Everybody wants this.
Lately, a slew of celebrities have had comebacks.
Adam Brody is having a renaissance as a romantic lead. Josh Hartnett is in the midst of “The Hartnettaissance.” Pamela Anderson, Jennifer Coolidge, Noah Wyle, and Brendan Fraser have all seen second winds to their careers.
“There’s not many things that Americans love more than a nostalgic comeback,” Troy McEady, host of the celeb gossip podcast “Beyond the Blinds,” told The Post.
But, not all comebacks are the same, and there’s no set formula to it.
For instance, Brody never went anywhere. He rose to fame as the nerdy yet dreamy love interest, Seth Cohen, on “The O.C.” After that show ended in 2007, he still appeared in several movies and TV shows, such as “StartUp” and “Fleishman Is In Trouble.”
Now, the Netflix rom-com “Nobody Wants This,” (returning for Season 2 on Thursday) sees him play a rabbi falling in love with Kristen Bell’s agnostic character.
“His comeback is based in how we preferred him, in the first place,” McEady noted.
Brody’s roles after “The O.C.” were mostly not romantic leads, so “Nobody Wants This” is a return to form. For Wyle, who recently won an Emmy for playing a doctor on “The Pitt,” it’s also a bounce back, since audiences first got to know him as a doctor on “E.R.”
Anderson’s resurgence, however, is its own animal.
“Pam’s [comeback] is a rejection of nostalgia, a rejection of everything that we’ve known. She’s sort of stripped away all the stuff that a person would typically rely on to come back,” McEady said, referring to how Anderson was a ‘90s sex symbol, but she’s shown up with no makeup to recent red carpet appearances.
“She’s reinventing herself. And I think that’s really cool… it’s like a radical thing to do.”
He noted that the 2023 Netflix documentary, “Pamela, A Love Story,” helped the public “reimagine” Anderson in a new light beyond the “sex symbol” image. That led to her renaissance in movies like 2024’s “The Last Showgirl” and this year’s “The Naked Gun” reboot.
“Even people who hadn’t thought deeply about her in the past now have these nuanced feelings about her celebrity,” said McEady.
In the doc, the former Playboy model recalled how, when her notorious 1995 sex tape with ex-husband Tommy Lee leaked, it squashed her dreams of being taken seriously in Hollywood.
“I think people are excited to give her that opportunity,” McEady said. “I also think we’ve learned a lot, when it comes to the way we treat women that we idolize. We’ve had a lot of trial and error.”
Fraser, meanwhile, was big in the ‘90s, with “The Mummy” and “George of the Jungle,” and faded from the spotlight for years before he won an Oscar in 2023 for “The Whale.”
In a 2018 GQ interview, Fraser alleged that former Hollywood Foreign Press President Philip Berk sexually assaulted him in 2003, which led to the actor retreating.
“After that interview, people just had such a space for him, emotionally,” McEady said.
He noted that Fraser’s resurgence reminds him of the way that fans adore Keanu Reeves, who lost a baby with his late girlfriend Jennifer Syme, and later lost Syme in 2001 to a car accident.
With celebs such as Reeves and Fraser who have “sad stories attached” to them, McEady explained, “People like seeing him be happy. And, the reasons people support him are steeped in that, as well.”
Winona Ryder’s return when “Stranger Things” premiered in 2016 was in a similar category. She stepped back from Hollywood after her 2001 arrest for shoplifting, but “there’s general goodwill towards her,” McEady said.
“She had a scandal that was very salacious, but she didn’t hurt anyone. She didn’t do anything that affected anybody, really. It was just kind of a weird, unwell moment.”
Because it was essentially a victimless crime, people are “rooting” for her, as she’s moved on from it and returned with “Stranger Things” and 2024’s “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.”
Josh Hartnett’s “Hartnettassaince” is also unique.
Hartnett was a heartthrob in movies like 2001’s “Pearl Harbor” and 2002’s “40 Days and 40 Nights,” but he deliberately stepped back. He’d later take on idiosyncratic roles (such as “Penny Dreadful,” which saw him play a gunslinging werwolf, 2024’s “Trap” which saw him play a serial killer, and “Oppenheimer,” which saw him play a physicist).
“He never really leaned into the teen magazine box they tried to put him in,” McEady told The Post. “It seems like he pulled back, and then re-introduced himself as a grown man. He was always a great actor, but he kind of removed himself from the heartthrob conversation.”
Hartnett has confirmed in interviews that he had no interest in “celebrity culture.”
For her part, Coolidge initially rose to fame on “American Pie” and “Legally Blonde.” She was still active in “2 Broke Girls,” but she didn’t have a resurgence until “The White Lotus” premiered in 2021. She’d go on to win two Emmys and a Golden Globe.
“I think she’s a good example of, sometimes it just takes someone presenting you to the world the way that your fans see you,” said McEady.
He thinks that “The White Lotus” creator Mike White, “is good at taking actresses and actors that we have appreciation for, and sort of presenting them in the way that we like.”
Because of the disparate reasons for these actors re-entering the spotlight, there’s no one path on how to do it. And while some comebacks might be “extremely strategic,” others are simply a happy surprise.
“I don’t know if we view a celebrity’s comeback the same way they view it. I don’t always think they know that they’re having a comeback,” McEady said. “I remember, whenever Britney [Spears] was releasing a new album, they’d ask about her comeback, and she’d always say, ‘Well, I haven’t really gone anywhere.’”
