This summer, Tom Cruise strips, Ewan McGregor swings a mean light saber and Brad Pitt fights like a man. The films these stars are set to showcase their talents at this summer's box office are discussed.

It's not heat, it's the masculinity. this summer, Tom Cruise strips, Ewan McGregor swings a mean light saber, and Brad Pitt fights like a man. BY STEW HARDESTY

LET'S HEAR IT FOR THE guys, the squarejawed, slimhipped, baby Redifords who haunt our dreams, who gaze at us smolderingly from a thousand magazine coversnow is when they need us, thei8r public, more than ever. Not that they'll go hungry, God forbid; they're set for life in any case. But now, in the last summer of the century is their final chance to earn immortality as the Sexiest Man of the Millennium. And the nominees are: Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Ewan McGregor and...Lord Byron! With three of the four going head to head with major releases, now is the time to whip ourselves into a frenzy of appreciation for those wonderful qualities that make them so special: McGregor's exuberance! Cruise's intensity Pitt's charm! That goes also for all of you who are actually thinking about Cruise's chin, Pitt's eyes and McGregor's... um... Well, if you were up against those guys, and your biggest role until now had been as a scrawny, knob-headed Scottish junkie, wouldn't you use everything you had to get people to notice you?

Of course, since we're talking about Hollywood here, the sexiest thing about all three is, naturally, their career. And here, McGregor has apparently lapped the field with his deal to play the young Obi-Wan Kenobi (the Alec Guinness role) in the trilogy of Star Wars prequels. Episode I The Phantom Menace is due out any day now and is conservatively expected to gross more money in its first week than all other movies in history put together. At the age of 28, with a handful of independent films to his credit (Trainspotting, Velvet Goldmine), the Scottish-born actor with the refreshingly iconoclastic attitude toward conventional Hollywood values - such as not showing your penis onscreen - has essentially guaranteed his stardom well into the next decade. And this with a part that, like most of the human roles in the George Lucas oeuvre, is written and directed so as not to upstage the special effects. Even twirling a Jedi light saber, larger, but apparently not by much, than the saber he twirled in 1997's gay cult film The Pillow Book, doesn't relieve the tedium of having to say many of his lines to a robot. "There's no character discovery to be had," he complained to a reporter. "It's just a lot of frowning, and that's it, really."

Yet even before most Americans knew his name, McGregor's friends worried that he might actually become too famous too fast. "He's had such a quick rise," said Mark Herman, his director on last year's cultish Little Voice, "but I believe he's got his head screwed on right enough to prepare for the huge amount of publicity he's going to get." McGregor himself isn't so sure. "I'm a bit insecure," he admitted last year. "Being famous doesn't make me think I'm any better than I am. It makes me panic."

His way of dealing with the panic is to pretend he isn't really a movie star at all. This comes quite naturally to him, because he hates pretty much everything about Hollywood: the parties, the products, the public-relations drill - everything but the money, and he's not even so interested in that. McGregor is notorious for denouncing the way Hollywood has corrupted innocent souls like Minnie Driver. ("She's gone mad, mad. She goes to the opening of an envelope; she wears those little dresses all the time. Why has she bothered buying into all that rubbish?") Movie stars pick their roles carefully to enhance their image. McGregor is now appearing as the voice of "the Steward" in an animated safety video for Virgin Atlantic flights, a job he probably did not have to beat out Tom Hanks for.

And movie stars never forget that their own career is bigger than any project. Some years ago, McGregor had agreed to perform in a small London theater company's production of a play called Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs, to be directed by his uncle, the actor Denis Lawson. (Lawson is best known for Local Hero but, by coincidence, also appeared as the space pilot Wedge in the original Star Wars trilogy) Partly because McGregor was so busy, the play couldn't be scheduled until last year, but by then he'd wrapped the Lucas film, and producers were throwing scripts at him. The scripts came wrapped in $i,ooo bills. One studio was so eager to land McGregor that the producers offered to buy out the entire eight-week run of the play to free him up, according to Jenny Topper, artistic director of the i74-seat Hampstead Theater. McGregor turned them down. After each performance he would, following tradition, go have a drink in the lobby with the audience, just as if he weren't becoming one of the most famous people in the whole living, breathing universe. That was because his personal integrity was more important than a few million dollars, because he liked working near home to be with his wife and daughter, and because he hates fookin' Hollywood anyway.

