..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

February 23 , 2004

For Immediate Release

Oscar Nominees Johnny Depp, Clive Owen, Don Cheadle,
and Leonardo DiCaprio Top List

NEW YORK, Feb. 22 -- GQ names the top ten greatest actors of our generation in its March issue (on newsstands nationwide February 22nd), including Oscar nominees Johnny Depp, Clive Owen, Don Cheadle, and Leonardo DiCaprio. Russell Crowe, Nicolas Cage, Benicio Del Toro, John C. Reilly, Gael Garcia Bernal, and Jim Carrey complete the first-ever GQ best actors list.

Russell Crowe: It is a blessing when a great actor just wants to make you feel: "You're watching something, and you're a cynical bloke or whatever, and you find yourself tearing up, and you've got goose bumps on your f***g skin, and you have a real f***g emotional reaction to what's going on, and just in the back of your mind when you walk out of the cinema, you go, 'Thanks, Russell-now I'll get back to whatever else I'm doing,'" he says.

Clive Owen: Hollywood loves a tuxedo-clad Brit; some are Bond material, the others just filler between Bruckheimer explosions. Owen is something else entirely: a steely, charming screen presence that almost never was. "When I got into drama school," he says, "I really felt like someone plucked me out of the life I was in and put me on the path to somewhere else."

Nicolas Cage: A jazz actor whose bizarre, inappropriate choices are almost always the best thing in the movie. Says Cage, "I think everything I've experienced has left its imprint on my mind and my soul, and it comes out in the work, whether I want it to or not."

Johnny Depp: It's tempting to see high-low calculation on Depp's resume -- a little art house here, a little Hollywood there -- but it's the lack of caution that continues to make him irresistible. Johnny does what Johnny wants to do. Want to move to France and start a family? Sure! Want to play Willy Wonka? Yeah! Want to make a Pirates sequel? Why not? In Johnny's hands, it all makes sense.

Benicio Del Toro: He has mastered the art of the early death (Snatch, The Pledge, and of course The Usual Suspects), and he's never pimped himself out to the romantic comedy. "I play wackos," he says. Why are they all wackos? "That's something you have to sit down for hours to make sense of."

John C. Reilly: The gut-level empathy Reilly quietly musters for his sidekicks, cuckolds, and second bananas defines his sixteen years on film. "I think of all the parts I play as the main characters in their own story," he says. "When you see great supporting performances, it's because people are committed to their little corner of the sky."

Don Cheadle: Whether he's undertaking the complex, profound lead in Hotel Rwanda or supporting roles in Traffic and Out of Sight or those NFL spots that made us reconsider the significance of five seconds, Cheadle demonstrates again and again that it's not what kind of billing you receive, it's what you do with the part once you've got it. "My career has never been like a jet taking off; it's a house built on sand," says Cheadle. "It's nervous-making
for sure."

Gael Garcia Bernal: Bernal has eschewed crossover career moves in favor of riskier parts -- an amoral drag queen in Bad Education, the man who would be Che Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries -- and proved that talent always translates. "I want to have an actor's life," he says. "It's not about having a successful career. I don't believe in 'making it.'"

Leonardo DiCaprio: As the sweet, stunted Arnie in What's Eating Gilbert Grape, DiCaprio played the part as if he were in an altered state, from the first frame to the last. And with his intricate Howard Hughes, both swaggering and fragile, he overcomes his perennial boyishness and proves himself the wildly searching, inventive actor we'd always hoped he was.

Jim Carrey: Carrey will go down as our greatest clown, of both the exuberant and sad varieties; in The Truman Show, and particularly in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, he's comically, heartbreakingly unaware of the malign puppeteers pulling his strings. Yet Carrey's ambitions lie beyond clowndom, and even the deep drama he's clearly capable of. As he says, "I will never be satisfied until I burst into a ball of flames on-camera and the
director yells, 'He got it!'"

"The Top Ten Actors of Our Generation" appears in the March 2005 issue of GQ, on newsstands nationwide Tuesday, February 22nd. GQ is the leading men's general-interest magazine and part of Conde Nast Publications, Inc.