UBERABA, Brazil: Brazil has hundreds of millions of cows, but one in particular is extraordinary. Her massive, snow-white body is watched over by security cameras, a veterinarian and an armed guard.
Worth $4 million, Viatina-19 FIV Mara Moveis is the most expensive cow ever sold at auction, according to Guinness World Records. That’s three times more than the last recordholder’s price. And — at 1,100 kilograms (more than 2,400 pounds) — she’s twice as heavy as an average adult of her breed.
Along a highway through Brazil’s heartland, Viatina-19’s owners have put up two billboards praising her grandeur and beckoning ranchers, curious locals and busloads of veterinary students to make pilgrimages to see the supercow.
Climate scientists agree that people need to consume less beef, the largest agricultural source of greenhouse gasses and a driver of Amazon deforestation. But the cattle industry is a major source of Brazilian economic development and the government is striving to conquer new export markets. The world’s top beef exporter wants everyone, everywhere to eat its beef.
The embodiment of Brazil’s cattle ambitions is Viatina-19, the product of years of efforts to raise meatier cows. The country’s prizewinners are sold at high-stakes auctions — so high that wealthy ranchers share ownership. They extract the eggs and semen from champion animals, create embryos and implant them in surrogate cows that they hope will produce the next magnificent specimens.
“We’re not slaughtering elite cattle. We’re breeding them. And at the end of the line, going to feed the whole world,” one of her owners, Ney Pereira, said after arriving by helicopter at his farm in Minas Gerais state. “I think Viatina will provide that.”
The cow’s eye-popping price stems from how quickly she put on vast amounts of muscle, from her fertility and — crucially — how often she has passed those characteristics to her offspring, said Lorrany Martins, a veterinarian who is Pereira’s daughter and right hand. Breeders also value posture, hoof solidity, docility, maternal ability and beauty. Those eager to level up their livestock’s genetics pay around $250,000 for an opportunity to collect Viatina-19’s egg cells.
“She is the closest to perfection that has been attained so far,” Martins said. “She’s a complete cow, has all the characteristics that all the proprietors are looking for.”
A GRAND MATRIARCH
A commodities boom in the 2000s turbocharged Brazilian agriculture, especially with a rising China buying soy and beef. Today, agriculture’s influence extends to Brazil’s Congress and the national consciousness. Country music is booming. TV viewers can watch the massive Globo network’s seven-year campaign exalting the sector. The Cow Channel features live auctions. And Brazil, along with the US, is at the forefront of cattle genetics; it does more in-vitro fertilizations than any country in the world, said João Henrique Moreira Viana, genetic resources and biotechnology researcher at the government’s agricultural research corporation.
Viatina-19 won award after award — including “Miss South America” at the Fort Worth, Texas-based “Champion of the World” competition, a bovine version of Miss Universe where cows and bulls from different countries square off. But at 3 years old she hadn’t yet proven that her egg cells, when fertilized and implanted in a surrogate cow, would reliably produce offspring bearing her champion characteristics, said Pereira, an Internet executive who moved into elite cow breeding. He needed “a grand matriarch.”
Such cows cost so much that people buy and sell partial ownership, and Pereira’s company Napemo Agriculture paid several million reais (almost $800,000) in a 2022 auction for a 50 percent stake in Viatina-19. Another rancher kept the other half, so the two would jointly make important decisions and split revenues.
As the auctioneer banged his gavel, the speakers blasted Elvis Presley’s “Suspicious Minds.” For Pereira, a lifelong Elvis fanatic, it was a sign.
“It gave me butterflies in the stomach,” he said. “We were new breeders. It was a bit of boldness, a bit of feeling and a bit of heart, too.”
Last year, Pereira and the other owner put a 33 percent stake in the cow up at auction. One bidder paid 7 million reais ($1.3 million), making Viatina-19’s full value break the Guinness record.
INDIA TO BRAZIL
In Brazil, 80 percent of the cows are Zebus, a subspecies originating in India with a distinctive hump and dewlap, or folds of draping neck skin. Viatina-19 belongs to the Nelore breed, which is raised for meat, not milk, and makes up most of Brazil’s stock.
The first Zebus arrived in Brazil in the latter half of the 19th century and they proved far hardier than European stock. They coped well with the sweltering tropical heat, proved resistant to parasites and gained weight faster. A prizewinning Nelore bull named Karvardi arrived from India in 1963, and some breeders still preserve cryogenically frozen doses of his semen, according to Brazil’s Zebu association. Draped in traditional Indian vestments, Karvardi’s preserved body stands in the Zebu Museum in Uberaba, the city in Brazil’s agricultural heartland where Viatina-19 lives.
