Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

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Living (2022)

Sutherland: When a girl like that steals 

your hat, always cheaper to buy a new one.

A happy 45th birthday to the great Tom Burke today! I didn't realize he's been acting for almost thirty years now but it does make sense now that I realize the first thing I ever saw him in was the sleazy Aughts thriller Donkey Punch in 2005 with my beloved Julian Morris -- and repeatedly at that because he's the guy who has the threesome with Julian and a girl and there is a lot, and I mean a lot, of homoerotic tension between the two guys in that scene. 

Needless to say I have seen that one scene more than I've seen any movie on Sight & Sound's Greatest Films list haha. I never really put that together with Burke when he started showing up in classier fare though -- in 2013 there was N.W. Refn's Only God Forgives and then it wasn't until Johanna Hogg's The Souvenir in 2019 that he really grabbed me again. (What a performance that is though.) 

After that I knew who he was proper, so when he popped up in Miller's Furiosa, Soderbergh's Black Bag, and my beloved Oliver Hermanus joint Living as quoted up top -- and I'd say the sequence between him and Bill Nighy is probably the film's peak -- I was always excited to see him. Anyway I think he's become one of our finest actors and I wouldn't be surprised to see him be an awards-magnet for a role in the next few years. Big fan! 

What's your favorite Tom Burke performance?