Henry Cavill Is My Unexpected Meat Muse of the Summer

Happy Pride! We have a new candidate for supreme grill season himbo, courtesy of Henry Cavill. The actor recently posted a nine-photo Instagram dump of ribeye steak and pasta that he seemingly cooked, and it swiftly made the rounds in Eater’s Slack channels for its childlike candor. Feast your eyes:

I don’t know anything about Cavill aside from the fact he has played Superman and the Witcher, but I was tickled by his wholesome post, appropriately hashtagged “#Foooooood” and “#1MillionGarlics.” This, to me, is peak ooga booga himbo-maxxing (read: positive). I am confident that the first slide of Cavill with his tongs is the first thing you see when God welcomes you into His Kingdom. “Today we have two 35-day-aged Galician Rib Eyes,” Cavill writes in the caption, “Galician beef is, in my opinion, the best in the world! Incredibly deep, beefy flavour. But I digress, we also have an olive fed Wagyu tenderloin which has a really interesting flavour profile.” The actor continues on to explain why he dry brined the steaks overnight, and paired the steaks with garlic confit butter sauce linguine. “Which is a recipe I found online,” Cavill writes. “It sounds fancy but it’s just roast garlic blended with butter, rolled into a snazzy little sausage, cooled in the fridge, and then whisked in a pan with pasta water!” 

The responses in the post’s comments were overwhelmingly positive, painting Cavill as quite the snazzy little sausage himself. “Conservatives need to stop being concerned about drag queens turning their kids gay and start being real concerned about Henry Cavil turning their husbands gay,” one person opined, while another wrote, “You’re like a big, sweet, strong gummy bear to me.” 

At a time when social media feels tired and overly branded — “in recession,” according to some trend trackers — Cavill has served us a social media White Whale on a silver platter (with garlic confit): authenticity. The desperate Instagram dump, it is not. This is a celebration — a symphony! — of beef, a post that scratches the “Celebrities! They’re Just Like Us!” itch of Us Weekly yore that I yearn to feel à la Ben Affleck ripping cigs with his Dunkin’ Donuts. Especially since  the majority of today’s celebrities are posting online about how they’re very much not like us; one rented an island during COVID-19-stricken 2020 to “pretend things were normal just for a brief moment in time”; more recently, a pop star recreationally went to Space and an influencer mouthed the words “let them eat cake” at the Met Gala, where a ticket costs $75,000 a head. So, yes, I will take Mr. Cavill’s giddy carousel of barbecue fare, because it looks like the kind of photo compilation I would get from one of my Midwestern aunties.  

Perhaps it’s only natural for us to crave the unfettered spillage of a celebrity’s personal life. I’m not immune from the charms of feeding my parasocial celebrity relationships, although the only deaths that made me cry were Joan Didion and Anna Nicole Smith. But now that I, the casual social media scroller, know that Cavill loves to cook meat. I don’t exactly know what to do with this information. Maybe I’ll buy a pair of tongs the size of a premature baby. Maybe I’ll order some steaks from Snake River Farms. The possibilities are endless. 

Whether or not Cavill’s Instagram carousel was, in fact, posted in as nonchalant a manner as it seems is really no business of mine; do we think that Martha Stewart, queen Instagram, is uncalculated in her content? Maybe. She can purportedly function on only three hours of sleep a night. The point is, fact-checking the “authenticity” of Cavill or anyone else in this parasocial and harmless of a context would be a futile vision quest. After all, to paraphrase the wise words of Trixie Mattel, if a group of people believes something is real, and that makes them live their life differently, it might as well be as real as anything.