Uberaba holds an annual gathering called ExpoZebu that bills itself as the world’s biggest Zebu fair. Held several weeks ago, it was a far cry from the Brazil imagined abroad. The dress code was boots, baseball caps and blue jeans. Evening concerts drew 10,000 spectators belting out their favorite country songs. But the main attraction was the daily cattle shows. Ranchers came from as far away as Zimbabwe and Indonesia. Stockmen shaved cows’ ears and the bases of their horns — the equivalent of a fresh human haircut to charm show judges and win prizes that boost an animal’s auction price.
The most prestigious auction is called Elo de Raça, and Viatina-19 has been sold at increasingly higher prices there. Searchlights shooting into the night sky on April 28 summoned the hundreds fortunate enough to receive invitations. Arthur Lira, the speaker of Congress’ Lower House, drove in followed by a car with his security detail. He was set to offer his 3-month-old calf.
“The auctions always present the best of what each person has and that spreads to other people, other breeders, and the genetics evolve,” said Lira, who ranches in Brazil’s northeast.
As the first cow entered the paddock, speakers blared Queen’s “We Are the Champions.” But that cow was a mere appetizer before the auction of this year’s starlet, Donna, and three of her clones. The final sale price put her total value at 15.5 million reais ($3 million). Presenting Donna, the announcer said that each of the four produces 80 egg cells a month – quadruple an average Nelore – and called them “a factory.”
“Donna shows where we are with the Nelore breed and where we will go!” he shouted.
NEW MARKETS
Showstoppers like Donna and Viatina-19 are rarities in Brazil, where there are more than 230 million cows, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. It has the world’s largest beef cattle population, and that’s problematic; of the nation’s total greenhouse emissions, 86 percent are linked to its food production, mainly for beef and soy, according to a World Bank report published last month. Huge swaths of Amazon rainforest have been slashed to create pasture, releasing carbon stored in trees, and cows belch methane that’s far worse for the climate.
One of the best ways to cut livestock emissions is reducing cows’ age of slaughter, said Rodrigo Gomes, a beef cattle researcher at the government’s agricultural research corporation. Elite cows can gain weight fast enough to be slaughtered significantly younger.
Others say genetic improvements are helpful but limited ways to reduce warming. Simpler, more effective measures include planting better grass for grazing and regularly moving cattle from pasture to pasture, said Beto Veríssimo, an agronomist who co-founded an environmental nonprofit called Imazon. Productivity in Brazil could be at least three times higher, said Veríssimo, who sits on the consultation committee of meatpacking giant JBS’ Amazon fund. He receives no compensation.
Ranching is here to stay; it’s an economic engine in Brazil, which exported more than 2 million tons of beef in both 2022 and 2023, the most since records began in 1997. The overwhelming majority goes to developing nations, especially China, thanks to rising incomes that have put beef within reach. It’s partly why agriculture and livestock activity grew 3.6 percent from 2015 to 2023, compared to 0.8 percent for services and a contraction in industry of 0.6 percent, according to calculations by LCA Consultores based on official data.
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has been working to open new markets. Last month, Lula met Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan, home to the premium, marbled Wagyu beef; he urged his counterpart to taste Brazilian meat and become a believer.
“Please,” he said, addressing his vice president at the event, “take Prime Minister Fumio to eat steak at the best restaurant in Sao Paulo so that, the following week, he starts importing our beef.”
And in April, Lula visited one of the 38 Brazilian meatpacking plants that China authorized to send beef there. He boasted about the billions in revenue they will provide. Lula’s administration last month declared Brazil totally free of foot-and-mouth disease, saying it will request recognition from the World Organization for Animal Health in August. That would open the world’s more restrictive — and lucrative — markets to Brazilian beef, Vice President Geraldo Alckmin said at the time.
SEND IN THE CLONES
Just down the highway from the Elo de Raça auction stands what appears an ordinary farmhouse. But inside, employees in white coats extract DNA from cows’ tail hair and use it to create embryos. Behind that laboratory, sprawling hills of pasture are dotted with some 500 surrogates pregnant with clones.
“All those are rental bellies,” said Geneal Animal Genetics and Biotechnology’s commercial director, Paulo Cerantola, motioning to a hilltop herd as his truck rumbled along a dirt road.
