of time and I could get twice
the amount of money for it.”
While the secondary market spectacle of
2022 could have posed an existential risk to
Weyant’s career, it more likely fortified her
status in the upper echelons of the art world.
“It benefited me in a lot of ways, because I was
able to raise my primary prices,” Weyant says.
“I realized if someone is going to be making
money off my work, I want to be the one mak-
ing money off it.”
The debacle fortified her emotionally too.
“If someone threw an egg at me, I would be
fine,” she says. “At first it was so hard. Also,
to be criticized…. Now I’m so used to it that it
wouldn’t bother me at all.”
Not only is Weyant making money off her
work, her paintings remain so coveted that
she—and her team—can be especially selec-
tive about who gets to own one. “I have cli-
ents who’ve never bought anything from
the gallery who’ve reached out to me and
said, ‘I would like an Anna Weyant work,’”
says Sophia Cohen, an associate director at
Gagosian and the daughter of billionaire Mets
owner and collector Steve Cohen. (She has also
sat for Weyant.) “I’m like, ‘That’s cool! I would
like $4 million in my bank account tomorrow.’
It’s not going to happen.”
“Sometimes certain male collectors will say,
‘I want a [portrait of ] a sexy young woman!’ ”
Weyant says. “And I’ll say, nope, you’re not get-
ting one. Not that there’s anything wrong with
loving sexy, young women. Who doesn’t?”
A F T E R T H E S H O W in Paris this past fall,
Weyant would like to enjoy a nice lull. One
of her primary ambitions for the next few
months is to visit Disneyland. She also needs
to finish a new painting—the Mary Janes—
to be shown at Gagosian’s booth in Miami.
It’s a modest piece, but it’s been giving her
headaches, nonetheless. She’s been using a
thicker linen canvas than she’s accustomed
to, which requires an especially time-con-
suming technique to get edges of the shoes
smoothed out. She pulls up a photo on her
phone. “So I’m trying to get these edges,” she
says, “but it’s really tough, and I’m mostly
getting these edges.”
“It’s really fun,” she says, “but I’m not
crazy about it. I’m going to see if I can save it,
because I’ve been working on it for a while, but
I might kill it.”
F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4 G Q . C O M 8 5
 AN N A W E YA N T C ON TIN UED
A few weeks later, during the fair in Miami,
I check in with Weyant about the fate of the
painting. She finished it, but when it came
time to bring it to the art fair, she says, she “got
cold feet” and decided not to send it to Miami.
“I felt like a dick because obviously people had
planned around having that painting there.
But nobody really cared. I just feel like, if it’s
not something I need to say, or show, then I’m
okay not to show it.”
“Miami Basel is so…in my humble opinion,
so much more about the money and the par-
ties,” she says. “The outfits people wear, rather
than the art. I didn’t feel like anyone was going
to miss me.” By the same token, Weyant was
supposed to go to Paris the week before to
oversee the end of her most recent solo show,
but she opted out at the last minute. She’s
wiped out, she tells me, and she hasn’t been
sleeping well.
And besides, she has a new project to turn
her focus to. When we talk, Weyant is holed up
in New York, hard at work on her first public
art commission. She’s recently been asked to
create a painting for the Metropolitan Opera,
which will turn the work into a 60-foot banner
to celebrate the staging of the Italian opera La
Forza Del Destino.
For her piece, Weyant will be painting
a portrait of Leonora, the opera’s tortured
main character. Leonora is in a passionate
love affair that her father does not approve
of, creating a dramatically violent and oper-
atic back-and-forth between her lover and her
family. At the end, Leonora is permanently
separated from her love when her brother
stabs her to death.
A public art commission, while not as sexy
as a Miami Basel party or a collector’s din-
ner, brings a huge rush of relief and energy
to Weyant. “There’s no…. There’s no money
involved, no speculation, no market stuff,”
she says. “It’s about my art, and opera, and
the performers.”
After the whirlwind of the last few years,
Weyant has passed through to a place of
relative quiet again—where it’s techni-
cal problems and creative choices, rather
than speculation about her personal life,
that weigh on her. Weyant is about half-
way through the opera painting, and she
has reached a critical juncture, deciding
whether or not to make the portrait bloody.
“I have to be a little bit careful because
it’s public art. No nudity, and I proba-
bly have to tone down any gore,” she says.
“I really want her stabbed in the heart, which
is how she dies.”
When the commission is complete, the
60-foot rendering of it will hang outside the
building at Lincoln Center, the very place, she
says, she worked at around the time she first
arrived in New York, almost seven incredibly
long years ago. “I had done some internships
in events, and I thought I would work adja-
cent to creative people,” she says. “I thought
I maybe could be on that side of it, and be
close enough to painters that I could still get
some of that juice.”
