The performance of casualness that isn't casual at all

Certain pairs of sunglasses give you a superpower: the ability to spot the beginning of a sunburn on someone else’s skin. Once you know what you’re looking for, it’s hard to unsee. It’s somewhere between a smudge and a rash. Amber lenses are best, but really any pair will do. I’ve been lifting mine up and down for the last ten minutes, studying Rafa’s shoulders as we walk down the white sand.

Every inch of the shore in the hotel zone is crammed full—resorts, beach clubs, DJ booths, bodies. The water is that shade of eye-wincing blue that made someone decide to build all this here in the first place.

We find the right DJ eventually—Rafa has strong opinions about this—and take two beds next to a group I clock immediately. A guy with pink hair and washboard abs who could be Frankie Grande, or just a Tulum clone of him. He has an entourage: a male friend in leopard-print parachute pants, and a rotating cast of women in string bikinis with the kind of implants Posh Spice had in 2003. They are sucking on crab legs and taking photos of each other, cycling one by one through the spot under the umbrella next to Frankie.

They collectively glance at us when we pull off our tank tops, but lose interest and return to their phones.

Aside from a twink in a neon pink thong walking up and down the beach with a drink in his hand, there aren’t any other visible gays. So Rafa and I take off our swim shorts and lounge around in our swimming briefs. I tell myself this is about solidarity, as much as it's about confidence and not caring what anyone thinks. I also tell myself I’ve changed over the past twenty years, but maybe it’s time to be more honest about not changing.

I still moisturize twice a day. I still think about how my body will photograph before someone takes a photo. I still spend ninety minutes in the gym four or five times a week—I like to tell people this is about my health and mental well-being. (It is not about my health and mental well-being.)

At some point, Rafa pulls out his phone. He starts taking photos of me, then of himself. I start taking photos of him taking photos of himself. We order Aperol Spritzes and photograph those too. We joke about the group next to us, roll our eyes, tell each other we aren’t those people.

Later that night in bed, sheets sticking to my sunburned shoulders, I close my eyes and can see the pretitle logos of big streamers—HBO, Netflix, Apple+—playing on a loop in the dark. I have two doc series out to market with a US production company, and for the past month, I’ve been taking the kind of pitch meetings I used to dream about when I was first starting in film and television.

I couldn’t have picked a worse time to try to take a break. We wanted to celebrate Valentine’s Day in a destination we both loved, but I ended up having to take one of these pitches from our Airbnb, performing mid-career filmmaker while a leak from the air conditioner dripped into a cup off-camera. And instead of being present in the days that followed, I circle-thought over the gap between the work I believe in and the rooms that decide whether it gets made.

It made me think of something a good friend sent me before the trip, an excerpt from a Joan Didion interview:

INTERVIEWER: There’s a certain esthetic to the way you live. You once talked about using the good silver every day.

DIDION: Well, every day is all there is.

Didion understood something about public life that I’m still resisting: that the line between the work and the life is thinner than we pretend. Her writing voice, her sunglasses, the way she moved through the world—it was all part of the same aesthetic project.

The quote has been stuck in my head because there’s something I’ve promised to do this year but keep avoiding: to write publicly about my body and my past and what it means to age in an industry that’s always looking for the next young thing.

For the last two months, I’ve had a half-finished Instagram carousel sitting in my drafts folder. One of my resolutions this year was to finally stop lurking: to turn my essays here into reels, to do a video where I talk directly to camera, to post to TikTok for the first time. But I’ve also been avoiding it because social media’s particular flavour of exposure—the algorithm, the performance of casualness that isn’t casual at all—has always made me uncomfortable.

This tension between filmmaker who wants to get into the room with HBO and guy who’s afraid to use TikTok is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

On the plane home, I tell Rafa I’ll post some of our vacation shots to Instagram. He nods like it’s a reasonable thing to say. We both know I won’t.

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