It led to a stable beside a small pen where a cloned calf lay in the sunshine. Born the day before, it was still too unsure of its legs to stand, and a 2-day-old clone set an example by ambling about gamely. Another born 20 minutes earlier by cesarean section was huddled on hay in the rear of a stall, pressing backwards against the wall and unsettled by this strange new world.
Perhaps one-third of fetal clones survive; the pregnancies can fail or a clone can be born with deformities that require euthanasia, Cerantola said. Clones of Viatina-19 are due in a few months, he said.
But some ranchers wouldn’t even want a big herd of her clones. High-maintenance cows like Viatina-19 aren’t profitable on a commercial scale because they couldn’t meet their energy needs from grass alone, said P.J. Budler, a cattle judge and international business manager for Trans Ova Genetics, an Iowa-based company focused on improving the bovine gene pool.
“For the environment and the resources that it would take to run a cow like (Viatina-19), she fits the mold ideally, but she’s not the answer for all cattle everywhere,” he said.
Another Texas cattleman who traveled to ExpoZebu in 2023 to scope out the genetics scene was more critical, calling Viatina-19, and cows like her, “man-made freaks.”
“In my opinion, she needs a bullet in her head. She’s poison for the industry,” Grant Vassberg said by phone. “We still need cows to be efficient on grass. That’s how you feed the world.”
Viatina-19’s owner, Pereira, said she gets special treatment to boost egg cell production, but would thrive were she put to pasture — where almost all his elite cattle feed.
Meanwhile, Viatina-19 is pregnant for the first time, which helps maintain hormone cycles, Pereira said, and he’s eyeing expansion; her egg cells have sold to Bolivian buyers and he wants to export to the United Arab Emirates, India and the US.
“If she is the best in the world – not just her price, but I believe she is the world’s best – we need to share her around the world,” Pereira said.
His veterinarian daughter, Martins, is looking even farther ahead.
“I hope she is the basis for an even better animal in the future, decades from now,” she said.
Viatina-19, the world’s most expensive cow, is embodiment of Brazil’s beef export ambitions
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Viatina-19, the world’s most expensive cow, is embodiment of Brazil’s beef export ambitions
How a viral, duct-taped banana came to be worth $1 million
- Yellow banana fixed to the white wall with silver duct tape is a work entitled ‘Comedian,’ by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan
- It first debuted in 2019 as an edition of three fruits at the Art Basel Miami Beach fair, where it became a much-discussed sensation
NEW YORK: Walk into any supermarket and you can generally buy a banana for less than $1. But a banana duct-taped to a wall? That might sell for more than $1 million at an upcoming auction at Sotheby’s in New York.
The yellow banana fixed to the white wall with silver duct tape is a work entitled “Comedian,” by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. It first debuted in 2019 as an edition of three fruits at the Art Basel Miami Beach fair, where it became a much-discussed sensation.
Was it a prank? A commentary on the state of the art world? Another artist took the banana off the wall and ate it. A backup banana was brought in. Selfie-seeking crowds became so thick, “Comedian” was withdrawn from view, but three editions of it sold for between $120,000 and $150,000, according to Perrotin gallery.
Now, the conceptual artwork has an estimated value of between $1 million and $1.5 million at Sotheby’s auction on Nov. 20. Sotheby’s head of contemporary art, David Galperin, calls it profound and provocative.
“What Cattelan is really doing is turning a mirror to the contemporary art world and asking questions, provoking thought about how we ascribe value to artworks, what we define as an artwork,” Galperin said.
Bidders won’t be buying the same fruit that was on display in Miami. Those bananas are long gone. Sotheby’s says the fruit always was meant to be replaced regularly, along with the tape.
“What you buy when you buy Cattelan’s ‘Comedian’ is not the banana itself, but a certificate of authenticity that grants the owner the permission and authority to reproduce this banana and duct tape on their wall as an original artwork by Maurizio Cattelan,” Galperin said.
The very title of the piece suggests Cattelan himself likely didn’t intend for it to be taken seriously. But Chloé Cooper Jones, an assistant professor at the Columbia University School of the Arts, said it is worth thinking about the context.
Cattelan premiered the work at an art fair, visited by well-off art collectors, where “Comedian” was sure to get a lot of attention on social media. That might mean the art constituted a dare, of sorts, to the collectors to invest in something absurd, she said.
If “Comedian” is just a tool for understanding the insular, capitalist, art-collecting world, Cooper Jones said, “it’s not that interesting of an idea.”
But she thinks it might go beyond poking fun at rich people.
