Chace Crawford
Chace Crawford is an actor, born 1985.
The first half of the career was about being looked at. Chace Crawford, born in Lubbock, Texas in 1985, turned up in the supernatural teen film The Covenant in 2006 and then, the following year, as Nate Archibald on Gossip Girl, which ran until 2012 and made him famous as the nice one. Nate was written as the least complicated member of that cast, which meant five years of playing the character the plot happened around rather than to.
The films of that period did not help. Twelve, What to Expect When You're Expecting, The Haunting of Molly Hartley: none of them found anything the show had not already used. Blood & Oil was cancelled quickly, and the run of straightforward leading-man offers stopped there.
The Boys is the correction, and it is a genuinely strange second act. The Deep is a superhero whose power is talking to fish, and the series uses him as a permanent humiliation engine: vain, needy, forever being forgiven by people who should know better. Crawford plays him without protecting himself, which takes a particular kind of nerve from an actor whose earlier value lay entirely in being admired, and it is easily the best work he has done. He has taken the darker small parts since as well, including Tex Watson in Charlie Says, and the pattern now is an actor who is finally being cast against the face rather than because of it.
Movies (11)
TV (7)
Where to start with Chace Crawford
The Boys is the whole argument, and there is no reason to begin anywhere else. The Deep gets a running subplot of indignities the series never lets him escape, and Crawford commits to it well past the point most actors would stop. Watch a season before deciding whether the show is for you.
Gossip Girl is the other pillar and plays better as a rewatch than it did as an event: he is the least interesting character on paper and quietly the most likeable one on screen. The Boys Presents: Diabolical is a short animated detour with the same character.
For film, Charlie Says is the most serious thing he has done and the least comfortable, and The Covenant is the teen-horror artefact that started it. Twelve and What to Expect When You're Expecting can be skipped unless you are completing the set.