Individually, they have rare, distinctive talents, and shine when casting directors understand what these are. Putting them in absolutely everything is a risky strategy, though – there’s nothing like finding yourself overexposed and simultaneously stuck in the wrong part to reduce excitement about what you’re doing next. “It Boy” shouldn’t mean “he’ll do”, or the shine comes off.

When the Beatles films come out, it’s going to pit several of these guys against each other in a fittingly competitive way. Will McCartney emerge with more depth than Lennon? Will Ringo, ironically, be the MVP? Will the boys who didn’t get cast hatch a breakaway Rolling Stones project?

It must be tough out there being an unknown right now – with this lot hoovering up all the parts, those jobs waiting tables may never end. There are only so many GQ covers to go around, after all: good luck reserving a spot. But who are these men, and where will you see them next?

Paul Mescal

Mescal, 28, is Ireland’s most talented export since Saoirse Ronan – or at least could certainly fight Barry Keoghan (below) for that accolade. He leapt to fame with a Bafta-winning performance as the walled-off Connell Waldron in Normal People – one heck of a role, over 12 episodes, packing in daring nudity and an emotionally challenging take on inarticulate love.

His blue-eyed, boy-next-door quality makes him endearing and approachable: he’s the one on this list you’d probably most want a pint with, and he was quickly a fan favourite to step in as McCartney.

Mescal’s apprenticeship in films involved stepping to one side: learning from such experienced lead actors as Olivia Colman (in The Lost Daughter), Emily Watson (God’s Creatures) and Andrew Scott (All of Us Strangers). Even in Charlotte Wells’ superb Aftersun, for which he scored a Best Actor Oscar nomination aged 27, he inhabits a broken young father in glimpses, more often hiding than revealing himself.

Gladiator II pushed him forward, but into a role too thinly conceived. Almost every review, even approving ones, felt Lucius wasn’t the substitute for Russell Crowe’s Maximus that the script needed him to be. Bagging that role was a trade-off – the box office may have wildly increased Mescal’s name recognition around the world, but the film simply didn’t afford him the killer acting opportunities one might have hoped.

Luckily, he has three forthcoming projects with huge potential: Living director Oliver Hermanus has wrapped with him on a gay romance called The History of Sound, alongside Josh O’Connor; he’s playing a grieving Shakespeare in Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet; and he’s shot the first sections of Richard Linklater’s Merrily We Roll Along, a screen version of the Stephen Sondheim musical which will be filmed, Boyhood-style, over a span of 20 years. If Mescal-mania ever dims between now and then, a dazzling revival around the 2040 mark is eminently possible.

Jacob Elordi

Jacob Elordi is very tall – 6 ft 5in – which the Australian actor thought might cause him real trouble starting out: he used to pretend he was a few inches shorter to get casting calls.

Now that he’s established, the 28-year-old’s secret weapon quality as an actor is clear. You deploy him to stand out from the herd. If he enters a room, heads turn. He’s classically handsome, with a savage eyebrow game and an interesting, angular face that asserts authority and charm, but can cloud over in the blink of an eye.

Mastering an American accent was the first key to Elordi’s success: he became a dab hand at playing bad-boy jocks, as in Kissing Booth on Netflix and Euphoria on HBO. “Girls go crazy around him,” reasoned Sofia Coppola when she cast him as Elvis, in her 2023 biopic Priscilla – a film he easily stole.

The same year, he was also the best thing in Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, stretching his range as Felix, the entitled British aristocrat who treats people as his playthings. He assumed the role with a perfect blend of lazy wit and lethargy, seeming absolutely to the manor born. Fennell has since cast him as Heathcliff in her 2026 update of Wuthering Heights, but before then he’ll appear as the lead in Justin Kurzel’s TV adaptation of Richard Flanagan’s harrowing Second World War novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

Elordi is drawn to darkness, clearly: someone is bound to use him as Dracula one day. For now, we’ll have to make do with him as Frankenstein’s monster, in Guillermo Del Toro’s new version for Netflix, an enticing prospect for next year. The lurching stature is right there for the taking, and his ability to give off a dazed effect, after so much intoxication on screen, is already a forte.

Andrew Garfield, who had to quit that role because of scheduling conflicts, has been gracious enough to admit that it might be rather serendipitous that it fell into Elordi’s lap. If he drives the fangirls wild even as Mary Shelley’s agglomeration of dead body parts, he’ll be doing the horror genre a freaky service.

Harris Dickinson

Harris Dickinson, 28, first made an impression in gay roles – the likes of Beach Rats (2017) and Postcards from London (2018) – and was absolutely convincing, even if he’s subsequently been more or less outed as straight. He nailed a Brooklyn accent, too, in the former of those – not bad for a 20-year-old from Leytonstone in his film debut.

A certain Caravaggio quality makes him ideally cast as models or rent boys – he has played both, with varying streaks of damage/exploitation below the surface. But if you need proof of his versatility, and also comic chops, his impression of Dickie Attenborough in See How They Run (2022) is an absolute peach – hilarious and affectionate at the same time, which was exactly what that featherlight theatreland caper called for.

