It’s a Bittersweet 25th Anniversary for the Shared Star of She’s All That and Varsity Blues

25 years ago, one of the great, legendary movie years in recent history kicked off with a bunch of disposable crap that might well have come directly from Abercrombie Studios in Association with Fitch Productions. Though 1999 has inspired countless essays and at least one full book extolling its virtues as 12 months of cinematic wonder, its first few months heralded a Delia’s-catalog revolution of synthetic teen movies, reviving John Hughes-style prepsploitation with a lacquered turn-of-the-century sheen. Later in the year, a couple of bonafide adult-sensibility classics of the genre emerged, but in January ’99, the two heavy hitters – the only two hit movies of the year so far – were Varsity Blues and She’s All That. Both co-starred Paul Walker. He’s the hero in neither, but a standard-bearer nonetheless in each: the hot, popular guy with no morals in She’s All That and the hot, even-more-popular quarterback in Varsity Blues (at least until he’s sidelined by an injury).

Paul Walker was not a teenager in 1999. He had already been alive for a quarter-century. I was a teenager (albeit just barely), and I didn’t care for Walker at all, to the extent that I was even aware of him. He blended into a sea of attractive preps – plus I didn’t see Varsity Blues in a movie theater. I became more aware of Walker a couple of years later, as many did, when he made The Fast and the Furious – playing an adult by that point, but no less of a youth-culture sex symbol.

Walker seemed like a good fit for those 1999 high school movies, maybe because he looked about as much like a normal teenager as She’s All That resembles anyone’s actual high school experience. You can tell director Robert Iscove would have made it a musical if that had been remotely in fashion at the time. What he does instead, heightening the cartoonish choreography, is fun, if a little unnerving in its commercial-ready polish. The school in the movie looks like some kind of feeder institution for MTV, underlined when prep hero Zack Siler (Freddie Prinze Jr.) loses his queen-bee girlfriend Taylor (Jodi Lyn O’Keefe) to a fictional Real World cast member (Matthew Lillard, frequently teamed with Prinze but more fun when pitted against him) – as none other than Usher serves as the all-seeing (and barely-interacting-with-anyone-in-person) school DJ.

Walker enters the picture as the supporting cad who makes one of those classic movie bets with Zack, who claims he could turn any girl into prom queen with a proper image makeover. “Any girl” turns out to be conveniently already-hot social outcast Laney Boggs (Rachael Leigh Cook), and, well, you probably know the rest: She takes off her glasses, Zack looks beyond his own preppy circles, Sixpence None the Richer swells on the soundtrack.

Walker isn’t the focus here, nor is he when he plays a more blandly affable guy in Varsity Blues, where he’s introduced in a slow-motion low-angle shot that quickly gives way to his image on a nearby billboard. In other words, he’s the hero of a Texas football town, who second-stringer Mox (James Van Der Beek) wouldn’t dare wish ill upon. But ill befalls him anyway, promoting Mox to quarterback and placing him on a collision course with domineering Coach Kilmer (Jon Voight). Varsity Blues tries to take a more sociological look at the game, rather than standard sports-movie rah-rah – but then gets all misty anyway about how “the day was ours” when Mox and his buddies take back the team from Kilmer, promoting Walker’s character to coach in the process. If you want to watch a good 1999 movie about football with a rousing locker-room speech, you had to wait until the other end of the year for Any Given Sunday.

Though Van Der Beek does the lackluster honors in Varsity, it’s difficult to imagine Walker rising to that rousing-speech occasion. That’s just not his deal, and I imagine his seeming constitutional resistance to any kind of floridity is – along with his suspiciously superhuman looks – why I dismissed him back in his youthful heyday. But the best way for these fake-ass high school movies from 1999 to take on some genuine feeling is to wait 25 years, at which point a rewatch feels like a reunion. Between the two movies, you see Walker, Prinze, Lillard, Cook, Van Der Beek, O’Keefe and Usher, plus Amy Smart, Ali Larter, Gabrielle Union, Scott Caan, Kieran Culkin, Jesse Plemons and Anna Paquin. These are not exactly the superstars of tomorrow (though it is neat to realize this list includes two co-stars from The Irishman). But it’s a lot of familiar faces nonetheless, made bittersweet when at least one, Walker, died way too young.

Is it just the usual trick of appreciating artists more in the shadow of their death? Maybe, but the fullness of time also gives Walker, who seemed so Abercrombie-ready in the moment, a little more context. That’s truer of The Fast and the Furious and some of the better sequels, where his reputation could be said to rise in parallel with Keanu Reeves, whose Point Break role he was essentially knocking off. Walker isn’t as soulful or deceptively range-y as Reeves, who has done comedy, drama, and multiple types of action with skill. But his presence has a similarly bro-y solidity, especially when acting out a little puppy-dog loyalty to Jordana Brewster or, especially, Vin Diesel. There’s a glimmer of that in Varsity Blues, while in She’s All That he’s an outright villain, such a bronzed-and-frosted manipulator that he makes gooberish Freddie Prinze Jr. look a little ganglier and less golden by comparison. He does succeed in turning his California accent into something vaguely menacing, as he rages against Zack’s perma-winner status: “This is one caw-tenst you’re gonna lose!” he bark-drawls. The “brah” is implied. There’s also a faint strain of metatextual comedy in Walker’s super-heel-turn in the final stretch of the movie, where he fakes sensitive-bro interest in Cook’s Laney in order to further sabotage Zack. There’s even a little dirtbag poetry to the subtle (lol She’s All That, “subtle!”) cues to Walker’s increasing desiccation as he gains a cigarette, then a flask, as he mutters “tonight is definitely my night” to reassure himself in the men’s room at the prom.

These are small moments of consolation that come from watching She’s All That too many times. (Also, damn, Walker really was a beautiful man.) Still, 25 years later, the way Walker inhabits these very era-specific movies makes him look paradoxically timeless – akin to any number of B-squad Handsome Guys of Hollywood’s past, like Tab Hunter, a point of comparison Variety mentioned in their 2013 obituary for Walker, keyed to his 1950s-styled appearance in Pleasantville. (Hunter himself didn’t actually pass away until 2018.) Briefly becoming the Tab Hunter of the late ’90s and early ’00s isn’t exactly a pantheon-level achievement – a prom-king role in a year that would almost immediately graduate to bigger and better things. The thing is, in the future, you might still be glad you saved the pictures.

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including Polygon, Inside Hook, Vulture, and SportsAlcohol.com, where he also has a podcast. Following @rockmarooned on Twitter is a great way to find out about what he’s watching or listening to, and which terrifying flavor of Mountain Dew he has most recently consumed.