Brad Johnson vs. Bill Campbell vs. Bill Pullman vs. Jeff Daniels vs. Bill Paxton
Battle of the Generic Gentlemen

In a sense, the clash between Bill Campbell, Bill Pullman, Bill Paxton, Jeff Daniels, and Brad Johnson has been the epochal Two (or, rather, Five) Stars One Slot battle of our time, a kind of celebrity cage match that left none of the combatants unscathed. Rarely has our, or any, generation seen five actors who were so generically similar and so similarly generic all appear at exactly the same time. From the start, it was clear that while each was, at one time, groomed for major leading-man stardom, not all could survive. What resulted is an object lesson in the Darwinian world of niche acting in Hollywood.

All five emerged in the mid- to late eighties. Jeff Daniels was the first to appear on the famedar screen with a starring role in Woody Allen's Purple Rose of Cairo in 1985, followed by a lead part in Jonathan Demme's cult hit Something Wild in 1987. Meanwhile, Bill Paxton was busy stealing the show as Private "We're all fucked, man" Hudson in Aliens (1986), while Bill Pullman was smirking his way through Mel Brooks's 1987 Star Wars spoof, Spaceballs, and croaking out the now-immortal tagline, "Don't bury me...I'm not dead," in 1987's The Serpent and the Rainbow. At the time, Daniels, Paxton, and Pullman all seemed poised for a perch on the A-list ladder -- if not on the the Harrison Ford rung, then a couple of steps below, sharing a step with, say, Jeff Bridges.

Right on their heels, however, came the carved-from-Mount-Hunkstone Brad Johnson. His very first role was in 1989's Spielberg-directed Always, playing a dashing, firefighting pilot. Good looks, a starring role in a Spielberg film, a spot in the 1990 edition of People's 50 Most Beautiful People: Johnson seemed to have "matinee idol" branded on his buttocks. Then, two years later, in 1991, Billy Campbell arrived on the scene, playing a dashing, crime-fighting, rocket-pack-wearing hero in Disney's The Rocketeer. Here was yet another vaguely generic but generally good-looking young actor seemingly primed for a major and imminent elevation in his Hollywood stock.

The problem was that, about this time, America began to scratch its collective head and wonder, Okay, so which Bill is which? And what about the guy from that pilot movie that tanked? Or that spider movie, Arachnawhatchamacallit? Clearly, only one of these actors could persist and thrive, but which one? And whither the rest?

Rather than wrestle with the other contenders, Pullman judiciously stepped out of the ring, apparently deciding, after a brief career hibernation (one word: Newsies), to trade on his generic good looks by taking a series of inspired roles in creepy, non-mainstream films like The Last Seduction and Lost Highway, as well as one no-frills payday in the B-list casting fest known as Independence Day. Rather than become a generic leading man, Pullman became a kind of ironic stand-in for the Generic Leading Man. Similarly, Daniels discovered a hitherto unknown talent for slapstick comedy, and diverted himself into a lucrative niche as the goofball sidekick in Dumb and Dumber, Trial and Error, and My Favorite Martian. As for Campbell, The Rocketeer fizzled, sending his career into a decade-long death spiral from which he only recently recovered by landing the lead in the TV hit Once and Again opposite Sela Ward. And Brad Johnson, for reasons known only to him, disappeared off the face of the earth, spending the better part of the '90s playing Navy SEALs and other assorted camouflage-wearers, surfacing only recently along with Kirk Cameron in the Christian-financed and aptly tilted Left Behind.

So who, of these valiant but interchangeable stars, has emerged victorious, smiling his wonky, gap-toothed smile? Why, it's Bill Paxton who, after years of memorable supporting turns in movies like One False Move and Tombstone and Apollo 13, eventually managed to ascend to the leading-man tier in 1996's Twister. He fortuitously followed this up with a small but pivotal role in Titanic, which cemented his status through Hollywood's strange gilt-by-association rule: if you're anywhere near a movie that makes lots of money, you must, in some small way, have been responsible for that windfall. (See also Goldblum, Jeff.)

Advantage: Paxton, though each is lovable in his own way.