Cattelan is often thought of a “trickster artist,” she said. “But his work is often at the intersection of the sort of humor and the deeply macabre. He’s quite often looking at ways of provoking us, not just for the sake of provocation, but to ask us to look into some of the sort of darkest parts of history and of ourselves.”
And there is a dark side to the banana, a fruit with a history entangled with imperialism, labor exploitation and corporate power.
“It would be hard to come up with a better, simple symbol of global trade and all of its exploitations than the banana,” Cooper Jones said. If “Comedian” is about making people think about their moral complicity in the production of objects they take for granted, then it’s “at least a more useful tool or it’s at least an additional sort of place to go in terms of the questions that this work could be asking,” she said.
“Comedian” hits the block around the same time that Sotheby’s is also auctioning one of the famed paintings in the “Water Lilies” series by the French impressionist Claude Monet, with an expected value of around $60 million.
When asked to compare Cattelan’s banana to a classic like Monet’s “Nymphéas,” Galperin says impressionism was not considered art when the movement began.
“No important, profound, meaningful artwork of the past 100 years or 200 years, or our history for that matter, did not provoke some kind of discomfort when it was first unveiled,” Galperin said.
Palestinians turn to local soda in boycott of Israel-linked goods
- Chat Cola has tapped into Palestinians’ desire to shun brands perceived as too supportive of Israel
- The Palestinian economy’s dependence on Israeli products has made a broader boycott difficult
SALFIT, Palestinian Territories: In a red box factory that stands out among the drab hills of the West Bank, Chat Cola’s employees race to quench Palestinians’ thirst for local products since the Gaza war erupted last year.
With packaging reminiscent of Coca-Cola’s iconic red and white aluminum cans, Chat Cola has tapped into Palestinians’ desire to shun brands perceived as too supportive of Israel.
“The demand for (Chat Cola) increased since the war began because of the boycott,” owner Fahed Arar, said at the factory in the occupied West Bank town of Salfit.
Julien, a restaurateur in the city of Ramallah further south, said he has stocked his classic red Coca-Cola branded fridge with the local alternative since the war began in October last year.
Supermarket manager Mahmud Sidr described how sales of Palestinian products surged over the past year.
“We noticed an increase in sales of Arab and Palestinian products that do not support (Israel),” he said.
Although it does not supply Israeli troops in Gaza with free goods — as some US fast food brands have been rumored to — Coca-Cola is perceived as simply too American.
The United States provides enormous military assistance to Israel, aid that has continued through the devastating military campaign in Gaza that Israel launched in response to Hamas’s unprecedented attack of October 7, 2023.
Coca-Cola did not respond to a request for comment, but it says the company does not support religion nor “any political causes, governments or nation states.”
A manager of the National Beverage Company, the Palestinian firm bottling Coca-Cola in the Palestinian territories, said the company had not noticed the return of many products from local stores.
There was however a decline of up to 80 percent in the drink’s sales to foreign-named chains, said the manager, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“The national boycott movement has had a big impact,” Arar said.
Ibrahim Al-Qadi, head of the Palestinian economy ministry’s consumer protection department, said that 300 tons of Israeli products were destroyed over the past three months after passing their sell-by date for want of buyers.
The Palestinian economy’s dependence on Israeli products has made a broader boycott difficult and Chat Cola’s popularity partly stems from being one of the few quality Palestinian alternatives.
“There’s a willingness to boycott if the Palestinian producers can produce equivalently good quality and price,” the head of the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute, Raja Khalidi, said.
Khalidi said the desire for Palestinian substitutes has grown sharply since the war in Gaza began, but is stifled by “an issue of production capacity which we lack.”
A boycott campaign has been more successful in neighboring Arab states less dependent on Israeli goods.
In neighboring Jordan, the franchisee of French retail giant Carrefour, Dubai-based conglomerate Majid Al-Futtaim Group announced it was shutting down all its operations after activists called for a boycott.
Chat Cola’s Arar is proud of developing a quality Palestinian product.
Staff at the company’s Salfit factory wear sweaters emblazoned with the words “Palestinian taste” in Arabic and the Palestinian flag.
After opening the factory in 2019, Arar plans to open a new one in Jordan to meet international demand and avoid the complications of operating in the occupied West Bank.
Although the plant still turns out thousands of cans of Chat, one production line has been shut down for more than a month.
Israeli authorities have held up a large shipment of raw materials at the Jordanian border, hitting output, Arar said, adding he can meet only 10 to 15 percent of demand for his product.
