Rare is the man who comes along only to capture your heart (and other points south), and who manages to stay on your Hot List for a decade or so, but when he makes it onto your list for another solid decade, then it's time to pay attention.
Today's Fab 40+ selecion is one of those few men in my pantheon of hotness who caught my attention with his debut on the American soap opera As the World Turns, playing the original Mike Kasnoff in 1994. In all amazing honesty, he hardly looks any different than he did 18 years ago. I give to you his hirsute hotness...
SHAWN CHRISTIAN
Born Shawn Patrick Christian (obviously to Irish American parents) on December 18, 1965, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he got his marketing degree (more reason to love him) from Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan, causing one has to wonder what makes one set of rapids grand and the other big?
Alls I know is that Shawn's chest, arms and shoulders are big, and the rest of him is grand!
The thing that has driven me crazy with Shawn's career is that he got stuck in Soap-opera-land. American soaps are famous for their hunks, and for putting them in skimpy clothes, and that is all wonderful. However, some actors never break out of the soaps, even after some prime time success, and so they never get into projects where we could really see them let loose, and, most importantly, show some ass.
It's hard to find stuff from his ATWT days, but I do remember this moment...
He was wearing only a towel and then dropped it to seduce the lady he was pursuing. Of course, this being daytime American TV, they didn't show anything but the towel hitting the ground and him being shirtless, and in this pose, but the suggestion worked quite well.
Shawn was later on One Life to Live, where one of his plotlines was getting stranded on a desert island, which, as we know, only happens to soap characters, along with evil twins, plastic surgery that actually makes someone look like an entirely new person, and rare blood disorders that can only be resolved by acquiring the blood from one of three people in the world, and one of them happens to live in that soap's very same town.
ONE LIFE TO LIVE
Okay, I apologize. Any idea for getting Shawn stranded in a state of undress is definitely a brilliant one.
Shawn has done some night time work, and it always seemed to revolve around beaches. In fact, you could say that beaches are a continuing theme in his work....thank God!
First, he was in the NBC series Wind on Water...or Sand on Surf.....or Time and Tide. It could have featured the music of Earth, Wind & Fire for all it mattered, because it starred Bo Derek. So let's not kid ourselves--the title was never important.
Shawn's natural hair color is dark brown, but given the beachy nature of so much of his work, he is often required to either fully bleach it blond, or at least get highlights, a look that I must say actually suits him.
Wind on Water
Shawn's biggest acclaim in prime time was on the WB Network series Summerland with True Blood's Aussie-cum-Louisiana stud Ryan Kwanten. The show was about a woman who didn't count on raising two kids who....blah, blah, blah. Summerland really had only two plots: the one that involved Shawn Christian, and the one that involved Ryan Kwanten. Everything else was filler.
SUMMERLAND
Oddly, the two hottest guys on the show rarely interacted. This is really the only halfway decent shot of Shawn and Ryan that I could find.
(Completely superfluous Ryan Kwanten picture)
In one brilliant episode, they came up with the idea of Shawn applying oil to himself...
See what I mean? What plotline could compete with that?
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This ass will be discussed later....
The show looked like it would be the beginning of something great for Shawn, but in the second season it lost its audience, and so he was relegated to guest appearances on other shows....
CSI
COUPLING
It is my guess that the Showtime series Episodes got some of its ideas from Coupling. The show was a huge hit in the United Kingdom, so they brought the series over to the States and used pretty much the exact same scripts, with just some tweaks to Americanize it a bit. Didn't work. Not even a little bit. What was funny in the mouths of Brits, was lame in the mouths of Yanks. It was sort of like taking Friends to Great Britain and expecting the rhythm and chemistry to repeat just because the same words and plots are being used.
Still it did give us some hot Shawn business.
Shawn is known for his magnificent upper body, so it came as a surprise to some of us to see that he has one, fine, rocking ass!
Shawn was in the movie Small Town, Saturday Night with Chris Pine, but it went straight to video. Then he got sucked back into the soap opera vortex, playing a doctor on Days of Our Lives with actors who are younger but by no means hotter...
DAYS OF OUR LIVES
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| It's this big. I swear it is. Guinness put it in his record book. Ripley couldn't believe it. |
In this scene, he counters a Doubting Thomas lady friend by offering to strip for her to search him...
...and then he offers to strip off his pants....
....which is an offer men only make to women because they know they won't make them go through with it.
Are those the same jams he wore in Summerland? Damn, Hollywood is cheap!
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| Wait a minute. Just wait one stinkin' minute here. You're trying to tell us you went to Target and you couldn't find anything you liked? |
And of course, there are the various and sundry publicity shots and caps from things I can't readily identify...
While Shawn is doing chin-ups, the rest of us feel a different body part of our own going up....
If you want to see a great collection of caps of Shawn in action, go to Soaphunks' wonderful collection. Shawn has been a winner in different categories of the site's annual (and much coveted) Soapy Awards.
Courtesy of xyzpdq, here are a few links to some great shirtless videos of Shawn...
Shawn left Days of Our Lives earlier this year, and is working on a sci-fi film right now. We can only hope that it involves a lot of strip searching in the future.
Shawn Christian: Take a gander at this Michigander!
Quite literally one of the absolute hottest guys to grace any screen! I seem to remember him on As The World Turns as actually having long hair early on?! Or was I too focused on the chiseled chest to be an eyewitness? Quite possible! His chest is just so perfect, so awesome from shoulders and arms on down, and yes the rest is equally good. I truly can't say enough--it's even going to be interesting to see what he looks like as time progresses! Thanks Derek!
ReplyDeleteAnother excellent choice Derek!! Shawn didn't blip onto my radar until "Summerland" and he's never left.
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