Near the end of this year, I found myself in a movie theatre crowded with Shah Rukh Khan fans. We were there to watch Om Shanti Om in celebration of the actor’s 60th birthday. The film is famously packed with iconic moments—from industry references to unexpected cameos—yet, to my surprise, the cinema hall was at its loudest during ‘Dard-e-Disco’. Women around me hooted and hollered every time the camera zoomed into Khan’s glistening chest, every time he thrust his crotch or emerged wet and shirtless from a pool. When he licked his finger and ran it across his chest, a woman loudly whistled. The theatre was united in a deafening roar, growing even louder when Khan’s wet tank top stuck to his chest.
Gone are the repressed horniness and restrained passion of the past. 2025 is the year of women in male-dominated fields: we openly thirst after male celebrities, wolf whistle in theatres, and tweet our most unhinged fantasies. Shah Rukh Khan may be an eternal crush, but he is not the only man in the public eye to be objectified this year. From Michael B Jordan in Sinners to Jacob Elordi as Frankenstein’s creature (yes, the internet finds him sexy even in his freakish costume), there is one trait all these internet crushes have in common: an unbridled sense of whimsy; they are always in on the joke. Take Elordi playfully shaking a leg with a belly dancer in Marrakech or nonchalantly smirking on red carpets. Take Ishaan Khatter treating us right with shirtless selfies or Jonathan Bailey intently downing a glass of milk, then seductively eyeing the camera as he wipes his lip.
In the spirit of global thirstiness, The Nod rates seven of the internet’s 2025 crushes by hotness and whimsy but, most importantly, by how well they can smoulder at a camera and play to the gallery. Presenting, in no specific order:
Ahaan Panday
Broody and brown-eyed with curly locks to twist your fingers into, Ahaan Panday is no stranger to being thirsted over on the internet. Every one of my schoolmates was once obsessed with him as a teen on Ask.fm. Now 27, the broody actor is once again causing lusty mayhem amongst the masses with his role in Saiyaara, which saw audiences in theatres faint, scream and roll on the floor crying. Every time Panday posts a photo of his doe-eyed stare or—god forbid—a casual shirtless pic, the comment section loses all sanity: from declarations of love to comparisons with Tangled’s Flynn Ryder, no comment is too crazy. My favourite: “Sir, do you do weddings? As the groom, I mean?”
Smoulder rating: 10/10 when he has stubble and messy hair. Panday was made to brood
Dream date: Movie at the theatre, which he mostly spends gazing at you with puppy-dog eyes and and holding your hand
Oscar Isaac
A clip of Jacob Elordi playfully smacking Oscar Isaac’s butt at the London Film Festival recently went viral…and we wish it was us. “It hurts to see other people living your dream,” reads the most popular comment on the video, with over 3,000 likes. The internet has crowned Isaac one of the top DILFs of 2025. The actor is blessed with having sizzling chemistry with just about anyone he works with—but the moment the internet collectively fantasises about every night before falling asleep is him kissing the arm of his Scenes from a Marriage co-star Jessica Chastain. The photos go viral on Twitter every two days and have no doubt inspired endless self-insert fanfiction.
Smoulder rating: 1000/10. When he looks at a camera, he’s eye-fucking you
Dream date: Walking the red carpet, maybe we’ll be as lucky as Jessica Chastain
Michael B Jordan
“Oh lord lead me not into temptation,” reads a popular comment on one of Michael B Jordan’s Instagram posts…and he’s wearing a loose-fitting, full-sleeved sweater in this one. The actor’s sultry tank top in Sinners has its own fan base. From posing in Calvins to letting vampire Hailee Steinfeld spit in his mouth in the 2025 horror-drama, Jordan has frequently caused half the Twitter population to lose their minds this year. More than his smoulder, though, it is his nerdy side that makes him so irresistible. The 38-year-old is openly a huge anime fan; in a viral clip from a Vanity Fair interview, he passionately explains a pivotal scene from My Hero Academia to peers Austin Butler and Paul Mescal.
