In the near decade since he took over the role of Reggie Mantle in season two of Riverdale, Charles Melton has made a meal of physically strong, emotionally sensitive types. He stole scenes from Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore as the latter’s much younger husband in Todd Haynes’s darkly comic melodrama May December, a role that gained him unfulfilled Oscar buzz, then played a calmly authoritative officer named Jake in Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s Warfare. His performance this year as a himbo with a heart of gold in Lee Sung Jin’s Beef earned him his first Emmy nomination for acting. (Doubling as an EP on the show, Melton is also nominated for Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series.) On this Wednesday morning in early August, he’s juggling the release of his newest film (Nicolas Winding Refn’s sci-fi thriller Her Private Hell, which he describes as “physically the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do”), X-Men casting rumors (he’s been coy about playing Beast and wasn’t at the D23 cast announcement), and filming the Daniels’ next movie, a top-secret project following the Best Picture–winning Everything Everywhere All at Once. The 35-year-old Melton is helping build a new kind of masculine archetype, the anti-red-pill guy who’s much more complicated than he appears. Right now, though, he just misses his kid.
