One of Hollywood’s most time-honored traditions is praising actors in recognition of the physical transformation required for certain roles. The awards come flooding in, as do vague references to Stanislavski’s method, and the clickbaity headlines set the internet ablaze: Matthew McConaughey packs on 40lb for his turn as a gold-miner! Christian Bale ate a single can of tuna a day for The Machinist! Cameron Diaz uglies up in Being John Malkovich!
Watching the spectacle of celebrity mutation excites us both as gossip-mongers and moviegoers, since we appreciate dedication to craft as much as we do a grainy on-set photo of Matthew McConaughey cradling his pot-belly like a stray dog he’s just encountered.
But just as often as these good-looking people make themselves less so in the name of art, actors are cast as substantially less attractive real-life people and don’t undergo the same bodily metamorphosis. CGI, hair and makeup go a long way, but for every Charlize Theron-as-Aileen Wuornos or Robert De Niro-as-Jake LaMotta, there are times where we’re asked to accept a character as “ugly” because their hair is frizzy or their teeth imperfect. But let’s face it: sometimes, by no fault of their own, actors are simply too attractive for the role.
This came to mind when the former Disney Channel star Ross Lynch played Jeffrey Dahmer last year, and when Zac Efron was cast as Ted Bundy in an upcoming biopic, and when Margot Robbie channeled Tonya Harding, and, most recently, as Taylor Kitsch and Darren Criss appear, respectively, in the new series Waco as Branch Davidian cult leader David Koresh, and as serial killer Andrew Cunanan in The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story.
In Waco, Kitsch tries to expunge himself of Friday Night Lights heartthrob Tim Riggins to play Koresh, pseudo-prophet, alleged sexual abuser, and leader of the Branch Davidian religious movement. Kitsch plays the part formidably, but you can’t help but wonder how Waco would look if the camera weren’t so enamored by its lead, who broods and smizes so frequently it’s as if he’s been conditioned to play up his looks. Then you remember it’s Kitsch, and he probably has been.
Although he shares something of a resemblance to Andrew Cunanan, Darren Criss’s performance in Versace is similarly gratuitous in the way only an excessively handsome person could make it, and the end result is a particularly doe-eyed brand of menace. I’ll hold off on any pre-emptive judgment of Efron’s turn in the new Joe Berlinger-directed Bundy biopic, but I’m not optimistic about that one, either.
Hollywood is of course a business, one that’s in the business of prettification; often, our enjoyment of its product is incumbent on our suspension of disbelief. But that becomes more difficult with biopics, particularly those concerning subjects of ill repute. When serial killers and cult leaders and disgraced figure skaters are made more attractive – read: packaged for box office consumption – than they really were, is something lost in the process? Are the films forcing upon us a redemptive arc that hasn’t been earned?
First, let’s look at the scholarship: there are, to put it mildly, competing schools of thought among academics about the conflation of beauty with evil. In a 1998 essay, the philosopher Mary Devereaux looked at the case of Leni Reifenstahl’s 1935 film Triumph of the Will, regarded by most cineastes as one of the most important, visually engrossing films ever made and, also, a heinous lionization of Adolf Hitler and the Nuremberg rallies (pardon the obeisance to Godwin’s Law).
Devereaux argued that the film’s valuable insofar as it makes you question the Platonic notion that beauty and moral goodness proceed from one another.
“Indeed, one of the most shocking things about Triumph of the Will is that it so clearly demonstrates that beauty and goodness can come apart,” she wrote, “not just in the relatively simple sense that moral and aesthetic evaluation may diverge, but in the more frightening sense that it is possible for art to render evil beautiful.” Some scholars are purists, and others still feel that the moral can’t be divorced from the aesthetic, and that the gussying up of reprehensible people amounts to a reappraisal, a muddying of the ethical waters.
Triumph of the Will is of course a loftier, more high-stakes case study than the ones at hand; Hollywood has so far stopped short of casting a preternatural beauty to play Hitler. But there’s something to be said about the industry’s insistence on endearing us to crummy people by making them sexy. If it’s not manipulative and cynical, it is disingenuous; these casting decisions are oriented around bankability, not believability.
In the best-case scenario, the performance, like Robbie’s in I, Tonya, is still gutsy and commendable, even as the film itself lazily deploys scrunchy hairbands and braces to sell its version of Harding (her ex-husband Jeff Gillooly also gets a not-insignificant sprucing up at the hands of the uber-handsome Sebastian Stan). At worst, they result in tone-deaf marketing, like how Jennifer Aniston, in Cake, was meant to be “ugly”.
“This isn’t about culling conventionally attractive people from your TV screens,” wrote Lindy West in a Jezebel piece called Why We Need More Ugly People on TV. “It’s not about telling you who you ‘can’ and ‘can’t’ find attractive. It’s about decoupling women’s value from their desirability, and embracing the idea that people are more complicated than that.”
Maybe this is why, when we talk about the lengths actors go for roles, the reverse facelifts they execute in the name of authenticity, we so readily wax poetic about their commitment and artistic zeal. Because, most of the time, studios are actually quite lazy in this regard. It’s a point of fact that when we watch a movie or television show the actors therein are considerably better-looking than us laymen. But Ted Bundy was no centerfold, and it seems just a bit unscrupulous to reimagine him as one.