The major international breakthrough was in the same year’s Triangle of Sadness, which afforded Dickinson double the screen time of any other actor, and gave rise to memes – including the “grumpy brand”, “smiling brand” dichotomy for model poses. Launching the film vigorously with that aggrieved restaurant tête-à-tête about having to pay every damn time, he was equally terrific whether lounging complacently on the superyacht or being pressed into service, in the final act, as a sex slave.

That’s to say, he can do toughness and vulnerability simultaneously, and with cracking assurance. His fanbase are due to go into meltdown with the imminent release of Babygirl, the much-hyped erotic thriller embroiling him in a steamy workplace liaison with Nicole Kidman’s high-flying CEO. From that, to John Lennon? Maybe the hardest challenge of the four, but it’s time we saw a firebrand side of Dickinson, and if he can find the prickliness, he’ll nail it.

Barry Keoghan

Keoghan, 32, has been knocking about, often causing lairy trouble, for rather longer than his peers. He had significant roles in ‘71 (2014) and Dunkirk (2017), and was impossible to ignore as a blank, baby-faced psychopath, terrorising Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman, in The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017). We didn’t feel safe with him at any point on screen; we never do. He’s the wild card, the gimlet-eyed joker in the pack.

For this reason, the Dublin-born star is closer to being a character actor than a conventional lead. He keeps tabs at all times on the best scripts set in Ireland that come down the pike. He was ideally suited to playing a bleached-blond wastrel sidekick in Nick Rowland’s ace crime drama Calm with Horses (2019) and has ventured back to similar (perhaps overfamiliar) terrain with the farming thriller Bring Themeffect Down, due out in February.

What nudged him up to a new level of acclaim was The Banshees of Inisherin (2022), for which he got every supporting actor nomination going, and won a clutch, including the Bafta. The stellar technique was right there on show – especially in the scene where he sidles up to Kerry Condon and awkwardly proposes by the lake (“there goes that dream”). The role of this harmless fool had Keoghan playing younger – which he still often does – and naïve, which he’s arguably past doing: watching an unknown seize that chance could have been even more poignant.

Instead of playing the giggling, depraved Caracalla in Gladiator II, he ducked out to take the lead in Saltburn, a tricky assignment, sleeper hit, and the real step forward. He made creepy sense of that scheming snake in the grass, and became a meme king with his naked dancing, but still kept a part of the character tucked away. His upcoming slate includes The Weeknd’s directorial debut and a film about the soldier guarding Saddam Hussein in his final days. How he’ll fare as Ringo Starr is a Riddler-sized question mark – gregarious and mysterious? We’ll see.

Austin Butler

Butler’s Elvis was the real deal – gangly, full-throated and possessed by a rowdy inner fire. Baz Lurhmann’s 2022 biopic plucked him from years of teen-drama obscurity to embody that swagger, and he slickly sailed through awards season – indeed, he’d have swiped the Best Actor Oscar that year, if it weren’t that the career-comeback narrative for Brendan Fraser (in the godawful The Whale, unfortunately) were so irresistible.

The problem bedevilling Butler ever since is getting rid of Elvis. Long before Oscar night, everyone started to wonder why the voice hadn’t gone away. It had taken him nearly three years to perfect that Memphis drawl, and he had to hire a vocal coach to unlearn it, which took some while.

Butler’s Marlboro Man effect is strong: he looks good on horses (see his cameo as “Tex” in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) and Harley-Davidsons (see The Bikeriders). Unsurprisingly, he wants to cut against that image now that he’s a star – the smouldering pin-up phase can’t last forever, and at 33, he’s the oldest of this crop.

One step was his almost unrecognisable villainy as Feyd-Rautha in Dune: Part Two, rendered as bald and shiny as the chest-burster alien, and essentially giving a Bill Skarsgård performance – fittingly, since Stellan was playing his father. But the bigger showcase to level up now awaits, since he’s been cast in new films from Darren Aronofsky, Ari Aster and Michael Mann (the long-promised Heat 2, no less). He’ll also be playing Patrick Bateman, in Luca Guadagnino’s new version of American Psycho.

It’ll be quite an ask to eclipse Christian Bale’s 2000 interpretation, and not everyone is convinced a remake is a good idea – remember Guadagnino’s Suspiria (2018)? But Butler in crisp white collars is well worth a try, now that he’s put the rhinestone suits and double denim back in the closet. We’ve seen him do shady, irascible and blood-crazed – now he needs to unleash pure devilry with a smirk and get away with it.

On the bench: Joseph Quinn, 30, and Leo Woodall, 28

Knocking on the door of this club are two more Brits with major promise. Quinn was the emperor who stayed put in Gladiator II, after an apprenticeship running the gamut from the BBC’s Howards End (as an ideal Leonard Bast) to Stranger Things. He makes a transfixing impression every time: his big, welling, terrified eyes were put to brilliant use in A Quiet Place: Day One, when he couldn’t make a sound. Before joining the Fab Four he’ll be seen as Johnny Storm, aka The Human Torch, in Marvel’s Fantastic Four.

Woodall wowed in the second season of The White Lotus as an Essex boy with cheeky charm and mercenary secrets. That character felt uncannily like a real person. He looks like a young Michael Pitt – part rebel, part angel – and knows how to work that, in the likes of the Netflix One Day adaptation. In Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy next year, Renée Zellweger will need to be on guard – he’s got “slippery catch” written all over him.