I meant to note this months ago, when the annual Attitude Youth Issue first surfaced, but somehow I didn’t. That doesn’t mean that the pictures of cover boy Ed Speleers, star of adventure dud Eragon, are not noteworthy. I’m deeply ashamed to admit that I caught it in its theatrical run back in 2006, but the reason was not Speleers, so much as his co-star, Home and Away alumni Chris Egan. To my deep disappointment Egan’s role is very minor (in fact he holds a grand total of 10 minutes of screentime), and after that, I was stuck with 70 more minutes of this utterly unimpressive tweenybopper dragonfest. Back then, Speleers simply couldn’t save my day.

He’s closer this time around, probably because I don’t have to bear with his severely limited acting skills. Not even the Attitude shot catapults him onto my 20 Sexiest Males Alive list, but he sure is growing up to be a nice-looking man. Several of the pictures really gets out the best of him, and you can tell that he has modeled before. The shirtless shot reveals a chest to die for, and also between the less daring ones, he gives out a certain glow of apparent hunkiness. His boyish face does him no harm either, especially in the picture in the white sweater. And I didn’t know that a guys calves could be this hot!

However boyish, his face is also the feature that sometimes makes me write him off as good looking, but not decidedly sexy. When he puts up a serious look he has me melting, but there is something about his smile that makes him seem almost too old for his age. His face looks akwardly strained, and he kind of reminds me of Haley Joel Osment, who can be cute at times as well, only to dip into his The World’s Oldest Teen look. On average, however, they both come out on the upper end of the grade scale.