As Arar spoke, Israeli air defenses intercepted a rocket likely launched from Lebanon, creating a small cloud in view of the plant.
But with war have come opportunities.
“There has never been the political support for buying local that there is now, so it’s a good moment for other entrepreneurs to start up,” economist Khalidi said.
Yoko Ono owns Lennon watch, Swiss court rules
- The highly rare Patek Philippe 2499 timepiece was given to the former Beatle on October 9, 1980 for his 40th birthday
- “Yoko Ono is the owner of John Lennon’s watch,” the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland ruled
GENEVA: Yoko Ono is the rightful owner of a watch she gifted to her husband John Lennon shortly before he was murdered, Switzerland’s supreme court ruled Thursday after it resurfaced at an auctioneers.
The highly rare Patek Philippe 2499 timepiece was given to the former Beatle on October 9, 1980 for his 40th birthday, two months before he was shot dead.
The 18-carat yellow gold Swiss watch was stolen and passed through various hands before a collector took it to a Geneva auction house for a valuation in 2014. The auctioneers contacted Ono, who did not know the watch was missing.
“Yoko Ono is the owner of John Lennon’s watch,” the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland ruled, as it dismissed the collector’s appeal against a judgment by the Geneva Cantonal Court of Justice.
Ono bought the watch in New York City in 1980 and had the back engraved with the inscription: “(JUST LIKE) STARTING OVER LOVE YOKO 10-9-1980 N.Y.C.”
Released in late October 1980, a few months after it was recorded, “(Just Like) Starting Over” was Lennon’s last single issued during his lifetime.
Lennon was shot dead outside the couple’s apartment building in New York on December 8, 1980. The watch was the last gift Ono gave Lennon before his murder.
The Patek Philippe was listed in the inventory of Lennon’s estate and was kept in a room in their apartment.
A Turkish man who had been Ono’s driver from 1995 to 2006, handed over the watch to an intermediate owner in 2010, along with 86 other items that had belonged to Lennon, court documents showed.
It was later handed to a German auction house, which sold it in 2014, for 600,000 euros, to an Italian collector living in Hong Kong.
The collector gave it to a Geneva auction house for a valuation later that year. They raised the alarm with Ono.
In 2018, the collector filed a court action seeking to establish his status as the watch’s owner, with Ono opposing the move.
In 2022 a Geneva lower court found Ono was the sole owner — a decision upheld on appeal in 2023 by the higher Geneva Cantonal Court of Justice.
The Italian collector then appealed to the Federal Supreme Court, which upheld the cantonal court decision.
The Supreme Court said it was not disputed that Ono had inherited the watch after Lennon’s death.
The Cantonal Court of Justice found that the watch “had been stolen by the former driver,” the Supreme Court said, adding that there was no evidence to show that Ono intended to donate “something as special as the watch,” with its particular inscription.
“Since it is a stolen item, the collector, now the appellant, could not acquire ownership of the watch” when he purchased it in 2014, and according to German law, this applies “regardless of whether or not the purchaser was in good faith as to the origin of the item.”
Lennon’s watch is being held by the Italian dealer’s lawyer, under an agreement that it can only be released to the owner designated by a state court.
It should therefore return to Ono, now 91.
Istanbul’s historic baths keep hammam tradition alive
- For centuries, hammams were central to Ottoman society, and while they fell out of use in Turkiye with the advent of running water
ISTANBUL: For centuries, hammams were central to Ottoman society, and while they fell out of use in Turkiye with the advent of running water, many are being restored to revive an ancient ritual bathing tradition.
Often featured in older Turkish films, hammam scenes are highly entertaining, with women not only bathing but enjoying these historical bathhouses as a place to socialize, eat, drink and even dance.
Last year, the 500-year-old Zeyrek Cinili Hammam — built during the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent by the celebrated Ottoman architect Sinan — reopened to the public after a painstaking 13-year restoration.
Alongside a functioning hammam, it also houses a museum explaining its history and the Ottoman ritual of bathing.
“The restoration somehow turned into an archaeological dig” that gave insight into how the hammam once looked, museum manager Beril Gur Tanyeli told AFP.
“Around 3,000 pieces of missing tiles were found which helped solve the puzzle of why this hammam was called Cinili” — Turkish for “covered with tiles.”
The beautiful Iznik tiles that once lined its walls were exclusively produced for the hammam, with no other bathhouse having such a rich interior, museum officials say.
Although most were damaged by fires or earthquakes, or sold off to European antique dealers in the 19th century, some are still visible.
