Julian McMahon has died. An Australian actor noted for his ability to project a particularly icy and callous (but undeniable) flavor of charm, McMahon broke into the American mainstream with starring roles on Charmed and then especially Nip/Tuck, before going on to play Doctor Doom in 20th Century Fox’s 2000s-era Fantastic Four films. Per Variety, McMahon died of cancer on Wednesday. He was 56.
McMahon was born in the 1960s, into the highest portions of the Australian upper crust: His father, Sir Billy McMahon, served as the country’s Prime Minister from 1971 to 1972, and his mother, Lady Sonia McMahon was a prominent (and infamously intimidating) socialite and philanthropist. Raised, in part, by nannies and in boarding schools, McMahon embarked early in his life on a career as a model, only returning to Australia for his father’s funeral in 1988—at which point, a Levi’s commercials he filmed while back in the country caught the attention of the producers of Australian soap operas The Power, The Passion and Home And Away, leading him to embark on a career as an actor. He made the jump to American soaps with a role on Another World in 1993, and from then onward was a regular fixture in American TV.
Early roles in Hollywood included a four-season stint on NBC’s Profiler, and a well-loved turn as literal ex-husband from hell Cole Turner on The WB’s Charmed. (Alyssa Milano, who played Cole’s wife/frequent adversary Phoebe Halliwell on the series, was one of many former co-stars to effuse in their remembrances of McMahon after news of his death became public, praising his “charisma” and “kindness” and writing that “He made me feel safe as an actor.”)
In 2003, McMahon secured the role that would help solidify his position in the television landscape of the 2000s: Professional plastic surgeon/lothario Christian Troy, on early Ryan Murphy success story Nip/Tuck. As Christian, McMahon was able to play to his strengths, delivering withering sarcasm and heartless behavior with a mixture of comedic timing and irresistible charm. McMahon spent six years on the series, making his way through an absolutely enormous number of sex scenes and surgical moments that often sought to out-do each other in their graphic nature, and sketching, in the aggregate, a portrait of a guy who was kind of, sort of trying to be a good person (when it didn’t get in the way of his numerous appetites). During this same period, McMahon was also cast as Victor Von Doom in the first really serious effort to bring Marvel’s “First Family” to the screen; the role, which he reprised for sequel Rise Of The Silver Surfer, was largely thankless, with McMahon forced to spout generic villain dialogue and spend much of his time with his face in a mask. But he did manage to capture Doom’s all-important arrogance, with a capacity to talk down to any and every scene partner that was drawn directly from his considerable skills as a performer.
After Nip/Tuck ended in 2010, McMahon continued to work steadily, if with slightly less ubiquity, for the rest of his life: In 2017, he returned to the Marvel brand with a regular role on Runaways, where he played one of the villainous parents of the titular super-team. In 2020, he became part of the Dick Wolf-Industrial Complex, starring in the first three seasons of spin-off series FBI: Most Wanted. He departed the franchise (and his role as team leader Jess LaCroix, a rare heroic turn for an actor who delighted in playing villains and cads) after its third season, leaving the series in 2022. His final role was in Netflix’s recent murder mystery The Residence, where he played a part surprisingly close to home, as a close associate of the show’s fictionalized version of the role his father once held: Australian Prime Minister.
Wow! Y'all really showed up for this fun little vote. A total of 3171 people submitted ballots containing 2164 different games for their Top 10 Games of the 21st Century. To put that in perspective, that's SEVEN TIMESthe amount of entries we received for the Giant Bomb Game of the Year 2024 community vote.
The scoring system is based on a weighted system where your #1 is worth more than your #2 and so on. I don't actually know what the math is on that because this "Community List" feature is built into the site. When the deadline hits, it just spits out a report, which I transcribed here and try to make look somewhat pretty.
The tie breaker on weighted scores is the total number of votes received.
Before I give you a big ol' list and some stats, let's slow roll the Top 50.
Breath of the Wild taking the top spot probably isn't too surprising, but the margin by which it won is at least a little bit. Getting over 200 votes more than 2nd place is big.
The real shocker is Outer Wilds taking 3rd place. It had fewer votes than almost anything in the Top 10, but that means that the people who like Outer Wilds REALLY LIKE Outer Wilds and put at the top of their list.
Conversely, Super Mario Odyssey had the 5th-most raw votes, but didn't make the Top 10. That means a ton of people like it, but not enough to put it high on their list.
I think it's funny how NieR is sandwiched between two Metal Gears.
Let's take a look at the details of the Top 100 games y'all chose.
You know how everyone says 2014 was a "down year"? Looks like they're right. It's a pretty even spread here. No real recency bias.
Top 100's Top Developers
Nothing too surprising here. I did combine Kojima-led studios into one column and the same for the Persona team. The love people still have for BioWare games makes it even sadder to see how much EA has squandered that love.
Top 100's Top Publishers
Again, nothing too surprising. All the stars are here...mostly. The one standout to me is the complete absence of Ubisoft.
Franchises
Sixteen franchises had multiple entries in the Top 100.
We definitely have several instances of votes being split due to compilations. The biggest example of this is the 87 people who voted for Mass Effect Legendary Edition. If they had just voted for Mass Effect 2, it would've easily been #3 instead of Outer Wilds.
We also had some discussions about how Hitman's most recent trilogy is now viewed as one product. Whether all the people who voted for Hitman 3 intended for that to cover the whole trilogy, we cannot say. But, if we combine Hitman 3's score with Hitman World of Assassination's score, it would've bumped up a little bit into the Top 50. If we combine all four, it would've been Top 30. But, it's not exactly fair to assume people's intent. Maybe they only loved one of them.
