Joseph Quinn is the Chaos Romcoms Desperately Need Today

I’m sick and tired of the same four faces.

It’s like a recurring dream: two Chrises and an Emma strut into frame, spill coffee on one another, and—shocker—realize they were soulmates all along. Cute? Sure. Predictable? Painfully.

What’s missing? Substance.

Cue the crickets. Cue my yawn. Cue me mindlessly scrolling Letterboxd instead.

It’s 2025, people. We’ve rebooted every single franchise imaginable, are making it an Olympic sport to bring British literature to the screen (the Brontë sisters are rolling in their graves), and to top it all off, endured Glen Powell winking at us in six different roles that are all clearly the same guy. And if I hear one more comment about how someone wants to lick his abs, I may have to sue for psychological damages.

It’s not that Hollywood forgot how to write chemistry—it’s that sincerity doesn’t trend. But you know what does?

The “internet boyfriends”—the Paul Mescals, Jacob Elordis, and Jeremy Allen Whites of the world. We’re one TikTok edit away from collectively erecting shrines in their honor. Pretty? Sure. But they’re as formulaic as the Chrises—and at the root of the problem.

Because I don’t want another perfectly symmetrical, six-foot-something, all-American jawline—a man whose torso looks like it was sculpted at an Equinox underneath the Mediterranean sun all the while he somehow works 80-hour weeks at the top law firm in New York and drives a Porsche. The modern rom-com has turned love into a parody—pretty faces, empty scripts, predictable storylines. And I want something else.

I want messy and awkward—the kind of guy who’d send a 2 a.m. voice memo about a weird dream he had, panic, and apologize for it the next morning.

I want Joseph Quinn.

Because if love is supposed to make us laugh and ache and root for two flawed people, he’s the one who could remind Hollywood how to do it.

For starters, he doesn’t look like he’s been living on boiled chicken, egg whites, and creatine since birth. He looks human. Authentic. Real. Like the kind of guy who’d ask on a first date, “If you were a duck, what bread would you want people to feed you?” And you’d forgive him instantly, because his voice is velvety with a hint of gravel—just enough to remind you he’s from London. And factually: British guys are hot.

Plus, he really does have the face—sharp, expressive, slightly haunted—that makes you want to fix him. Which, let’s be real, is 70% of the rom-com fantasy. His lopsided grin makes him look three seconds away from either confessing to a crime or admitting he ate the last cookie you’d been saving all week.

Either way, you’d forgive him.

His vibe is unconventional, unpredictable—you can’t tell if he’s going to start reciting poetry, trip over a curb, or remember something he wanted to tell you yesterday when he saw you wearing your favorite dress: “I like you in yellow. You look happier in yellow” (all equally possible, to be fair). A little bit tortured, a little bit floppy-haired, a little bit like he hasn’t slept in three days because he was too busy listening to obscure vinyls (fair).

And he’s funny. Dry, understated, whip-smart funny. The kind of funny that’s learned over a lifetime of going against the grain, of becoming a person not everyone accepts but not caring anyway. His quiet, off-kilter confidence makes your heart swell. You need that for rom-coms—for great rom-coms, at least.

Otherwise, it’s just two hot people kissing under a Christmas tree, expecting us to clap—and that’s the problem.

We’ve killed the ‘com’ in rom-com.

Love is supposed to be enjoyable—but it’s also supposed to mean something. The pretty people humor our society has become obsessed with lives and dies by the blind hope that we’re all so consumed by the idea of hot people in love that we forget that at its core, these films were supposed to be equal parts romance and comedy. The genre was supposed to be about making us swoon and laugh. Because what’s love without laughter?

Somewhere along the line, we traded punchlines for lusty V-lines—and the genre has been suffering ever since.

*While You Were Sleeping (1995), the iconic Florence snowglobe scene*

But Quinn has that offbeat rhythm where you’d actually believe in the banter, the oops-we-fell-in-love-while-bickering cadence. He’s not the buttoned-up lawyer who loosens his tie at the holiday party; he’s the guy who only came to the party to see you (spoiler: you’ll both ditch it to track down a strange trinket he found for you on eBay after you mentioned it once in passing). Because he remembers the little things that matter. Not to everyone—just to you.

He’s the male lead who works at a record store and insists vinyl just sounds warmer. He has a coffee order so specific it’s basically a cry for help (he actually specifies that he wants ‘cow milk’). He knows way too much about one weird niche subject—Ancient Roman city-grid structure, moth migration patterns, take your pick.

It’s just as endearing, regardless.

It’s ridiculously disarming. He’s the poster-boy for the male archetype the rom-com was founded on, created for. In other words: he’s a chaotic dreamboat. The one who shouldn’t work on paper but absolutely does, because he’s charming without trying to be.

I mean, the script quite literally writes itself.

He’s late to work at his weird little indie bookstore that doubles as a wine bar, fumbling with the keys because he’s holding three tote bags, and inexplicably, a baguette. Enter the protagonist—maybe a burned-out American journalist with a sharp tongue (hi, hello, it’s me!)—who stumbles in looking for directions.

Cue the offbeat meet-cute. He’s distracted, fumbling with his lucky pen as he says something vaguely insulting without realizing it, and then he spends the next three days scouring the city to try and make it right.

There’s banter. A scene with him awkwardly holding an umbrella too small for two. He insists it’s fine, but he’s soaked by the end. It’s both really cute and really embarrassing. Their first kiss is at the most inconvenient time—and somehow, it’s timed perfectly. By the end, you love him not because he’s perfect, but because he’s weird. And real.

It brings us all to our knees. And that’s the pulse that could save a floundering genre.

Currently, rom-coms are in a weird little renaissance—a reboot wearing a $1.99 fake mustache from the clearance bin. We’ve seen Sydney Sweeney try to revive the genre (with mixed results), Glen Powell’s smirk weaponized more times than necessary, and exactly one British rom-com in the last decade that wasn’t about Christmas (and there’s no way the British like Christmas that much).

Casting Joseph Quinn wouldn’t just be fun—it would be a correction. A return to the roots of the rom-com (think: Notting Hill, 10 Things I Hate About You, and just for fun, Definitely Maybe).

*27 Dresses (2008), publicly butchering the lyrics of ‘Bennie and the Jets’ together*

Two messy, believable characters who accidentally fall into love while being delightfully themselves. And you can’t help but root for them—because in doing so, you’re rooting for raw, beautiful love.

You will cry. You will laugh. It will be everything we used to love about rom-coms but eventually forgot about while thirsting over tanned abs and broad shoulders and whether or not the female lead parts her lips seductively enough (I mean, seriously?).

Because rom-coms aren’t about perfect people. They’re about ordinary weirdness colliding in extraordinary ways. And the cheap-feeling storyline we pretend is ‘perfect’ is quite literally the antithesis of that, because there is nothing less human than perfection.

A ‘perfect love story’ doesn’t actually exist. But the perfect rom-com could.

So Hollywood: Give me messy. Give me awkward. Give me Joseph Quinn mumbling something bizarre about pigeons over coffee and somehow making us all fall back into love with the idea of love.

That’s why we need Joseph Quinn in a rom-com—not as another carbon copy of Hollywood’s leading men but the antidote. For culture. For balance. For the sheer joy of proving that whatever’s wrong with him is exactly what’s needed to make the genre feel right again.