On Wednesday, it briefly felt as if we’d all slipped through a portal to the ’00s. Everyone online was buzzing about Mean Girls and Patrick Dempsey, People magazine’s newly crowned Sexiest Man Alive. The high school comedy is being rebooted as a musical and its trailer had gone up, so that explains that, but People’s choice was harder to rationalize. No one seems to dispute that Patrick Dempsey is a sexy man, but since his selection as Sexiest Man Alive had no 2023 rhyme or reason to it, it gave the odd impression that it might have been the result of a very specific time warp. After all, there was a time, a very clear time, when Patrick Dempsey would have been a killer pick for Sexiest Man Alive. But that time is not, and please understand I’m speaking purely chronologically here, the present.
People’s Sexiest Man Alive franchise has been in the business of choosing era-defining hunks since 1985, and for much of that history, it took this responsibility seriously. Who can argue with its choices of Tom Cruise in 1990, George Clooney in 1997, and Jude Law in 2004? It nailed all those. For the past decade or so, though, the picks have gone a bit screwy. In looking for the sexiest man, the magazine has a few times now failed to find someone who met the sexiness criteria whatsoever—the less said about its 2017 pick, Blake Shelton, the better. But more often, recent picks have read as off, time-wise. We all love Idris Elba, but I think we can agree 2018 was not the year of peak Idris.
Dempsey got famous in the late ’80s thanks to teen comedies like Can’t Buy Me Love, but with him more than most stars, his shall we say imperial phase is very easy to identify: It was during the first few seasons of Grey’s Anatomy, when his role as Dr. Derek Shepherd made him one of the most lusted-after men on TV. He even had an in-show nickname to prove it: They called him McDreamy, and reader, he was.
He’s acted in a few things since, but none have had quite the same cultural impact. He has a few projects coming up—Ferrari, in which he plays a race car driver, a nice mirror to his real-life hobby, and the horror movie Thanksgiving—but it feels like a strange choice to name him Sexiest Man Alive before we see how big either of them might be. It probably helped his chances that prior to the People issue’s release, many actors weren’t promoting movies because of the SAG strike, which Ferrari was granted an exemption for. Factor in Dempsey’s graying hair too, which might newly be considered an asset in this season of The Golden Bachelor. He looks great—maybe he’s even poised for a big year ahead—but it’s still curious to consider him now beside his 2006 self: One is undeniably sexy; the other was so much so that many women (and men) would have followed him to war, to the ends of the earth, into a cult. It may not have lasted, but boy was it potent.
Is it possible that People decided to give Dempsey a kind of lifetime achievement award this year? To correct the injustice of passing him up at his actual sexiest? The Oscars sometimes do this—when Leonardo DiCaprio won for The Revenant, was it really for The Revenant, or was it because it was generally felt that he was owed a statue? Rather than a Pulitzer for flash-in-the-pan sexiness, perhaps People is embracing more of a Nobel model, giving Dempsey an award for a long career of sexiness. The clearest previous example of this may be 2015 Sexiest Man Alive David Beckham. Anyone who watched the recent Beckham documentary can attest that Beckham’s sexiest years were in the ’90s and ’00s, but if that sexiness wasn’t awarded contemporaneously, it was only right of People to rectify its mistake. It’s less pronounced with actors like the aforementioned Elba, who, unlike a professional athlete, hasn’t retired, but I think the past five years of picks prove that People has slowly transformed Sexiest Man Alive into more of a capstone achievement. With the past three winners—Michael B. Jordan in 2020, Paul Rudd in 2021, and Chris Evans in 2022—none won during especially sexy or breakout years for them. You might say the franchise, at almost 40 years old, is finally reckoning with the alive part of its title, at times going out of its way to celebrate slightly older stars while it still can.
Patrick Dempsey as Sexiest Man Alive in 2023 doesn’t make the most sense, but in the long arc of sexy history, it would’ve been wrong to leave him out. With his coronation, I can’t help but feel that a sexiness ledger somewhere in the universe has now been righted. Dr. McDreamy, you have secured your place in history.