If you'd like to see the full list of all 2164 games that received votes, their total votes, and weighted scores, you can see all the raw ass data with the link below. It's way too long to post here in the article itself.
Thanks to whoever else made it so I wasn't the only person to vote for EverQuest games. We even had a few votes for the Champions of Norrath games. Hell yeah!
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Thanks to everyone who participated in this project. The turnout was incredible. Let's meet back here in 2050!
Michael Madsen, a prolific character actor best known for his frequent appearances in Quentin Tarantino films, died Thursday morning. The cause of death, his manager said (per NBC News), was cardiac arrest. He was 67.
Madsen’s acting career began with a chance run-in. In 1980, his friend took him to see a production of Of Mice And Men at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company, starring a young John Malkovich. In an interview with The Independent, Madsen recalls wandering into the wings where he found Malkovich taking off his makeup. Malkovich promised to send the young Madsen a brochure for acting classes and then actually followed up. A couple months later, Madsen himself was on stage in a different Steppenwolf production of the same play.
From there, he moved to Los Angeles, where he secured some bit roles in TV shows and films throughout the ’80s like WarGames (which he told The A.V. Clubbrought him to L.A. in the first place in a 2015 interview), as well as St. Elsewhere, Miami Vice, Cagney & Lacey, Quantum Leap, The Doors, and more.
In 1991, he landed one of his first major parts, as Susan Sarandon’s boyfriend in Thelma & Louise. “There’s a nice little part for anytime that people think that I’ve been put in the corner as the guy with the cigarette and the gun,” he told The A.V. Club. “I can say, ‘Well, what about Thelma & Louise? I got to play a nice guy, a romantic guy, and a gentleman.’ I rarely get asked to do stuff like that, so I was happy.”
He was the guy with the cigarette and the gun in Reservoir Dogs, which followed in 1992. He had the chance to be an A-list star in the years following—a scheduling conflict kept him from playing Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction, a role that eventually netted John Travolta an Oscar nomination—but he mostly stayed on the sidelines. “I’m not a publicity hound,” he told The Independent. “I don’t care about being on the cover of GQ or Vanity Fair. There was a time when I could have done that, but I didn’t have a publicist. And I think the studios decided I was some sort of renegade or malcontent.”
That doesn’t mean he didn’t have an incredibly fruitful career, however. Madsen went on to appear in three other Tarantino films—Kill Bill: Volume 2, The Hateful Eight, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, as well as Free Willy, Wyatt Earp, Donnie Brasco, Die Another Day, and many, many, others. “If a time machine existed, I would’ve liked to have played Doc Holliday. But it was fun. I just like to live in the present. Hey, I’m in The Hateful Eight. I’m a happy man!” he told The A.V. Club.
In a joint statement shared with USA Today, Madsen’s managers wrote, “In the last two years Michael Madsen has been doing some incredible work with independent film including upcoming feature films Resurrection Road, Concessions and Cookbook For Southern Housewives, and was really looking forward to this next chapter in his life.”
“Michael was also preparing to release a new book called Tears For My Father: Outlaw Thoughts And Poems,” they added. “Michael Madsen was one of Hollywood’s most iconic actors, who will be missed by many.”
News of the sale, and G/O’s pending dissolution, managed to rate mention in The New York Times, which notes that company CEO Jim Spanfeller published an “epilogue” to G/O’s legacy on the company blog. To connoisseurs of the Spanfeller School Of Business Writing—previously confined to those lucky enough to wake up to periodic “State Of The Company” emails from him clogging up their inboxes—it’s a clear paragon of the form: Over-long, highly defensive, and largely concerned with the assigning of blame to proper parties (media unions, mostly) and away from the innocent (G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller).
Among other things, Spanfeller addresses that time the entire workforce of sports culture site Deadspin resigned in protest after being ordered to curtail its more wide-ranging focus “to cover just sports, sports related issues, as well as sports adjacent stories,” described in the blog as “the slightest of changes.” “That was perceived as beyond the pale by the legacy team and as such they left en masse. An outcome that the management team certainly did not want.” (If you’d like another perspective on these events, you may enjoy the formerly-hosted-on-Deadspin“The Adults In The Room,” written by former Deadspin Editor-In-Chief Megan Greenwell, now the author of newly minted bestseller Bad Company: Private Equity And The Death Of The American Dream.) Still, the Deadspin story did have a happy ending: “In the end, we sold the site for more than we bought it for.”
Elsewhere in the article, Spanfeller addresses various other bugbears that have impacted his time in the manager’s chair, notably the hated specter of writers writing about the things they want to write about from positions of familiarity or expertise. (“Often now, the writer wants to choose topics and story angles to match their own specific world view. A practice that often actually works against the very brand building that some would suggest supports such practices.”) But it’s not all doom and gloom: Spanfeller takes a moment to herald some of his big successes, too, like G/O’s innovative use of artificial intelligence to produce bold new experiments in online content, noting—in his blog post about his company no longer surviving or growing—that, “Innovation was always a constant, which was clearly a key reason for our survival and growth during these very trying times.”
The Times notes that G/O hasn’t completely powered down, as it’s still hunting around to find a buyer for Black culture and news site The Root. It’s also not clear what’s next for Spanfeller, whether he and his friends at Great Hills Partners will now seek out another set of sites to leave their lasting and undeniable impact on, or whether he might consider retiring, possibly to tend to a garden where he’d grow a variety of plants known for their properties in garnishing and flavoring food.
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