Which makes an interesting contrast to Pitt and Cruise, who certainly know how to act like a star but are undergoing, if not a crisis, at least an inflection point in their mathematically perfect career trajectory. Pitt represents a classic case of an actor falling victim to the quest for a role about which nobody could ever say, "Gee, that sounds like a perfect part for someone like Brad Pitt." After the moderately successful thriller Seven, a subsequent project, Seven ears in Tibet, suffered Hollywood's curse of the Dalai Lama, which afflicts every movie made about this great spiritual leader, driving away audiences with endless scenes of mournful chanting against a background of poetically bleak mountain peaks. The project was also hurt by the embarrassing discovery that the historical character Pitt portrayed, an Austrian mountain climber, was a Nazi. Then, compounding dullness with incomprehensibility, Pitt made the IRA drama The Devils Own, before landing the much avoided role of Death in Meet Joe Black. "Pitt is still a big movie star, but just because he's in a movie doesn't mean it's going to be a big hit," admits one studio executive, who didn't want to be named, in case he someday decides to make a movie with Pitt. "If you're going to pay someone $IS million or $20 million, you want him in a movie where he plays a character the way the audience wants to see him. Meet Joe Black should have been that movie. The audience wants to see him wearing a tuxedo, falling in love with the girl next door. Unfortunately, it was a really bad movie."

Pitt is also still struggling against the legacy of the events of the day in June I997, known to gossip columnists as Black Monday, when his press agent announced the breakup of Pitt's two-year romance with Gwyneth Paltrow. This was another unfortunate career move, even though, let's face it, for Brad Pitt, it's not all that hard to replace one of the most desirable women in the world with another one. "In all fairness, we're dealing with an industry full of fascinating people, you know?" he once remarked.

Last year, Pitt put this proposition to the ultimate test by starting a romance with Jennifer Aniston of Friends, and sure enough, he found her fascinating. Although rumors of a marriage are apparently unfounded, Pitt did throw her two parties for her 3oth birthday a few months ago. One, at the hot LA. restaurant Barfly, came complete with mini pizzas and Adam Sandler, but no presents or cake. The other, though, was at a seaside mansion in Acapulco with a handful of friends, whom Pitt flew down for the weekend, and a private fireworks display For Aniston, this was "the happiest time of my life." For Pitt, it's a little harder to tell, because he won't even confirm they're dating, and regularly enrages photographers by refusing to be seen with Aniston at parties or restaurants, or even getting out of a car.

But Pitt says he genuinely doesn't care what people write about him, which may be fortuitous, because he's about to open in Fight Club, a big-budget fantasy-drama co-starring Ed Norton and Helena Bonham Carter. No more Nazis, terrorists or allegorical Grim Reapers for him! This time, Pitt plays a miserable, alienated loser who is driven to join a cancer support group for company, while Norton is a disturbed sadist who dreams of destroying civilization. Together they find solace in an underground society of frustrated yuppies whose hobby is to beat one another up in grimy basements. Remember, if you heard the plot of the Star Wars films summarized like this, they'd sound every bit as stupid and contrived, although maybe a little more cheerful. (Pitt, who turned 36 in December, has cited a favorite line of dialogue from Fight Club: "This is your life, and it's ending one day at a time.") To add verisimilitude to his appearance, Pitt had his dentist intentionally chip one of his front teeth. It has since been repaired, and Bonham Carter found her co-star "as dreamy inside as he is outside."

Cruise, on the other hand, has avoided making any bad movies in recent years, by making no movies at all. Like Pitt, he was at the peak of his career in I996, after Mission: Impossible and Jerry Maguire. In the preceding dozen years, according to a study of zoo top Hollywood stars by University of California at Irvine economics professor Arthur De Vany, only Ig stars had a statistically significant effect on a movie's chances of becoming a hit; and of the I9, Cruise ranked third, behind Michelle Pfeiffer and Sandra Bullock. (Pitt was sixth, following Jim Carrey and Jodie Foster.) But then Cruise and his wife, Nicole Kidman, disappeared into the London studios of the notoriously reclusive, perfectionist, monomaniacal director Stanley Kubrick, spending all of I997 and a good part of last year filming the steamy psychological thriller Eyes Wide Shut. At least, that's what they said they were doing. Until a go-second teaser was shown to exhibitors in late March, virtually no one knew what two of the biggest stars in the world were up to for I8 months, except for a report in one British newspaper that Kubrick shot 95 takes of Cruise walking through a door. "Cruise likes to work with great directors," explains Brian Grazer, the producer of the couple's Far and Away. "He will sacrifice anything for greatness."

