16 min readOH, NO. Did I just call Charles Melton a himbo? We’re an hour into lunch at Millie’s Cafe in Los Angeles and I’ve just remarked that he seems to have found an unusual niche in “complicated himbos.” I’d been thinking of Austin, Melton’s character in the new season of the critically acclaimed anthology series Beef. Austin is a football star turned trainer who, in the show’s early episodes, is swept into the machinations of his fiancée (Cailee Spaeny) after the two witness a damning fight between the manager of the country club where they work (Oscar Isaac) and his wife (Carey Mulligan).
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he agrees reflexively, then balks. “Complicated himbos?” What, he asks, is a himbo?
When I have explained what I mean—muscles, guilelessness, joie de vivre—he emphatically dismisses the term. “He is fighting to be kind, and he’s in service to everyone around him,” he says of Austin. The beauty of Beef, he continues, is in how its creator, Lee Sung Jin, who also goes by Sonny Lee, “leans into the cringe of humanity.” The two discussed the character in long phone calls over weeks, sharing stories from their lives as Austin took shape. And here I’ve reduced him to a tired trope. Sure, Melton adds, “if you see someone who’s a trainer, who played sports, people are going to have their own preconceived notions. But there’s more to a—quote, unquote, like you said—himbo than you know.”
My hands flutter around as I try to backpedal. His voice is pleasant, but with his thumbs and index fingers he’s rolling the ends of his mustache into long points. “Is it because of me, as Charles? Because I have ‘muscles’? Then people assume I’m a himbo?” No, no! I don’t know! Melton lets me off the hook and gently plops me back into still waters. He runs a hand over his mustache, erasing his handiwork like an Etch A Sketch, and guides the conversation back to Austin.
There are obvious similarities between Melton and his character. Both are Korean American, and both are former football players. Lee says that as he was writing the character, he did have his Notes app open whenever he and Melton spent time together, noting his “Charles-isms.” And Melton says he was interested to notice himself drawing from his mother’s mannerisms to play the role. (His mother, who is Korean, voices Austin’s mother in a phone call on the show.) “She has such a great physical comedy. Koreans are like”—his face moves through a montage of human extremes—“they’re very expressive without saying anything. Somehow, unconsciously, I had the freedom to do that.” I had assumed that to some degree Melton was playing himself.
It appears he was, in fact, acting. Melton’s career has simmered since 2017, when he replaced Ross Butler as Reggie on the CW’s Riverdale. In the six years that followed, he delivered excellent performances in a slew of under-the-radar films and series. But then, in 2023, he played Joe in Todd Haynes’s film May December. Julianne Moore plays a tabloid villain named Gracie who sexually abused Joe when he was in middle school and later married him. Natalie Portman plays an actress who arrives to study Gracie, whom she is to play in a biopic. Melton delivered such a layered performance that the tension between the two women, played by two of our era’s best actors, often felt like a backdrop to his own turmoil. Audiences were outraged when he wasn’t nominated for an Oscar.
Portman was also startled by the depth of Melton’s acting. “When we started doing press, I realized how different he was from his character,” she recalls. “I didn’t even realize how charismatic he was when we were working because he was so in character as this insecure, underdeveloped man-child in the film.”
Then came Warfare, a drama about a Navy SEAL platoon, from Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza. The creators required a high degree of immersion, gathering the actors (a small army of Internet boyfriends including Will Poulter, Joseph Quinn, and Kit Connor) for a weeks-long boot camp, which imparted a Band of Brothers closeness on the film.
Now, in Beef, Melton again stands out in a stacked ensemble, without doing anything identifiably attention-grabbing. He’s not a scene stealer; he’s more like the guy in a meeting who doesn’t say anything for 30 minutes but then shifts slightly in his seat, capturing the attention of the whole room. He seems immune to the hype-gathering antics of his peers: disguises and wild physical transformations and bold proclamations of leading-man ambition. Can an artist of subtlety become a movie star? And is that what Melton really wants?
