4. Taye Diggs, 55
Diggs did not pretend to be above the compliment.
“I love being on any list, as long as it’s positive,” he told AARP after learning he had been voted one of Movies for Grownups’ Hottest Gen X Actors. “I’m getting older, so I’m very aware of myself getting older, so whenever anybody sees me as hot, I love it.” On June 19, Diggs co-stars opposite Tamar Braxton in Tubi’s family thriller Stepfather.
Diggs made his film debut opposite Angela Bassett in 1998’s How Stella Got Her Groove Back, playing the charming 20-year-old who romances a 40-year-old stockbroker during a steamy Jamaican getaway. Broadway had him first, in the original 1996 cast of Rent, but Stella is the one that landed. Two decades of film and television followed, from The Best Man and Chicago to Private Practice and All American.
Aging crept up on him in ways he didn’t expect. “I thought I’d be done by 50. I thought I’d want to retire by 50,” he told AARP. He thought he would stop caring how he looked, maybe stop going to the gym. That did not happen. “Now I feel like I’m more vain than ever.”
What did surprise him was not the vanity, but the usefulness of everything he had picked up along the way. “I didn’t know that this part of life, I would realize how much I’ve learned up to this point and be able to use it,” he said of being in his 50s.
He started out in an industry with a clear path to follow. That path is gone, and he is not mourning it. “When I came up, everything was done a certain way,” he told AARP. “Things were more already formed. Things were already established. We were following rules. Today, it’s like there are no rules. It’s kind of crazy, wild, unpredictable.”
For Diggs, that unpredictability has opened the room. Actors can shoot their own material, put it out themselves and find an audience without waiting for permission. There is less privacy, more competition and plenty of content he does not care about. Still, he likes the new math. “The small guy that you never heard of now has a movie that made $10 million,” he said. “I love that.”
One Gen X habit has stayed with him: being in the moment. Before phones and feeds, he said, it was easier not to live with one eye on how everything would look later. He tries to hold on to that. “Some of the best work is when you’re in the moment,” he told AARP.
Diggs has written children’s books and says they are for adults too. But he has thoughts about writing more directly for grownups, especially about learning from mistakes. “Everybody can relate,” he said. “It’s always interesting and fun and helpful.”His next chapter, he said, is simple: “It’s going to be about growth.”
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.aarp.org ’
