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The premiere, immediate reception, and eventual reappraisal of the film Zoolander is kind of fascinating, especially for a mostly harmless, aggressively silly 90-minute comedy in which Owen Wilson says the phrase "dera-lick my balls, capitán." Zoolander arrived a mere two weeks after September 11, 2001, and history shows this fashion industry spoof wherein a male model (Ben Stiller, who also directed) is brainwashed to assassinate the Prime Minister of Malaysia was not the balm this country needed to start healing. Instead, the film was pretty much savaged to pieces, with Roger Ebert famously going so hard he eventually apologized to Stiller. ("There have been articles lately asking why the United States is so hated in some parts of the world," his review started. "As this week's Exhibit A from Hollywood, I offer Zoolander.") But, as these things usually go, a combination of mild box office success, the home video market, and a script that's endlessly easy to quote gained Zoolander a cult following, a belated sequel, and the type of beloved pop culture ingratiation that leads to big retrospectives on its 20th anniversary.
I'd like to make one thing very clear: Absolutely none of this information popped into my head when I learned Zoolander was turning 20. Instead, as I have done every single day for the past 20 years, I thought of Billy Zane's roughly three-and-a-half-minute cameo in this film, which remains a crystalline snapshot of a specific moment in time, a genuinely hilarious encapsulation of where we were in the year 2001 so pure I cannot even think of it without Lifehouse's "Hanging By a Moment" blasting from every speaker in a 10-mile radius. Sweet baby Zane, it's perfect.
I'm obsessed with the flawless comedy that is Billy Zane's 180-ish seconds of screentime in Zoolander for the same reason I'm obsessed with any perfect joke, which is to say any explanation for why it's funny is less interesting than the fact it just is. Billy Zane is just one of many cameos in this film—David Bowie is probably the most memorable, but that's because David Bowie is the most memorable part of literally anything David Bowie is even tangentially involved in—and exists mostly to try and dissuade his friend Derek Zoolander (Stiller) from getting into a walk-off with young hotshot model Hansel (Wilson). "Listen to your friend Billy Zane," Hansel says. "He's a cool dude."
Billy Zane is a cool dude. He made his first significant screen debut as Background Goon #3 in two Back to the Future films, but really gained notoriety as an absolute psychopath in the Australian high-seas horror, Dead Calm, alongside Sam Neill and Nicole Kidman. From there, it was a string of extremely interesting, if not always successful genre roles, from the ill-advised cult comic book film The Phantom, to a brief recurring pitstop in that part of Twin Peaks season 2 that everyone skips, to a henchman of literal Satan in the absolute classic, Tales From the Crypt Presents: Demon Knight, all leading to a little film titled Titanic. By now, you're well aware James Cameron's box office-breaking disaster film saw Zane play Caledon Hockley, a role for which he should have won an Oscar almost solely for his delivery of the line "I hope you enjoy your time together." (Titanic was also egregiously snubbed for a Best Makeup and Hairstyling win strictly for that one strand of Cal's hair that flops out while he's trying to commit tiny handgun murder in the bowels of a sinking ship.) Simply put, that's almost a solid decade of audiences dealing with what makes Billy Zane a compelling on-screen presence; it's a push-pull scenario, a Brad Pitt-esque dilemma, the fact that Billy Zane is a wonderfully committed character actor inside a body that looks like, well, a male model.
Which rounds us right back to Zoolander, premiering a short four years after Titanic and making pitch-perfect use of what Billy Zane, Billy Zane at that moment. Because, yeah, a man named Billy Zane who looks like Billy Zane absolutely would hang out in a swanky male model club making a plain grey Hanes tee look like it's worth $10,000. But then Billy Zane is called upon to deliver three lines of dialogue, and he snaps into character actor mode. "I heard some mad stories about this kid," he tells Zoolander. "He’s limber. He’s too limber."
It's "he's too limber" that absolutely kills me, the entire backstory of a B-level that-guy actor attuned to the whispers and rumors of the underground male modeling circuit apparent in how hard Zane sells those three words. It's the mark of a perfect cameo, a top-tier support guy coming off the bench and delivering a solid hit; the joke is that he's there, the punchline is he's doing a fantastic job.
The tragedy of the Billy Zane Zoolander Cameo is that it's kind of his last major big-screen appearance for several decades. Not that he hasn't been thriving through video game voice work, art exhibits, and the fact he's Billy goddamn Zane. And not that he doesn't still understand his presence. He did, in fact, return for Zoolander 2 as Billy Zane. He popped up shortly afterward in 2018's Holmes & Watson as Billy Zane. A year later, he appeared in two episodes of The Boys as [checks notes] Billy Zane. As long as Billy Zane is still willing to briefly appear as himself in an average of 1-3 projects every five years, pop culture will never die.