FASHION Magazine

Acts of devotion: Michael Shannon is seriously dedicated to the art of acting.
By Jason Anderson | Photographed by Seiji Fujimori

There’s something in Michael Shannon’s eyes that puts people on edge. Klaus Kinski had it. Christopher Walken has it, too. There’s a wildness there, a quality we’re quick to associate with madness. But that association is limiting, even if it’s true that these actors excel at playing men who’ve come unhinged, like the troubled neighbour in Revolutionary Road, a role that earned Shannon his first Oscar nomination, or Nelson Van Alden, the principled but ever more compromised lawman he plays on HBO’s Prohibition-era mob drama Boardwalk Empire.

The look is suggestive of deep-seated emotion that cannot be controlled or concealed, no matter how hard we try to keep it from the surface. If the eyes are really any kind of window to the soul, this is the force that threatens to shatter the glass. Yet that force has served the 38-year-old actor well, becoming a feature as distinguishing as his six-foot-three frame, his youthful face and a voice that would’ve suited a fire-and-brimstone Southern preacher.

It must be that everyman sees himself in James Bond. That’s what happened to me in the course of researching the subject, which arose by way of Designing 007: Fifty Years of Bond Style, the exhibition coming from the Barbican Centre in London to the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto in October.

The more I looked into Bond, the more I saw the secret agent as magnificent lifestyle editor, a material boy engaged with all the things—cars, drink, food, travel, toys—that are covered in a men’s magazine. And so caught up with appearances that, as author Jay McInerney once observed, he was “the only movie hero we had ever seen whose first impulse, after killing a man, was to straighten his tie.”

Of course, Bond came to film from fiction already infatuated with brand names. That was part of the character given to him by his creator, Ian Fleming, who in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service not only specifies Bond’s champagne but also what he uses to wash his hair: Pinaud Elixir, “that prince among shampoos.”

Word: Provocateuse

Meaning: A female provocateur. What’s a provocateur? Oh, come on. It’s someone who provokes, who engenders controversy for controversy’s sake.

Usage: “Carine Roitfeld: Agent Provocateuse.” — Style.com