The restoration also exposed several Byzantine cisterns beneath the hammam.
“Sinan the Architect is believed to have built the hammam on top of these cisterns to use them as a foundation and as a source of water,” Tanyeli said.
In ancient Rome, bathing culture was very important and it was “traditional for traders to wash before entering the city, especially in baths at the (city) entrance,” archaeologist Gurol Tali told AFP.
During the Ottoman empire, bathing culture had its golden age, with the ritual symbolising both bodily cleanliness and purity of soul.
In Islam, a Muslim must wash before praying, in an act known as ablution.
Hammams were also a place for celebrating births and weddings.
“Baths were used not only for cleansing the body but for socialising, relaxing, healing and even celebrating important life events,” with special rites for brides, soldiers and those who had undergone circumcision, Tali said.
Since households at the time did not have running water, hammams were an essential part of life until the 19th century, with census figures from 1638 showing there were 14,536 public and private baths in Istanbul, the museum says.
And that tradition has survived until today.
“You come here to get clean and leave handsome,” said Zafer Akgul, who was visiting one of the city’s hammams in the city with his son, telling AFP he visited often, particularly during religious feasts or for a wedding.
“We don’t want this tradition to die.”
That is where Istanbul’s ancient hammams can serve a bigger purpose, Tali said.
“Restoring historical baths in Istanbul and putting them to use may be the most effective way to transfer cultural heritage to future generations,” he said.
Another nearby bath house from the same era, the Beyazid II Hammam, underwent years of restoration and reopened as a museum in 2015.
One of the largest hammams in the city at the time, some historians believe it was where a notorious male bathing attendant, or “tellak,” called Halil plotted an uprising that in 1730 overthrew Sultan Ahmed III.
For Manolya Gokgoz, who does publicity for Cemberlitas Hammam, another 16th-century bathhouse built by the royal architect Sinan, the connection is more personal: her grandmother worked there as a “natir” — a woman’s bathing attendant.
“When I was two or three years old, I would go to the baths in the morning, wash and play by myself until the evening without getting bored,” she told AFP.
For Gokgoz, the tradition lives on — although mostly among tourists, which for her is a shame.
“In the past, we used to go to the hammam with our mothers and grandmothers. Now 70 percent of our customers are foreign tourists and 30 percent locals,” she said.
These days, the hammam experience — which lets bathers relax in hot, warm or cool pools alongside extras like massages or peeling — is quite expensive, with the basic service costing around $100.
Celebrities, both Turkish and international, often visit Cemberlitas, with the last being Spanish actor Pedro Alonso — the character Berlin in the Netflix hit “Money Heist” — who visited in September.
“Hammam is not a luxury, but a need,” Gokgoz said.
“Yes, it’s not like in the past because we have hot water at our fingertips, but we need to keep this tradition alive.”
John Krasinski named People magazine’s ‘sexiest man alive’
- The actor was especially excited to tell Blunt the news, saying “there was a lot of joy involved in me telling her“
Actor and director John Krasinski was named People magazine’s “sexiest man alive” for 2024 on Wednesday, taking over the mantle from “Grey’s Anatomy” actor Patrick Dempsey.
“Just immediate blackout, actually. Zero thoughts,” Krasinski told People in reaction to the news. The actor is perhaps best known for his sardonic nice guy role in the television comedy “The Office.”
“Other than maybe I’m being punked. That’s not how I wake up, thinking, ‘Is this the day that I’ll be asked to be Sexiest Man Alive?’ And yet it was the day you guys did it. You guys have really raised the bar for me,” he added.
Krasinski, 45, said that out of all of the opportunities he’s had as an actor, being a real-life family man is most rewarding.
He prefers being a husband and father who happily lives in Brooklyn with his wife of 14 years, actress Emily Blunt, 41, and their daughters Hazel, 10, and Violet, 8.
The actor was especially excited to tell Blunt the news, saying “there was a lot of joy involved in me telling her.”
Blunt joked that she plans to wallpaper their house with the cover of Krasinski if he received the title.
“It’s that beautiful thing where when you’re married to someone, you’re constantly learning and changing and evolving,” he said.
“And I’m so lucky to go through all that with her,” he added.
Recently, Krasinski has directed the comedy “IF” and the dramas “A Quiet Place” and “A Quiet Place Part II,” both featuring Blunt in a leading role.
However, he noted that the new title will change things very little around the house.
“I think it’s going to make me do more household chores,” he joked.
The announcement is included in this link: http://people.com/sexiestmanalive
