The Internet Is Freaking Out About This Video Of Henry Cavill Building A PC
Look! There, at the table! It's a hardcore gamer, it's a tech-savvy actor, it's... Supergeek!
The internet is losing its collective mind over a video tweeted by MTV UK, in which actor Henry Cavill — who has portrayed Superman across three films in the DC Extended Universe, and who currently stars as Geralt of Rivia on the hit Netflix series The Witcher — builds what looks like one heck of a butt-kicking gaming PC from the ground up. The video, captioned "5 minute 26 second meditation video brought to you by Henry Cavill's arms building a PC from scratch," currently has nearly 18,000 likes. While it does actually feature the entirety of Cavill and not just his arms, you might not know it by some of the comments.
What might ordinarily be a regular, boring, old tech video takes on a whole new dimension. Cavill, in a tank top that looks to be about two sizes too small, somehow manages to look at once like your neighbor Larry from down the street and like the ultra-chiseled Hollywood star that he is. To the dulcet tones of Barry White, the actor pores over instructions, labors into the night, and hits a roadblock; he then takes a day off ("Had some gaming to do" a title card explains) before returning to finish up his build a day or so later. Sharp-eyed viewers will notice that after the break, he's still wearing the same tank top (must have been some intense gaming), but even though he can probably smell himself, Cavill diligently puts the finishing touches on his build before triumphantly booting it up.
"The End — or, more realistically, just the beginning," reads the concluding title card. What's that supposed to mean? Why is Henry Cavill even building a hardcore gaming rig to begin with? We are so glad you asked.
Henry Cavill's tech skills shouldn't be a surprise
We weren't just kidding about the "hardcore gamer" thing — the label fits Cavill (better than his tank top, anyway). There's a reason why he was chosen to star on The Witcher, one of the more successful video game adaptations ever. Cavill is an avid gamer, and he revealed in a December 2019 interview that his obsession at that particular time was the Sega strategy game Total War: Warhammer II, which he had played through a mind-boggling six times. As for the Witcher series, the star also divulged that he had indeed completed its most popular entry, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — a pretty significant accomplishment, considering that the game boasts up to 100 hours of gameplay. Oh, yeah — and Cavill finished it twice.
Later that same month, the actor appeared on The Rich Eisen Show, describing his digs and gaming setup pretty much exactly as it appears in the video. "I don't have a man cave," Cavill said. "I've got a small mews house in London — what a mews is, it's like an old stables, and they've been converted into houses over the years — and it's not huge. So my computer desk is in my very small living room, and it's just at the end there. That's it. Nothing special" (via PC Gamer).
Cavill also mentioned that he rarely watches pro gamers online, because that would cut into his own gaming time — so you know that in order to take on a custom PC build, he must have had a pretty severe need for an upgrade. Half of the internet can relate, and while they did turn out to comment on the video, the other half just wanted to talk about his arms, because those things are massive.
What is the internet saying about Henry Cavill's custom PC build?
A typical response came from Twitter user @OshinHaans, who tweeted, "Those arms... I wanna touch them just for once. Please God. Amen." Others were a bit more subtle, like user @dodgytriangles, who tweeted, "How do I save this video to my phone?!?! Asking for a friend... honest." Incidentally, it's a testament to the number of tech geeks who must have viewed this video that while this tweet was obviously meant as a joke, the user received a slew of earnest, helpful responses.
Speaking of tech geeks, more than a few of them weighed in on Cavill's build, as well (his PC build, not his physical build). User @jaysjeopardy tweeted, "How big of a hard drive you think he has? 5 [terabytes]? I'm also curious how many gigs of RAM he'd be happy with. The thing is so beautiful inside I want to dance in there!" We concur, although some others were not quite so impressed. "I'm just trying to see what parts he picked out.. sigh," tweeted @iLadySwoop. "I see maybe a ROG Predator monitor, and RTX something, Looks like G. Skill and Ryzen." Well, we suppose even Cavill can't wow everybody.
The winning comment, though (in our humble opinion), came from user @nicolejooon, who brought both sides of the commentary together in one fell swoop. "Ok as a daughter of a scientist I was around plenty of engineers who could build computers in my childhood," she tweeted, "but none of them looked like this." On behalf of all of us here at Looper, Mr. Cavill, thank you for breaking the internet — we needed a little breather.