Sure, Josh O’Connor’s Patrick Zweig has many moviegoers’ hearts racing with his rakish good looks and asshole demeanor. But, as I told my colleagues in our group discussion, we know this man doesn’t stay loyal, doesn’t pick up the phone, and definitely doesn’t clean his bathroom. Does that make him even more attractive? Sure! But who has the energy?
Imagine how refreshing it would be to have Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) as your little sweetie instead. He may be dead inside, but he’s loyal. I mean, the man makes his entire life into a humiliation kink for his crush turned wife Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), and she doesn’t even care! She actually kind of hates him for it, and that makes him want her even more.
Tashi can’t play tennis anymore, so Art trains with her until he becomes everything she dreamed of being, giving her the lifestyle and money and fame she would have had if her career hadn’t gotten derailed. In the end, he asks her for permission to quit. It’s not his career, after all; it’s both of theirs. He doesn’t just ask though—he grovels.
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TL;DR: Art is so sprung by Tashi, he will literally do anything for her. She could slap him in the face—literally or metaphorically—and he would say “thank you.” He knows she has slept with Patrick many times, but he will never leave her. Like, you know it’s true. If she wants to dump him, she’s going to have to shake him off her leg like a toddler fighting bedtime.
As one TikTok creator, Alexis, put it, just one screengrab from the film of Art’s sad face being cupped by Tashi’s hand is simultaneously the saddest and sexiest thing we’ve ever seen.
“He is so down bad it should be criminal,” she says. “And I need that. That’s the energy I’m looking for in my future husband.”
Exactly. We deserve this, don’t we? A man to be down bad crying at the gym over us, for a change?
“Challengers needed to bring back men being pathetic for women, we are in a yearn drought,” wrote one person on Twitter. Amen.
Stephanie McNeal is a senior editor at Glamour and the author of Swipe Up for More! Inside the Unfiltered Lives of Influencers.