“When I look back on it, I realize how lucky
I got. Fuckin’ fell into all the right holes.”
CARRIE BATTAN is a writer in New York and
frequent contributor to GQ .
8 6 G Q . C O M F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4
HOW TO B U Y A SP O RTS TE AM
C O N T I N U E D F RO M PAG E 7 3
London. But Blitzer put in a bid for Chelsea as
part of a consortium, afterward acknowledg-
ing that, had his group won, he would have had
to “hide a little bit” the next time he visited the
city. The financier Todd Boehly, already a part
owner of the LA Dodgers and the LA Lakers,
was reported to have been part of a consor-
tium led by Behdad Eghbali and José Feliciano
of the private equity firm Clearlake Capital
Group to bid for the Broncos. The Broncos
auction overlapped with that of Chelsea, in
which Boehly and Clearlake had also placed a
bid. Leonsis, pretty cynical about such sudden
switches of allegiance, offered a romantic anal-
ogy, imagining someone who abruptly says to
their fiancée: “I gotta go. I met someone else.”
Leonsis had once considered buying into
Chelsea himself, a FOMO thing. “We said,
‘Let’s go and look…everyone’s doing it.’ We
spent a whole day at Chelsea.” He backed off in
the end because he couldn’t bear the thought
of fans asking, Does this guy even live nearby?
Does this guy even understand the basics of
our sport? The answer in Leonsis’s case would
have been no and no. He told me he thought
there should be a questionnaire sent to pro-
spective owners. How many games will you
attend? Will you ever descend from your box?
“Fans smell inauthenticity a mile away,” he
said with a shrug. “They can’t love you if you’re
not one of them.”
The Boehly and Clearlake group was
among the final bidders standing for Chelsea
when the auction came to an end in spring
2022. Their offer of $5.2 billion, at the time
unprecedented in all of sports, was accepted
by Raine on behalf of Chelsea. (As the result
of an agreement with the UK government, the
money from the sale was to go to a charitable
foundation to be created by Abramovich.) As
the transaction drew closer to the finish line,
there were no cork pops. Most sports-team
auctions end with a phase of increasingly soli-
tary haggling over the finer deal points.
Once the deal is completed, lawyers,
who will have been present, attentive, and
extremely stressed through every phase of the
deal so far, can relax. It isn’t exactly Montagues
and Capulets when lawyers and bankers are
forced to collaborate. But they’re naturally
suspicious of each other and only at the end of
an acquisition will they put aside their differ-
ences and go out for dinner. They raise toasts.
It is a tradition among bankers and lawyers
to exchange commemorative gifts after all the
contracts have been signed. They give each
other take-home statuettes made of glass or
Lucite, which, like the technical-achievement
Oscars, tend to be distributed out of sight of
the stars.
trying to work out where
O N E D AY L A S T FA L L ,
all of this frantic activity was trending, I sat
in on a lecture in London. It was being given
by Charles Baker, that lawyer experienced
in team trades, to a group of law students
who were in training to become the team-
acquisition specialists of tomorrow. Calling up
digital slides that spoke to the rapidly chang-
ing culture of pro-sports ownership, Baker
concentrated his lecture on the landscape in
Europe. There, a historic champion of Italy,
AC Milan, is owned entirely by a Manhattan-
based private-equity firm called RedBird
Capital Partners. A team in the industrial
north of England, Newcastle United, is owned
by a group led by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign
wealth fund. A team in France, Paris Saint-
Germain (or PSG), is controlled by Qatar.
Almost every insider I spoke to was sure
that the price of teams in North America
would soon get so high that all but a minus-
cule cluster of decabillionaires would be
priced out. The growth-obsessed leagues
would not want that. The NFL would not
want that. They would soon, the insiders
believed, loosen their ownership rules and
probably keep loosening them, only to keep
the system liquid. In contrast to the rapid
flow of American private-equity money into
European football, until last year no sovereign
wealth funds had been granted ownership of
American sports teams—not until Leonsis
(Leonsis of all people, charming Uncle Ted,
mayor of Sportstown!) sold a small stake in
his teams to Qatar. When I asked Leonsis
why, he remained genial even while going
on the defensive. “They own a little less than
five percent,” he said of the Qatar Investment
Authority. “They’re not on the board. They
can have one meeting a year with us. They’re
investors, not partners.”
Speaking to the students in London, Baker
pointed out that the NFL had set up a commit-
tee to explore the pros and cons of embracing
these funds. Behind him, a slide showed the
team logos of AC Milan and PSG, sporting ava-
tars of Wall Street and an oil state. Looking
up the two teams’ schedules, I saw that they
were due to play each other in Milan. I started
sending emails. I started researching Airbnbs.