Right now, what Melton wants is to watch his new baby be a baby. Shortly after he takes his seat at Millie’s, he leaps up again to greet a friend, Ramzi, in a Millie’s T-shirt. Ramzi asks after Melton’s partner, filmmaker and photographer Camille Summers-Valli, and their daughter, born two weeks prior. Melton pulls out his phone as swiftly as he might a pistol at a duel. He scrolls through his camera roll as Ramzi exclaims. “You can see the Korean,” Ramzi says, pointing at one photo, and Melton nods with a goofy grin.
“It’s the best thing—the best thing,” Melton says of fatherhood, returning to his chair when Ramzi has gone. He has always wanted children, he says. “But I never knew if that dream was going to happen, because you’ve got to meet the right person. And I did.”
His daughter is doomed to have a cool dad. Melton wears a light-blue jersey from the streetwear brand Martine Rose. He has several piercings on each ear, he wears a sleek Cartier watch, and on his left ring finger he has a band of multicolored gemstones with a big bauble at their center. The ring catches the sun with every gesture he makes.
Some of these gestures are quite large: Twice he stands up from his chair to demonstrate a big movement, causing pedestrians behind him to parry out of the way. As he describes the moves his family made for his father’s military career—“Alaska, Kentucky, Georgia, Tennessee for a year,” followed by Korea for five years, then Texas, then Germany for four years, then Kansas—he cups his hands around each other, changing their places with each location as if making a snowball. When he describes the “anime bangs” he had when his family moved to Texas, he grabs the front of his curls and pulls them down across his forehead until his hair is a straight and shiny sheet.
When he releases it, the hair boings back to its artfully tousled form. “Hair used to be a big part of my identity,” he says. Even when he was at football practice, he would pile on products to the point where a helmet became redundant. “Mousse phase, gel phase, wax phase, pomade phase, hairspray phase.” Now he exercises moderation. He recently went to his hairstylist, Candice Birns, and asked for a “mullet kind of thing.” Birns, he recalls, counterproposed a haircut for the mullet-curious, popularized on TikTok, wherein the lower ends of the hair merely flare out a bit, suggesting a mullet is possible but not desired at this time. Melton loved his “soft mullet” (the t, like the mullet, is soft). He does not man his own social media, so he did not know he had the It haircut until the Golden Globes. “Everybody had a soft mul-ley!”
Melton also badly wants a biscuit—he loves a warm biscuit at Millie’s—but as he’s shooting this cover in a few days, he settles for the Devil’s Mess, a mash of meat and eggs that looks like a protein pancake, and a Pepsi Zero Sugar.
He has managed to find a routine in the weeks since his daughter was born. He attributes this in part to his sports background: He ran track and played baseball, basketball, and football. In a military family ping-ponging to different bases, he says, “sports was the unifying theme that allowed me to assimilate and be identified.” He started playing football in eighth grade, then earned all-state honors two years in high school and played in Kansas’s all-star game in 2009. He could run a 10.9-second 100-meter and a 4.5-second 40-yard dash. “I have the greatest feeling playing the game and I am willing to do anything to play at the next level,” he wrote in his college recruiting profile, noting that he hoped to study marketing and advertising. He was a preferred walk-on at Kansas State University after redshirting his freshman year.
Then he pivoted. “I was driving to football practice when I was 19, and I heard on the radio: Do you want to be a star? Do you want to be an actor or a model? And I was like, Yeah! It was like 120 degrees outside, 4 o’clock in the morning, and I was driving to practice,” he says. “Because of my sister, Patricia, we ended up going to this audition in Salina, Kansas, at this Marriott. And there’s people from all walks of life—ages 2 to 100—and I read this Twizzlers mock audition, and it was the most exciting thing.” He got a callback and went to Orlando, Florida, where he was told he couldn’t act from Kansas; he’d need to move to New York or Los Angeles. For 10 years he had dreamt of playing in the NFL, but high on the exhilaration of his first audition, he decided to leave Kansas State, and football, behind. He got a modeling contract and spent two years traveling for jobs. Many kids who move often learn to chameleon themselves to their surroundings. As a model, Melton became sensitive to the changes he would have to make to be taken seriously in Hollywood—“the nuances that you can’t explain but you can see.”
