Let’s get this out of the way: Russell Tovey is not playing around. The British actor, longtime heartthrob, and gay icon-in-motion has emerged from the gym, the gallery, and perhaps the gay gods’ private sauna to give us his most visceral work yet — in turquoise leather pants, no less.
Tovey’s new spread for AnOther Magazine China, shot by the evocative Jumbo Tsui, is a smoldering visual buffet where beefcake meets brainwave. In a photo that could cause minor fainting spells across certain corners of gay Instagram, the Juice star flexes those massive arms with an air of rugged disinterest, wearing a sleeveless flannel and the aforementioned turquoise leather pants. Let’s be honest: if the gay agenda had a flag, this might now be it.
Then there’s the gymwear shot: Tovey in sculpted black, grey, and white gear, caught mid-stretch like your hottest fantasy of that one guy at Barry’s Bootcamp who never makes eye contact but definitely knows what he’s doing. The man is limber. And if that weren’t enough, we get a black-and-white image of Tovey displaying his push-up prowess—because apparently the world needed further proof that Russell Tovey contains multitudes, all of them jacked.
But don’t be fooled into thinking this is all surface-level thirst bait (even if our comment history might suggest otherwise). The shoot accompanies a piece titled The Beast of Imagination, a concept-heavy dive into the actor’s psyche that includes a haunting, art house-inspired video. The visuals pair brawn with vulnerability, silence with soul. As the magazine put it on Instagram:
“How hard is it to truly listen? We strain to hear through other senses—to see sound, to smell it—even when the loudest cries are silent, waiting only for an open ear. Russell Tovey’s silent scream—will you hear it?”
Listen, we’re hearing it. We’re hearing it loudly.
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EMBED: https://www.instagram.com/anothermanchina/reel/DIS0Eo1sLxP/
And if you’re thinking this is just Tovey leaning into a visual glow-up, think again. His AnOther Man China feature drops mere months after his haunting turn in Plainclothes, a powerful LGBTQIA+ drama that premiered at Sundance. Set in 1990s New York, the Carmen Emmi-directed film casts Tovey as Andrew, the unexpected object of desire for an undercover cop sent to entrap gay men in sting operations. The story is tense, raw, and deeply resonant—Tovey giving us romance, resistance, and ripped emotional complexity in one film.
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From Looking to Years and Years, and now to leather-pants-and-performance-art territory, Russell Tovey continues to do what many actors dream of: evolve. And maybe flex his biceps a little while doing it.
So here we are—caught between a scream and a stretch, a push-up and a poetic line. And we’re absolutely living for it.