A fortnight later I was on a flight to Italy to
meet with a man named Gerry Cardinale, the
kinetic, ever-texting boss of RedBird and as
such the owner of AC Milan for about a year
and a half.
Cardinale, who previously spent decades
as a dealmaker and investor in various
sports-adjacent businesses, was already a
contrarian figure in the ownership ecosys-
tem. A quiet-part-loud guy, he is willing to
be honest and say that he thinks the soar-
ing sums being paid for teams right now
are absurd. He told me a joke: Buying any
other type of company, you’d commission
detailed equity research before making an
offer. Buying a sports team, you glance at the
number printed in the trade journals and
blurt that out. “There’s not a lot of analytical
rigor to support these valuations,” Cardinale
explained. They’re simply worth what some-
one is willing to pay.
We were sitting in the breakfast room
of a Milanese hotel. It was the morn-
ing before Milan’s big game against PSG.
 H OW TO B U Y A S P O RTS T E AM C O NT IN UED
Cardinale—ex-Goldman, his hair pushed back,
his suits tailored—cannot help but bring some
trading-room-floor energy with him wherever
he goes. Milan’s traditionally blue-collar fan
base seemed to have taken to him, though,
at least this far in his reign, perhaps because
the team has practically never lost when he’s
flown in to watch. Il talismano, Cardinale’s
Italian bodyguard calls him.
Blasting coffee from a silver pot, he
returned to the subject of ownership and
said, “Will Bezos buy an NFL team? Probably.
He could buy the whole league if he wanted
to…. If it’s not gonna be the Silicon Valley
guys,” Cardinale continued. “The next rung
down in terms of their ability to pay are the
hedge fund guys, the private-equity guys.”
Gerry’s guys. “It’s my world,” Cardinale
agreed, “the finance-investing-Wall-Street
crowd.” If Bezos represented one type of
kaiju on the horizon, stomping toward pro
sports with his giant checkbook, Cardinale
represented another. When I asked about the
risks that private equity posed, Cardinale, to
his credit, gave a blisteringly candid answer.
First, he eyed a waiter and tapped the coffee
pot, wanting more. “It’s the right question
to ask,” he said. “It’s not gonna stop. Once
capitalism gets involved, there is no moder-
ating it. We are going into corporatized own-
ership. It’s an arms race. And it’s just gonna
keep going. Capitalism will find its way into
the cracks.”
The coffee took a minute to arrive. Waiting,
I told Cardinale about an Airbnb I was renting
on the other side of the city. The apartment
was owned by a man named Alfredo who
had a shelf of DVDs, 53 discs, all devoted to
AC Milan goals. He had kept copies of a local
newspaper, La Gazzetta dello Sport, to remind
him of recent championships his team had
won. Cardinale winced at the bit about the
newspapers. “It stresses me out, to be honest
with you,” he said of the strange burden of
ownership. “In a way that I’ve never experi-
enced before.”
I asked Cardinale to explain. As an investor,
he said, he had done well so far by avoiding
emotional attachments. “My thing was always
to look at sports as any other industry. You
could be manufacturing widgets in Omaha or
you could be owning the Giants in New York
City. It should be the same.” Detachment like
this had made him rich. Anxious, but rich. “It’s
stressful to own things in general, it’s stressful
to put this kind of money to work, it’s stressful
to be a fiduciary for third-party capital. I now
have a new level of stress I’ve not experienced
before,” Cardinale said, “which is Alfredo.” The
coffee came and he drank quite a lot of it. “It
bothers me,” he muttered.
I thought of Leonsis then and a moment
we shared at the hockey game in Washington
a few weeks earlier. Toward the end of that
game, Ovechkin—Leonsis’s favorite—got a
goal that broke a long scoring drought. The
arena erupted. Everybody leapt to their feet,
delighted. Leonsis stayed seated, only sinking
back a little with a look on his face that I rec-
ognized as one of infinite parental relief. Later,
when I asked Mark Cuban why he had owned
only one team, he answered, “I don’t have the
emotional capital available to own more.” As
a fan myself, a sappy, swear-y, bitter, boastful,
blissed-out one, with DVDs and discoloring
newspapers of my own, I know that emotions
take deep, deep root in pro sports. It was a
surprise to learn just how much those same
emotions colored or clouded the experience
up the tree at ownership height. Anybody can
look lofty and implacable perched in a sky box.
They do squirm up there, though.
Cardinale, who told me he wasn’t a sports
obsessive, had been caught off guard by this.