Those shifts have remained a trademark of his acting. Though grand transformations—obscene bulking for Marvel movies, concerning desiccation for dramas—are standard among actors today, Melton’s transformations target accuracy rather than attention. To play Joe in May December, for instance, he gained 40 pounds. That his character wouldn’t have had time to exercise was obvious to him: Joe first became a father in his early teens and is now, in his mid-30s, the provider for his wife and three children. “What does his time look like?” Melton says. “He loves butterflies. Is he doing pushups and crunches while, like, looking at the chrysalises of the butterflies? No.” The transformation wasn’t newsworthy, à la Christian Bale’s famed weight gains and losses. Melton had merely transformed himself to look like an average dad.
For Beef, he was in trainer shape. Austin, a former Arizona State football player who won the Butkus Award—“the Oscars for the defensive position in college football,” per Melton—is frequently seen in high short-shorts, the teardrop shape made by his quads on full display. The power cleaning, squats, and deadlifts he did to play Austin reminded him of workouts he did in high school and college.
Now he’s settled into his own dad bod, of sorts. At 35, he is increasingly form-focused. “I’m getting older, and you realize you need functional movement, and you need to work on the ligaments and the tiny muscles that hold the other muscles together, right?” he says. At 19 he would power-clean 345 pounds, but now he celebrates when he hits 185 pounds five times. “It’s harder to do it when you’re older because it requires form and focus. If your form isn’t right, you can hurt something.” He has begun working closely with a nutritionist and a physical therapist, too, and says he’s become more attuned to his body. Before his workouts, he does a mental body scan and decides whether he needs to target his core, for instance, or “accessories” like calves, biceps, and triceps.
He trains primarily with Ty Manzo, who was recommended to him by actor Steven Yeun. When he and Manzo started working together, Melton was preparing for Warfare. “Not every Navy SEAL looks like a bodybuilder,” Manzo says. “They actually don’t look like a bodybuilder; it actually hinders them to.” Instead of piling on muscle mass until Melton looked like a caricature of a SEAL, the two focused on running, rucking, and trap bar deadlifts, which build dense muscles, rather than aesthetic bodybuilding muscles. Melton was doing 420-pound deadlifts, but in Warfare he didn’t look like a Schwarzeneggered ’80s movie version of a SEAL; he looked authentic.
In his internal transformations, too, Melton is subtle, using “the nuances that you can’t explain” to erase himself. Where one might think, while watching another actor nail a scene, This is the clip they’re going to play at the Oscars, a viewer is typically too invested in Melton’s characters to consider the quality of his performances.
He tries not to consider his performances either. Halfway through his meat pancake, we talk about Audition, a novel by Katie Kitamura; he will star opposite Lucy Liu in an upcoming film adaptation. In the book, an unnamed actress is enamored with the performance of an actor in a film she saw. The man “played each scene with painful caution,” she recalls. “I could feel the character’s turmoil in almost every instant on-screen.” Later, after agreeing to work with the man, she is unsettled to learn that the actor suffers from dementia; he performed with such nuanced uncertainty because he could not remember his lines. “Our awareness of the performance is what allows us to enjoy the emotion,” she observes.
“Without intentionality, there was no agency, no control, the work was happening to you.” Melton has raised the moment to explain that the audience’s perception of a performance can be totally distinct from an actor’s intentions and therefore not worth concerning himself with. But the scene also points to a feature of his acting: He seems to act without intent, channeling rather than portraying his characters.