The secrecy around the set also seemed to infect the pair's private life. "You never really saw either Tom or Nicole," says Richard Young, one of London's leading showbiz photographers. "Not at functions or out on the town, not ever." They commuted to the studio by helicopter and apparently went to only one restaurant, the Ivy, a celebrity hangout in the West End. Except for a few very exclusive parties and the occasional royal funeral, they evidently spent most of their time with their two adopted children, Isabella, 6, and Connor, 3.They did, of course, show up at the opening-night party for The Blue Room, the steamy two-person play Kidman did in London last fall. But according to Rachel Cooke, an editor at London's Daily Telegraph, "when Tom and Nicole arrived, people were too nervous to speak to them, so they ended up speaking to each other for about Io minutes." When The Blue Room opened for a sold-out run on Broadway last December, Cruise miraculously appeared in an aisle seat just at curtain time and disappeared a second before the lights went back up, but not before gossip columnist Liz Smith caught a glimpse of him applauding, along with the rest of the audience, the awe-inspiring sight of his wife's naked backside.

In any case, now we know what they were up to on the set, because the teaser for Eyes Wide Shut consists of 9o seconds of Kidman admiring her naked body in a mirror and Cruise fondling and kissing her. They have emphatically denied tabloid reports that two sex therapists were paid $3,ooo a day to get some erotic tension going on the set. On the contrary, Kidman told a reporter, working with her husband made the sex scenes easier: "Kissing on the screen is not as easy as it might seem, so it helps that you know somebody for a long time before you have to do those intimate things before the camera."

Vanessa Shaw, who has a part in Eyes Wide Shut, describes Cruise as "a dream to work with" who complimented everyone around him and even had his personal chef prepare a vegetarian lunch for her. For one scene when the camera was on her, he voluntarily crouched down amid a tangle of lights and equipment in the one place on the set where she could see him, to make it easier for her to emote. But we don't know much more than that, because Kubrick was compulsively secretive about the movie's plot. There is speculation that the couple play married psychiatrists who become sexually involved with their patients, and a report that Cruise appears in drag, singing at a well-known London transvestite bar. It's likely that the critics will swoon for the film even if it doesn't meet its great expectations, out of respect for the memory of Kubrick, who died suddenly of a heart attack on March 7. As far as Cruise's career is concerned, Grazer says, "He's Tom Cruise, and it doesn't really matter that he's been out of the spotlight for two years." But until it opens, no one can say if Eyes Wide Shut will be a brilliant, touching evocation of sensuality, like Last Tango in Paris, or a pretentious, windy bore, like Last Tango in Paris. It won't, in any case, make nearly as much money as The Phantom Menace, and it's a safe bet you won't be seeing any Eyes Wide Shut Happy Meals at McDonald's.

Meanwhile, of course, vast flotillas of ships are crossing the Pacific loaded with Obi-Wan Kenobi action figures bearing the likeness of Ewan McGregor. Lucas, only a little less obsessively secretive than Kubrick, hasn't said what he saw in the young actor, although presumably it wasn't the anatomical feature that McGregor fondly refers to as "the old chap." Chap sightings have been a regular feature of his performances ever since his work in The Pillow Book, which dwelled in luscious detail on his rather large.. .um...chapstick. The script for Velvet Goldmine, in which he played a '70s rocker supposedly modeled on Iggy Pop, called for him to drop his pants and display his rear to a concert audience, but "I got carried away," he recalled. "I managed to get my penis in as well. Too good an opportunity to miss." It happened again just this year as McGregor was sitting quietly in his seat at the Versace show in Milan, although why that opportunity was too good to miss is kind of a mystery. The fashion world, which has seen just about everything else at shows, was mostly amused.

Of course, McGregor can act with his pants on, too, as he showed in Emma, where he played opposite Gwyneth Paltrow. "He's really just a down-to-earth bloke," says Mark Herman. Despite the utter conviction with which McGregor played a junkie in Trainspotting he says he has never used heroin himself. The main thing he did to prepare for that role was lose 30 pounds, which he then promptly regained. If he had a reputation as a pub crawler in his youth, he wants people to know, that's behind him, too: "By the fifth or sixth glass, a warning light comes on and my system starts telling me, no, Ewan. It's not as much fun to get completely plastered anymore."And although he makes a point of going full tongue in all his screen kisses, unlike some actors, who just open their mouth and squirm their lips around, he hasn't been seen going around with Courtney Love or anyone like that, and he's totally happy living with his wife, Eve, a French production designer, and their 3-year-old daughter, Clara, in North London. "I completely believe I will be with her forever," he says of his wife, "and that we'll go through everything together. Otherwise I wouldn't be married."

Well, there you are: fabulously successful, rich, famous, loyal, drug-free and...um... quite a chap. That ought to settle it. The sexiest man of the millennium is not Tom Cruise. It's not Brad Pitt. When the votes are counted, it will be between Ewan McGregor and...Lord Byron. And only one of them has a movie coming out this year.

Reported by Genevieve Bracken, Staci Stukin and John Jurgenson.