Nick Stahl: A career of playing scarred, traumatized teens, with being gay as one of the traumas. Plus zombies, DeKay d*ck, and a gl*ry hole

Link to the n*de photos

In the summer of 2001, everybody in the East Village was talking about Bully, starring 22-year old Nick Stahl.  The South Florida teenager beats up his friend Marty (Brad Renfro), assaults him, and humiliates him by forcing him to become an entertainer in a gay bar. They even make an adult video to sell in gay bookstores.

 Bobby also assaults Marty's girlfriend Ali, while forcing her to watch gay movies and when his own girlfriend Lisa announces that she is pregnant with Marty's child, watch out!  The three friends set out to deadify him, with the help of Ali's new boyfriend (Michael Pitt).

It was not a pretty movie -- girl parts outnumber boy parts ten to one, and the gay world is portrayed as unfailingly sordid and decadent.  Nevertheless, every gay magazine -- In Touch, XY, The Advocate -- gave it a favorable review as a cautionary tale about the effects of internalized homophobia.  If only Bobby had the guts to come out...

Nick was born in Harlingen, Texas, in 1979 (Texas...ugh!), moved to L.A. in 1992, and was cast in a few small roles before his big break, playing opposite the then-famous Mel Gibson in The Man Without a Face (1993).  The Man and the boy are both gay in the original novel by Isabelle Holland, but straight in the movie.

My Son is Innocent (1996), Eye of God (1997), Promised Land (1997), and Disturbing Behavior (1998) cast Nick as scarred, traumatized, victimized, violent teenagers, leading to Bully.  Afterwards he did a horror movie (Taboo, 2002) and a true crime (Bookies, 2003), but found himself being manipulated by older women (In the Bedroom), doing stuff with men but denying being gay (Twist), or murdering young girls (Sin City). Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) must have come as a welcome relief.

In the Terminator mythos, John Connor manages to save the human world after it is destroyed by a sentient internet, so Arnold Schwarzenegger is sent back in time (n*ked) to kill him.  In T3, he returns (n*ked) as an ally, to protect young adult John and his future wife Kate (who is unfortunately engaged to someone else). 

Nick was the second actor to play John Connor.  There have been several others, including Thomas Dekker (n*de on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends) and Christian Bale.

Carnivale (2023-25) features paranormal beings working in a carnival during the Dust Bowl of Depression-era Oklahoma.  Nick plays Ben Hawkins, a farmer, chain gang fugitive, and healer who joins the carnival and eventually becomes an Avatar of Light.  He's hetero, but one of his girlfriends, Sofie, is a lesbian.

Tim DeKay (left) plays Jonesy, who runs the ferris wheel, and Michael J. Anderson, the backwards-talking dwarf on Twin Peaks, his boss, Samson.

More after the break. 

Tom and Huck

In Tom and Huck (1995), an idiosyncratic take on Mark Twain's classic Tom Sawyer, the standard elements are retained: Tom paints the fence, gets engaged to Becky Thatcher (with a tight-close up kiss), has a fake funeral, gets lost in the cave.  But as the title suggests, the relationship between Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn is emphasized.

Tom is played by fourteen-year old Jonathan Taylor Thomas, whose short stature and baby face could easily mark him as prepubescent, especially given his previous cute-boy roles.  Huck, in contrast, is played by Brad Renfro (left), thirteen years old but already a head taller and considerably more mature looking than Thomas, and already saddled with a reputation for being bad, wild, and irascable.

Brad Renfro’s Huck is a creature of the wild, as unpredictable and enigmatic as forest sprite.  He appears without warning, lodged in a tree or lying on a river bank to comment on the action of the fools with the dispassionate interest of a Puck.

In one scene he appears unexpectedly before Tom, naked, his body coated with mud.  He explains – it is a form of camoflauge – but still we are shocked at the sight of an elemental spirit. Indeed, his wilderness home is no hut or cabin, but an earthen pit, the sort of place one might visit at night to conjure hobgoblins.

Huck has no need or desire for human relationships. When Tom says softly “I thought we was friends,” Huck retorts “You thought wrong. I ain’t got no friends.”

But Tom desires him with a intensity beyond friendship, beyond even erotic longing.  Though he knocks around with acts of minor mischief, conning his schoolmates and torturing his cousin, he yearns to be naked and muddy, to need no one, to be free.

Yet he also yearns for a connection with Huck: he seeks out the sprite, invites him places, gazes at him with glassy-eyed wonder, sometimes dares to put touch his shoulder or put an arm around his waist.  This version omits the traditional homoromantic idyll on the island, since, in a terrible paradox, if Tom ever succeeds in establishing a connection with Huck, it will destroy the very “no-strings” freedom that he finds so attractive.





Huck is mistaken, of course: he does need human relationships, and Tom is indeed his friend.  In the cave with Injun Joe, he risks his life to save him – not Becky, who has long since escaped, but Tom alone: “When a friend’s in trouble, you can’t run away.”

With an elemental human connection (and, coincidentally, a fortune), Huck accepts the Widow Douglas’s offer to civilize him.  He puts on pants and enrolls in school and church.    Now Tom feels betrayed.  He decides to stay in the pit and replace Huck as woodland sprite, proclaiming “Somebody’s got to carry on!”  But Huck convinces him that one can be both uninhibited and civilized, and the two walk off together to plan their minor acts of mischief. The outsider has become a schoolboy through the evocation of friendship, with Becky Thatcher long since forgotten.