What is rizz, anyway? Rizz is the breeze in my hair on the weekend. At the beginning of 2023, Spider-Man actor Tom Holland was asked if he had rizz. To bring in another new-world slang, rizz can also be defined as the ability to “pull” what are called “baddies” or attractive people. If you “rizzed” this attractive person well, you would go down in legend as someone who “bagged the baddie”. If you failed, you would have “fumbled a baddie”. There are memes of Cillian Murphy’s emaciated face from Oppenheimer with the caption “What fumbling a baddie does to a MF”. Murphy looks sad and regretful. He thinks of bombing the world that didn’t let him enjoy a day in the sun. In the film, Murphy’s character fumbled a “baddie”, played by Florence Pugh. There is a nice scene where both of them sit buck-naked on perfectly innocent leather couches and talk about life. Back to Tom Holland, who is taking a sabbatical from acting and will return maybe next year. One could say he “bagged” Zendaya, who is his girlfriend and also a revelatory talent onscreen, and for some people that would mean Tom has “rizz”. One could easily say it is Tom Holland who’s the baddie here. In a clip I make my friends watch often, Zendaya and Tom are giving press interviews for a movie about arachnids, and the Euphoria star keeps interrupting the interviewer with silly jokes to make Tom laugh. Now that is rizz. Being unembarrassed in the face of passion is rizz like no other.
Come June 2023, Holland was modest and said he had “limited” rizz. This is unfathomable. And it was a reason for concern. It was picked up by the internet then, and months later, a venerated dictionary has to succumb to the pressures of internet culture. “Nepo baby” is a term everyone in India knows about, given the onslaught of comments under each Instagram photo that star kids post, even extending to newly-minted ones yet to show their colours in debut films. One can’t stomach hating toddlers this much. Yet, all nepo baby discourse pales in comparison to what New York magazine unleashed late last year, informally called the Nepo Baby Issue, where we discovered that Rooney Mara’s family owned a baseball team, maybe two baseball teams.
Pete Davidson has undeniable rizz. He’s a depressive funny guy who has been rumoured to subsist mainly on a diet of dates, being linked to Ariana Grande, Kate Beckinsale, Emily Ratajkowski, Kaia Gerber (whose parents wished their relationship would “fizzle out”, to success), Kim Kardashian, and the list grows longer. While researching, I came across respectful discussion boards on Reddit, to the tune of “what the hell is rizz?”, “The Term Rizz is Garbage and No One Should Use It”, and “Am I the only one who f**king hates the term “rizz”?”, but I disagree. Rizz is the modern fount of attractiveness and smooth charm. It captures the transitory, fleeting feeling of flirtation like none other. To say one has “game” is impolite to people who don’t like sports. To say someone has “swag” is to catch them red-handed taking a selfie in 2023. To say someone is “cool” is very 40-years-old. To say one has “drip” invites suspicious looks. “Rizz”, then, is the perfect embodiment of all that is unsaid about being maxed out on those hotness metrics. One can understand by example.