Smoulder rating: 9/10 because he may be cuter when he’s excitedly explaining My Hero Academia than when he’s posing for an editorial
Dream date: Netflix and chill…but it’s watching anime together as Jordan yaps about each scene to you
Pedro Pascal
“God created men and sent Pedro Pascal as an apology,” reads a comment with nearly 3,000 likes on the actor’s Vanity Fair cover. Something about Pascal, crowned DILF of the Year 2025 by everyone’s favourite Twitter account @archivedilfs, makes the internet feral with lust. Perhaps it’s the fact that he’s so female gaze, frequently seen being affectionate with his women co-stars, who seem to be equally fond of him. Or it’s the tank tops he regularly wears that reveal his sculpted arms (“I feel like a Victorian man seeing a woman’s ankle for the first time”)... or his pants that are so tight they barely leave anything to the imagination (thank you to his stylist). But surprisingly, the hottest thing about him is not his charms or his arms: it is his vocal activism and uncompromising values that make his fans seriously horny. From donning ‘Protect the Dolls’ T-shirts in support of trans rights to attending protests and publicly criticising Donald Trump, Pascal is unafraid to rage against the machine. And there is nothing hotter than a man who stands up for what he believes in.
Smoulder rating: 100/10. He has Isaac’s piercing gaze added to a bit of an unc charm
Dream date: A dinner at a restaurant where he leans forward, looks into your eyes, and says, “You are valuable”
Jacob Elordi
I just saw Jacob Elordi’s bare arms for the first time while researching this story and my brain short-circuited. The most attractive thing about Elordi this year is that he wasn’t trying to be hot, he was trying to make art. Many hail Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein as the 28-year-old’s magnum opus, praising the way he blinks in the film, the way he is capable of expressing more emotion solely with his eyes than several actors can with their entire faces (Shah Rukh Khan is the exception, of course). Elordi might be ethereal and angelic… but he is also just one of the girls. He complains about how expensive tote bags have become, does an awkward jig to stop himself from crying while receiving a standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival. In press junkets, he sits like he’s ‘petite’. Despite his catastrophic levels of hotness, he inspires endless cuteness aggression. He is relatable, he is the boy next door, the long-lost friend you once picked apples with in Papa’s orchard.
Smoulder rating: 9/10 because no matter how sexy he looks, I just can’t buy that he’s not just a little cutie
Dream date: Staring at his toned arms in a tank top forever and ever
Ishaan Khatter
Ishaan Khatter is unanimously everyone’s favourite Bollywood nepo-baby who “objectifies himself once a year then goes back to doing small meaningful films”. Earlier in the year, we were blessed with him in The Royals playing a perpetually shirtless, horse-riding prince who basically carries the series on his abs. But it’s not just these abs that make him attractive to the internet: it is his keenness to experiment, be it with his style or with the roles he plays, such as in Neeraj Ghaywan’s critically acclaimed Homebound. My favourite thing about Khatter is that he is almost always in a tank top. My second favourite thing is that if he’s not in a tank top, he’s still likely wearing something tightly fitted.
Smoulder rating: 1000/10. Those furrowed brows, those brown doe eyes… Khatter can smoulder like nobody else in Bollywood. Isaac’s piercing gaze combined with Elordi’s boyish charm—why thirst over a white man when we have Khatter?
Dream date: Horse-riding lessons. Bonus points if his shirt is off
Jonathan Bailey
Jonathan Bailey is so babygirl. The 37-year-old is People’s Sexiest Man Alive 2025: a decision that—probably for the first time in the history of the magazine—has caused zero backlash. (“Nothing has ever united the entire planet as much as this decision,” reads a comment on his Instagram.) The openly gay actor has such sizzling chemistry with all his co-stars that it’s led a bunch of fans to wonder if he may not actually be gay after all. The bar is high for his heterosexual counterparts: this GIF of Bailey in Wicked: For Good and his slow-burn romance with Simone Ashley in Bridgerton has gotten everyone on the internet lusting, thirsty, crying: where are all the men who yearn?! Bailey apparently gets several requests to take his shirt off for magazine editorials (yes, please) and has been deemed “the king of slutty little glasses” (yes, please x 2).
Smoulder rating: 10000/10. Intense, sexy, mischievous: no one can smoulder like Jonathan Bailey. The internet turns to mush at the sight of his eyes
Dream date: A promenade at the park with a carefully orchestrated fall into the nearest water body
