Check out the Nick Stahl gallery

There are few straight actors who’ve played as many gay or sexually confused characters as Nick Stahl. Always up for the challenge, Nick has more tortured souls stashed away in his closet than Big Brother has oversized breasts. Pale, thin and wide-eyed he’s no buffed up hunk, but he’s bohemian and sexy in a way that fans of Nan Goldin's work will appreciate.

The cute, young beauty stars in Robert Rodriguez’s comic book adaptation of Frank Miller’s Sin City as the canary coloured child molester Yellow Bastard, so Totty Watch decided it was time to salute the young maverick.

Name
Nick Stahl

Vitals
Born 5 December 1979 in Texas, USA.

Famous For
Tackling roles most other actors run a mile from.

Nick knew he was destined for bright lights after his mother took him to see a play at the age of four. Eight years later he was befriended by Mel Gibson's disfigured schoolteacher in The Man Without a Face. Based on a novel and directed by Gibson, the film told the story of a deformed recluse who everyone thinks is a child molester. Markedly different from the book, Gibson self-indulges his artistic licence by playing his character straight and falsely judged, as opposed to gay and sexually interested in his young protégé.

2001 was a stellar year for Nick. Straight after playing Sissy Spacek’s murdered son in the award winning In The Bedroom, he joined the cast of The Sleepy Time Gal opposite Jacqueline Bisset.

It was directed by fellow non-conformist Christopher Münch who’s probably best known for his celluloid imaginings of an affair between John Lennon and Brian Epstein in The Hours and Times. Münch was more concerned with regret and death than homosexuality this time around, but still cast Nick as a gay photographer trying to reconnect with his dying mother.

Nick topped off a remarkable year as Bobby Dent in Larry Clark’s Bully – a shocking account of the true story of a group of maladjusted kids who murder their tyrannical friend. Told with Clark’s trademark nihilistic, not to mention voyeuristic flair, Bully is shocking not so much for the actions of its protagonists, but the moral void they all inhabit.

Bobby seems fascinated by gay men, but isn’t openly gay himself. He videotapes men from gay bars, makes porn movies and has relentlessly physically and psychologically abused his best friend Marty since they were little. He forces Marty to strip for money in gay clubs and have phone sex and if he refuses he beats him up.

Nick told The Advocate, “There were a lot of different things going on with these two kids: They’re best friends, they grew up together, and in the actual account in the book, kids who knew them talked about this strange sort of sexual tension – a kind of ambiguous sexuality – to their relationship.”

Clark explains what motivated him to cast Nick as Bobby, “Nick walked in – all introverted and kind of weird and not making a lot of eye contact. He seemed very nervous. He certainly wasn’t the ‘Bobby Kent’ type – this big bully type. But there was something about him. This kid was really interesting. He seemed real.”

Nick went on to play the Artful Dodger in a queer re-telling of Charles Dickens’ classic, Twist. In Jacob Tierney’s doom and gloom-laden version, Nick spends most of the film enticing the innocent Oliver into a world of hustling and heroin with varying degrees of success – porridge doesn’t figure once.

In his latest role, Nick looks more like a wizened lemon than a gorgeous film star as Yellow Bastard in Sin City. The jaundiced tinge is the result of a bodged experiment to reattach the limbs he lost in an average day of slaughter and mayhem in the debauched metropolis. Serves him right too because he’s a paedophile obsessed with the luscious Jessica Alba, who’s fortunately under the protection of the only good cop left on Miller’s planet – Bruce Willis.

Worth Knowing
“I try to avoid the sweet-ass roles,” said Nick, declaring that he doesn’t have the sort of face to compete in the pressurised aesthetic of Hollywood – NOT what you lot were thinking.

He filled Edward Furlong’s boots as John Connor in Terminator 3 and said of Arnold Schwarzenegger, “I had these nightmares that he’d be a vicious anti-smoker and he’d throw me into the gym and scream at me, but he's very nice.”

Availability
Nick’s straight, but there’s not much evidence either way - except that he’s been spotted holding hands with girls. Hopefully it’s just research for his new role as a private investigator in A Cool Breeze on the Underground, which will be filmed in London this year. Among other things Totty Watch will be erecting a tent on the Circle Line.

Give me more
How about some lovely photos?

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Buy Season One of HBO's supernatural drama series Carnivale starring Nick Stahl on DVD now and save some money!