In May December, he walks with his eyes down and his shoulders slightly hunched, a recognizably teenage shuffle that is disconcerting in a character in his mid-30s. Every movement has a heaviness. When he’s not moving, his stillness looks catatonic, like the immobility of a day lost to a hangover. When his character confronts Gracie about their relationship, he speaks with the questioning, halting anger of a child calling out a parent for an obvious injustice. These choices feel intuitive rather than directed. “Certain mannerisms from trauma, those are things that come from a deep understanding of someone’s character,” Melton says. “Things just happen naturally. Sometimes you’re conscious of it; sometimes it’s unconscious. I notice I’m talking differently, or moving differently.”
He doesn’t go insufferably Method, but he goes…soft Method. When I mention to Lee Sung Jin later that Melton had rejected the “himbo” label for Austin, he says the actor also spoke up for the character sometimes when they were shooting. “It’s funny he reacted to ‘himbo,’ ” Lee says. “There are certain scenes where the laughter may be coming at Austin’s expense, and he would come to me afterwards and be like, ‘Are we laughing at Austin? Because I don’t find that funny,’ ‘Austin means so well in this moment,’ ‘If he’s messing up, it’s because his heart’s in the right place.’ I know now—we’ve talked about it—that his defensiveness of the character was because he was so locked in. He’s not playing any of these moments for jokes, which is great for me as a writer and director. He shouldn’t be reaching for the jokes. He’s playing every single comedy beat as just real, right? And that’s the only way that this tone works.”
Lee knew he wanted to cast Melton in Beef after he saw May December. He was particularly impressed by a scene in which his character, smoking pot on his roof with his teenage son, gets too high and begins to cry. But he also knew the actor was highly particular about projects, so he planned his ask carefully. Ahead of a dinner for Gold House, an organization celebrating Asians and Pacific Islanders, he asked Bing Chen, the org’s cofounder and a friend, to seat him next to Melton, one of the event’s honorees. He brought along a deck, and by the end of the dinner Melton had agreed.
Lee was stunned by Melton’s exacting drive, which he attributes to his having been an athlete. He says that during the ADR stage of production, when actors rerecord lines that were imperfect during filming, Melton was second only to Parasite’sSong Kang-ho, his costar in Beef, who might record a line hundreds of times, in his intensity. (“Intense in a good way,” Lee clarifies.) “That spirit of never settling for anything less than the gold medal, plus his curiosity—there’s no ceiling to where his career is going to end up.”
When I ask Melton about any leading-man ambitions, he punts them as quickly as he did my allegations of himboism. “For me, it’s just: I want to do great work, be part of something great,” he says. You can personally have a great performance while being part of a perfect film or series, he concedes, but it isn’t his focus. “I’m an Eagles fan, and this past year people were shitting on the Eagles, but we were beating teams. We weren’t beating teams by 5, 10 touchdowns, but we won the game. Do you want the win or do you want the high stats for you?”
Our meal and the formal portion of our interview have concluded, and as we leave Millie’s, Melton moves more lightly, like a horse relieved of its saddle. We must, he says, go to Handles Coffee: “Josh and Alice. Korean owners. I love them.” He walks loosely down the sidewalk, then leaps into the street, darting around the back of a BMW X6 M with a Batmobile-like matte-black exterior. He gets in and opens the passenger door from within. “It’s a good dad car,” Melton says, pulling into traffic and making a U-turn. The seat belts automatically tighten, as if concerned. “I’ll never be late to a doctor’s appointment, never be late to school. It goes zero to 60 in a very short time.” (He is, in fact, running late for an appointment; his sister, spending the day with his partner and baby, calls to tell him so.) Lee, he says, has the same one.
In an interview with Lee days later, I ask about the car. Melton has coincidentally just texted Lee, who begins to reply, but he puts his phone down at the question. “There’s a little bit of Talented Mr. Ripley to him as well,” Lee jokes of his friend. “He loves to absorb stuff from his surroundings and then regurgitate it as his own. But he does it with a wink and a nod, because he’s very self-aware. Similarly, he’s trying to Talented Mr. Ripley my life.”
