Simon Baker vs. Scott Speedman
Battle of the Squinty Blond Space-Fillers

It can be a very tricky proposition to cast the male love interest in a female-centric...er, movie with a strong woman lead that...fuck it: chick flick. If your leading lady is the movie's main focus and not just the male action hero's nearest set of orifices, an actor of any stature is going to balk at playing what amounts to her sidekick. Rare is the romantic comedy that stars a man and a woman who really are co-leads: sure, there are Mr. And Mrs. Smith and Two Weeks Notice and How To Lose A Guy In Ten Days and The Break-Up, but those are the exceptions. Normally, you're looking at Julia Roberts opposite a Dermot Mulroney (My Best Friend's Wedding), or Drew Barrymore opposite a Steve Zahn (Riding In Cars With Boys), or Lindsay Lohan opposite...some kid whose name we've already forgotten and she probably never learned.

If you were looking to create some kind of mathematical formula for how to find a male lead for your chick flick, try this: whatever list she's on, he should be at least one list down. If you start with Nicole Kidman (A-list) in the lead, then her male co-star can't be rated any higher than a B. In the case of The Stepford Wives, producers decided to play it safe and cast from the C-list, conveniently finding Matthew Broderick quite able to tap into reserves of frustration and sublimated hostility to play the dull husband of a glamorously successful woman. If you start with Ashley Judd (let's be kind and say B-list)...well, you can get Hugh Jackman if you're making a movie for release in 2001 (Someone Like You...). Nowadays, his people probably aren't even taking her people's calls. If you start with a marginal B-lister like Anne Hathaway (bumped up from C via Brokeback Mountain), her swain can't be very much more famous than the likes of Simon Baker. And if he'd been busy, Scott Speedman probably would have done just as well, or better.

We know: officially, Adrian Grenier was Hathaway's love interest in The Devil Wears Prada, and Simon Baker just a bit of all right on the side. His job was to show up at opportune moments, looking artfully dishevelled, appeal to Hathaway's Andy on a professional level, and eventually seduce her. (Presumably, the script didn't dictate that he have no eyebrows or, when shirtless, have a weird, Ferrellian fat pleat just under his boob, though both those things also occurred. Unfortunately.) None of that makes Baker's Christian sound like the sort of role that had everyone from Max Beesley to Norman Reedus clamouring for meetings with director David Frankel. And it's not. For any sub-B-list actor, just getting to have some of Meryl Streep's pancake maybe blow off her and onto you at the coffee cart would be an honour and a boost, and Prada should be both those things for Baker, but if history is any indicator, he'll find a way not to parlay it into anything, really. He made an Ang Lee movie...but it was Ride With The Devil, remembered (if it ever is) as the one with Jewel. He tried an action movie...but it was Red Planet, and therefore will end up in the dumpster with everything Val Kilmer's done since Top Secret!. He started in an American remake of a J-horror pic...but it was The Ring Two -- the one that was too Japanese and totally made no sense. He made a postmodern, twenty-first-century zombie movie...but it was Land Of The Dead, the one without a mall. Prada, Streep or no, is just another bleh role in a bleh project (a) that he probably doesn't give a shit about, and (b) for which he probably wasn't even anyone's first choice.

It's not like we're saying Speedman has quite set the world on fire since Felicity either, but at least there was a Felicity for him to, as far as we are concerned, dine out on for the rest of his life; Speedman's Ben was a complex, believable character, but that aside, even watching the reruns now, this commentator may have to make sure her husband isn't about to cross in or out of the room because every time he smiles -- not that often, sadly -- I goofily can't help smiling back. The boy was cute. And still is, even if I can't bring myself to watch any of the movies he's made since (pre-Felicity) Kitchen Party. Comparing Baker and Speedman side by side, they are the same -- only, objectively speaking, Speedman is doing worse, because he keeps making the same mistakes over and over again. In fact, Speedman? Could you join me over here in Camera 3?

Speedy. Honey. Once you've made Dark Blue, you don't have to make any more gritty cop dramas, particularly not ones that go straight to tape and co-star film's favourite cuckold, James Marsden. You don't ever have to get involved with anything that has XXX in the title, no matter how many of your friends tell you it's cool: even if it's not porn, it's still dirty in other ways. And while I understand that Kate Beckinsale is a B-lister, which is why you were qualified to play werewolf (?) to her vampire (right?) in Underworld and its sequel, you should still quit it. You're not meant for all these tough-guy parts. You're soft, and wounded, like a TV-sized James Dean, but not as good an actor. You shouldn't be punching villains. You should just be punching walls in mute frustration that the one girl who ever understood you won't return your calls because you flaked on your date and she's sick of your soft woundedness. And then maybe you go back to your one-room tenement apartment and pet your kitten and cry. Look, I haven't worked out all the details. The point is, that should have been you dicking over Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada (even if I wouldn't have completely believed you as a dick), because then you might get on the path toward a nice love story where you and Rachel McAdams are engaged and it's cute and everyone's happy until she meets some other guy she likes better but everyone in the audience gets a little mad at her and feels sorry for you. She'd still be on the A-list, and you still probably wouldn't, at least at first, but that's how it was for Patrick Dempsey in Sweet Home Alabama, and look at him now!

Advantage: Speeeeeedeeeeeeeeeeeeee.