Let me be perfectly clear: Broadway has a new Sexiest Man Alive, and his name is Mark Strong. Forget Hollywood’s pretty boys. Forget the Marvel gym rats. Forget every actor who’s ever smoldered on a poster. Strong walks onto the Studio 54 stage in Robert Icke’s electric, modernized Oedipus, opens his mouth, raises an eyebrow, and the entire audience melts into its seat like it just got caught staring at the sun.
And Lesley Manville? She meets him beat for beat — but more on her in a moment, because we must begin with the man who is about to inspire a cult following.
Icke’s Oedipus isn’t a tragedy so much as a political thriller dipped in gasoline, lit at both ends, and left to burn in real time. Sophocles becomes CNN by way of HBO, election night becomes Judgment Day, and from the first second, dread leaks into the room like smoke from the walls. The whole thing plays out in a campaign headquarters that looks temporary, bland, and already half-evacuated — a perfect metaphor for a man whose life is about to be stripped down to the studs.
When this version opens, Oedipus isn’t a king. He’s a progressive, polished candidate on the brink of a landslide victory. And in Mark Strong’s hands, he’s the kind of politician who could get elected on looks alone. The man radiates confidence. He has that lethal combination of intelligence, danger, and sex appeal that makes you understand immediately how someone this compelling could lead a country — even as he hides a secret that could take it all down in flames.
When he jokes to his supporters, “Perhaps the country needs a father,” women, men, and every heart within fifty feet of Studio 54 start drafting love letters. He is presidential, charismatic, devastatingly handsome — his presence so commanding that you don’t just watch him; you surrender to him.
But the brilliance of Strong’s performance isn’t just the swagger. It’s the destruction. It’s watching that steady, seductive confidence collapse piece by piece, vein by vein, breath by breath, as the truth claws its way into the room. When the revelations hit — the parentage, the murder, the marriage — Strong doesn’t just act it. He suffers it. You see the knowledge rip him apart from the inside. He becomes a man onstage whose skin barely contains the truth poisoning him. It is stunning, terrifying, magnetic. You want to look away. You can’t.
And then there’s Lesley Manville, who gives a performance so extraordinary it almost rewrites the entire myth. She doesn’t play Jocasta as the tragic accessory she exists as on the page. She plays her as a political wife forged from charm, wit, ambition, and denial so deep it’s practically religious. She adores her husband, protects him, defends him — and when the truth comes groaning up from the deep, Manville shows every crack of a woman whose soul is being peeled open. Her denial is a shield, and watching that shield shatter is the real heartbreak of the night.
Manville delivers the kind of performance that makes the entire theatre forget to breathe. By the end, as truth and horror converge, she is a woman unraveling thread by thread, and the devastation is almost unbearable. Icke makes Jocasta the emotional center of the play — a brilliant shift — and Manville tears into it like an actress who knows she’s holding a role of a lifetime.
The whole production is sleek, merciless, and gripping. Hildegard Bechtler’s set, the digital countdown clock ticking toward doom, the relentless flow of campaign staff and family members, the eerie cult-like presence of Teiresias — it all creates a mood of inevitable catastrophe. You know Oedipus is running out of time long before he does. The suspense is exquisite. The dread is delicious.
And when Strong and Manville collide in the final stretch, it’s volcanic. Sexy. Horrifying. Human. Both actors play the truth like a death blow. You feel the tragedy in your gut.
Icke has crafted a modern masterpiece — a two-hour political pressure cooker that becomes a character assassination of the self. It’s thrilling. It’s vicious. It’s unforgettable. But at the center of it all is Mark Strong: commanding, tortured, impossibly magnetic, and now officially the sexiest man on Broadway.
Run — don’t walk — to Studio 54. This is not just theatre.
This is theatre with teeth.
This is theatre that bites, seduces, destroys, and leaves you begging for more.
Mark Strong wins Best Actor
Rob Shuter is a celebrity journalist, talk-show host, and former publicist who has represented an A-list roster including Jennifer Lopez, Alicia Keys, Kate Spade, Diddy, Jon Bon Jovi, Tyra Banks, Naomi Campbell, Jessica Simpson, and HRH Princess Michael of Kent.
He is the author of The 4 Word Answer, a bestselling self-help book that blends Hollywood insight with deeply personal breakthroughs. Rob hosts Naughty But Nice with Rob, a Top-20 iTunes entertainment podcast, and previously served as the only dedicated entertainment columnist at The Huffington Post. A veteran of television, magazines, and red-carpet crisis management, he also led OK! Magazine during its most competitive era.
Rob’s latest exclusives and insider reporting can be found at robshuter.substack.com.
His forthcoming novel, It Started With A Whisper, is now available for pre-order