One day Lee got a text from Melton, asking what model his car was. He told him. Next, Melton texted him that he couldn’t find the same car in the same colorway anywhere in Los Angeles. “And I was like, Good,” Lee says. But “then he found one the exact same color, the matte black, in San Diego. He paid for someone to drive it all the way from San Diego to his house, and then he sent me a photo of him in front of his car giving a thumbs-up. So now I’m in the process of trying to figure out how to end my lease early.” It’s the kind of high-level troll that one of Beef’s characters might perpetrate.
Melton laughs as he drives through Silver Lake in the car he Ripleyed from Lee. “He gave me such a hard time,” he says, sounding pleased.
Given that the actor is so adept at collecting personas and making them his own—Ty Manzo, his trainer and close friend, jokes that he had some anxiety upon learning that Melton would play a trainer, fearing that his charge would begin mimicking his mannerisms (à la May December)—it has been difficult, over the course of our interview, to find the outlines of his baseline personality.
“He’s not so easily constrained or restricted to any one kind of label or category as a person. The same is true of him as an actor. It’s his versatility that is so impressive,” says Will Poulter, his castmate in Warfare and the upcoming Netflix romance Saturn Return and, like so many colleagues, his close friend. “The common denominator across all his work is conscientiousness. He applies himself with the utmost seriousness and conscientiousness to everything that he does, and I think that means a certain standard of authenticity is upheld.”
Melton’s first weeks of fatherhood have sharpened his identity and his wants, he says—“My flagpole is deeply rooted wherever I go”—and made him more judicious about where he applies his energies. He makes a quick right turn onto a corner opposite the Vista Theater (“It’s one of Tarantino’s movie theaters; they play 70-millimeter—it’s amazing”) and parks flush with the corner in front of Handles Coffee, blocking a fire hydrant. He is clearly eager to return to his partner and child. He’s been playing the baby Radiohead, especially “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi.”
The baristas in the café greet him warmly, and he orders a matcha, then pulls out his phone again upon request. His entire camera roll is baby photos; there might be 30 images of the same moment taken from different angles. He knows he’ll be able to be a present father even with a demanding career because he saw his own father do it: His dad found a way to listen to his football games on the radio while he was deployed.
“I think it’s hard, and I know it’s gonna get harder for me,” Melton says. Always selective about his roles, he’s even pickier now. “There’s certain things where I’m like, I know what this is gonna require of me, and I don’t feel like giving that right now. Because I need more time just looking at my child fart and burp,” he says. “It’s like being an athlete. You gotta enjoy the offseason.”
Lightning Round
What’s your workout anthem?
Kendrick Lamar. “Savior,” “Rich Spirit,” “Backseat Freestyle.”
Fantasy cheat meal?
A Win~Dow hamburger sandwiched in a pizza.
What do you eat when you’re sad?
Grilled peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
What’s your most rewatched movie?
A Knight’s Tale.
What book do you talk about the most?
Siddhartha. I like getting multiple copies of my favorite books and giving them away. I have no more Siddhartha copies.
What’s the least scientifically backed wellness thing that you stand by?
My acupuncturist Emma is brilliant. I hurt my back and she put a needle in my wrist. I couldn’t even walk, but I was standing up straight, doing squats. It was nuts.
Photographer: Ture Lillegraven
Stylist: Samantha McMillen/The Wall Group
Groomer: Candice Birns/Forward Artists using May Lindstrom and STMNT
Set Design: Aaron Bobrow
Production: Crawford & Co. Productions
Creative Director: Jamie Prokell
Visual Director: Sally Berman
Video Executive Producer: Dorenna Newton
Video Producer: Janie Booth
Video DP: Danny Dwyer
Video Camera: Joey Kramer
Video Sound: Matthew Leeb
Video Editor: Kyle Orozovich
This story appears in the Spring 2026 issue of Men’s Health.
