The Times profiles Kellan Lutz today, the beefy actor with a part in the Twilight movies and a relatively new gig as the lead Calvin Klein underwear model. Lutz is, as the Times puts it, a disciple of “the School of Marky Mark†— which is to say, an up-and-comer hoping that the Calvin Klein campaign can do for his career what it did for Mark Wahlberg’s. Prior to his Klein campaign, Wahlberg was a slightly grittier Vanilla Ice who hung around with a “funky bunch,†but he parlayed the attention into the beginnings of what became a very successful film career. (His ad debuted in 1992: His first acting part came in 1993.) Lutz, of course, would like to follow in his footsteps: “I could only hope and pray that I could have a career like Mark Wahlberg,†he told the Times. But we’re not convinced. If Lutz were really asking himself, “What Would Marky Mark Do?†we’re pretty sure Marky’s answer would not be, “Yes, totally, at the beginning of your career, try to get fired from the only acting job of any note you’ve ever had.â€
As reported earlier this week, Lutz, along with his Twilight co-star Ashley Greene, has not yet signed a Twilight contract, asking for $4 million dollars for each of the last two films. It should be noted that Lutz’s part, as Robert Pattinson’s older vampire brother Emmett, requires, mostly, that the actor playing it be ripped and know how to growl protectively. Lutz may be more ripped than most (apparently for the Klein campaign he worked on thickening up his “chicken legsâ€), but, certainly, there exists in the greater–Los Angeles area some ripped actor who would appear in the Twilight movies for … free? Does free seem like too much? Lutz and Greene, reportedly, would be willing to settle for $1 million each, which may be a reasonable sum given the profitability of the franchise, but is still a risky demand, given that Twilight’s producers have already demonstrated a willingness to recast, having done so to bring on Bryce Dallas Howard.
Perhaps Lutz doesn’t much care about this whole Twilight thing because he has three films in production, “including a romantic comedy with Mandy Moore and a gladiator movie with Samuel L. Jackson,†and, more important, a pants-dropping ad campaign that is totally making him famous. (“I won’t lie about it,†he tells the Times, “I started getting text messages and calls from producers, and when I went into meetings for scripts, people were always commenting on the billboard and asking for pictures for their daughters.â€) Still, this does not seem like a Marky Mark move. Wahlberg started by taking small supporting parts (in movies like Renaissance Man and The Basketball Diaries) and used them to prove he was talented, before demanding obscene amounts of money, which seems like the right order in which to do things. Study up, Lutz.
Stretching a Six-Pack [NYT]