He’d come into ownership with ideas about
disruption and incremental advantage. Now,
looking ahead to the night’s big game, he just
really wanted to beat the other team. PSG is
funded by apparently limitless riches, and as if
to emphasize the gap in resources, the Qatari
ownership had recently been able to lure
away one of Milan’s best players, their beloved
young goalkeeper, Gianluigi Donnarumma, by
offering him better wages. Cardinale told me
he was first tempted to invest in this foreign
league “because there were no ownership
restrictions…sovereign governments, oli-
garchs, wealthy individuals can all buy teams.”
The reality of a scarcely regulated sporting
arms race, though, was harder to accept than
the theory. PSG had thrashed Milan the last
time they played, in part thanks to the Qatar-
backed team’s ability to field one of the world’s
most expensive players, Kylian Mbappé. “All
very instructive data points for the NFL and
the NBA and the MLB,” said Cardinale, allud-
ing to the salary caps and luxury taxes that
create at least a semblance of payroll parity
among the teams in American leagues. “They
can see the pros and the cons of a complete
Wild West.”
He conferred with a looming aide, then said
to me, abruptly, “Meet us here at 7 p.m.” It was
an invitation to experience the game through
Cardinale’s eyes.
Later, we rode out for San Siro from his
hotel in an SUV. Whenever the car encoun-
tered traffic, police, or any sort of obstruc-
tion, Cardinale’s bodyguard buzzed down the
window and shouted that he had “il propri-
etario del Milan” in the back seat. Seas parted.
Underground, in a parking lot, Cardinale
shook the first of about 100 offered hands.
“Stay close. This will be chaotic,” he said. Three
hours of glittery, veneered, ear-shredding
chaos did indeed follow. Selfies in the bar. Bear
hugs at pitchside. At one point a famous Oasis
song boomed around the stadium. It felt in
keeping with the night’s surreal intensity that
Oasis’s lead guitarist, Noel Gallagher, should
have been invited along to watch with us.
Down a crammed gangway, Cardinale col-
lided with David Beckham, who’d come to
see the game too. Another retired galáctico,
Thierry Henry, was there. Wrapped in winter
coats, serene and smiling, the two ex super-
stars wore their retirement well, beautifully
even. Beckham, in particular, brought with
him down the gangway the aura of an intense
fame that had just recently been renewed by
a namesake docuseries on Netflix. Beckham
embraced Cardinale. Henry did too. As
locker room met trading room, onlookers
raised smartphones to capture the interest-
ing moment. We all found our seats, seconds
before kickoff.
PSG scored early. Milan equalized almost
right away. Behind one of the goals, die-hards
lit flares. They tortured their former goal-
keeper, Donnarumma, pelting him with
objects and later, in a breathtaking choreo-
graphed protest, hurling thousands of fake
banknotes to shower him in contempt. When
Milan scored to win the game, Cardinale was
almost dragged off his feet in the tumult. A
picture of him, roaring, would appear in the
following day’s Gazzetta. He was out of his
seat as soon as the whistle blew, down to the
car park so quickly that his bodyguard had
to come back in the elevator to fetch me. He
gunned the SUV back to the hotel, il propri-
etario, il talismano!
In the back seat, cooling off, Cardinale
made some soft-voiced business calls to New
York. He spoke to his daughter, a high school
student, who hadn’t made one of her school
varsity teams this year. Cardinale had been
sending her videos of interviews with suc-
cessful athletes, clipped life lessons about not
giving up too easily. His own dad used to do
something similar, Cardinale had told me ear-
lier, “cutting out articles from the sports pages
and leaving them next to my cereal.” He did it,
Cardinale explained, because “sport captures
in a two- to four-hour time span the whole
human spirit.”
Were guys like him, the Wall Street inves-
tors, going to be responsible stewards of this
captured human spirit? Were nation states?
Even Cardinale couldn’t be sure. “If all of our
sports teams end up owned by companies,”
he had asked, rhetorically, “whether finan-
cial institutions or governments, then what
happens?” He could only answer by posing
another question: “Big business. The human
element. How do these things not rip each
other apart?”
TOM LAMONT , a frequent contributor to GQ ,
is based in London. His debut novel, ‘Going
Home,’ will be published next year by Knopf.
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F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4 G Q . C O M 8 7
 FINAL SHOT

Sprout, artist Anna

Weyant’s Cavalier
King Charles spaniel, at
home. For our story on
Weyant, see page 50.

8 8 G Q . C O M F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 4 P H O T O G R A P H B Y R O E E T H R I D G E
24/7 FRESHNESS*
PITS to TOES
AND DOWN BELOW