The Cast of ‘The Right Stuff’ on Disney+ is Literally Too Handsome

Disney+‘s The Right Stuff is a television adaptation of the famous article, book, and film depicting the psychological pressure driving NASA’s first round of astronauts to reach for the stars. It’s also a smorgasbord of white-bread handsomeness. Specifically speaking, the all-American, corn-fed, hyper-angular jawlines on this show are giving me life. Between Jake McDorman‘s hot-to-trot Alan Shepard, Colin O’Donoghue‘s booze-soaked Gordon Cooper, and Patrick J. Adams’s stubbornly ambitious John Glenn, The Right Stuff is showing us the famed astronauts of the Mercury and Apollo missions like never before: as hardcore stud muffins. And honestly? It’s the primary reason I’m watching.

The Right Stuff started off as a simple magazine assignment given to Tom Wolff. He was asked to write about the final Apollo mission for Rolling Stone in 1972. Wolff became immediately obsessed with the astronauts he interviewed, and their post-space depression, which led to a four-part series called “Post-Orbital Remorse.” After which, Wolff devoted himself to researching the entire history of the United States space program, culminating in an opus of a book, The Right Stuff. That book would later be adapted into an epic 1983 film by Philip Kaufman, also called…The Right Stuff. Now, in 2020, Nat Geo is trying to once more squeeze art and excitement from his story with their new Disney+ series.

Here’s the thing about The Right Stuff on Disney+, though: I’m less interested in the psychology of these intrepid space explorers than I am utterly entranced by the cast’s bone structure. Like…what is this? How can one show’s cast contain this many overwhelming jawlines?

Look at their faces. It’s unnerving how they look like perfect carbon copies of one another, all made in the “1960s poster boy astronaut factory.” Hilariously, I looked up the portraits of the real life men some of these actors were playing while watching the show, and you know what? These actors look more like “astronauts” than the real deal! Gordon Cooper had a bit of a boxer’s nose in real life and a distractingly high forehead. The only thing distracting about actor Colin O’Donoghue’s looks are how his eyes are a color of intense blue hitherto not even registered by Pantone.

Across the board, the cast of The Right Stuff is like a male model catalogue version of the real thing. And I’m not complaining, but I’m also fascinated by the show’s decision to smooth out the real life astronauts’ wrinkles, receding hairlines, and crooked smiles from history. Obviously, the pulchritudinous cast pulled me into clicking play on The Right Stuff‘s Disney+ icon in the first place. However, it also highlights why the show has yet to fully click for me.

Early on in The Right Stuff, I realized that I knew exactly who many of these guys were just when their first name was mentioned. A newspaper salesman greeting a pilot named John? Oh, that’s John Glenn. An Alan romping around with a mistress? Alan Shepard. Americans are on a first-name bases with many of the astronauts of the Mercury and Apollo missions because they are as close to mythic warriors as Americans got in the 20th century. And while Wolff’s book and Kaufman’s film dug into the humans behind those myths, the casting of Disney+’s The Right Stuff alone seems to uphold the mystique. These aren’t real people. They’re perfect people. Right down to their Adonis-like jawbones.

The cast of The Right Stuff is unbearably good-looking. That’s why I started watching this show, but it’s also why I might be loathe to finish.

Where to stream The Right Stuff