Where have all the faces gone?
What happens when character actors no longer have any character?
I was watching Richard Linklater’s latest Hit Man the other week, an enjoyable bit of silliness that I’ll probably forget I saw in a year or so. I hadn’t been sold on Glenn Powell as a leading man, and had initially written him off as another Jai Courtney or Sam Worthington1, human fetches Hollywood tried to make happen, and then just as quickly gave up on when they didn’t take. But I’m not averse to admitting when I’m wrong, and it turns out that Glenn Powell is charming and likable, and his performance in Hit Man won me over.
There’s just one problem. He’s too good-looking.
Now, I have no problem objectifying attractive people. I enjoy looking at beautiful works of art just as much as anyone else. But, there’s a point when a person can be too attractive, and the uncanny valley effect kicks in. For some performances, like, say, Michael Fassbender in Prometheus, it makes sense: his character is literally an android. But in Hit Man Powell is just playing a regular guy, a shy, nerdy philosophy teacher who occasionally does undercover work for the local police department.
Slicking down his hair and wearing Jeffrey Dahmer aviator glasses does nothing to change the fact that Powell looks like the result of someone typing “handsome blonde actor” into an A.I. generator. His razor-sharp jawline, muscular physique, and blindingly white, straight teeth don’t evoke “unassuming dork who only gains confidence in himself by pretending to be someone else.” Glenn Powell emerged from the womb full of confidence, and probably flashing tiny finger guns at the nurses. He looks like someone who won “Best Looking (Male)” in his middle school yearbook, and it’s all been uphill ever since.
Conversely, Donald Sutherland died last week, and a number of articles noted his “unconventional” looks, which seems like a polite way of saying “ugly for an actor.” This was puzzling to me. Though he had many questionable hairstyles in movies over the years (the disco perm in Invasion of the Body Snatchers immediately comes to mind), I would have never considered Donald Sutherland to be unattractive. Gangly, awkward, occasionally spooky, sure, but not ugly. Interesting would have been a better way to describe him. He had a presence and an accessibility that always made him watchable, whereas actors like Glenn Powell are more to be admired, like a painting or a sculpture.
Sutherland’s leading man era was the 70s, the peak decade for character actors with real, lived-in faces. That was a unique period with actors who looked like they could have also been the guy reading your meter, or sitting at the counter of a diner that serves the worst coffee you’ve ever tasted. People like Walter Matthau, James Caan, Robert Shaw, Roy Scheider, John Cassavetes, Charles Durning, Kenneth McMillan, Ben Gazzara, John Cazale. Even the undeniable stone foxes, like a young Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel, still had a rough realness to them. These guys didn’t look like they were created by a team of scientists and grown in a laboratory.
Our contemporary interesting faces, like Steve Buscemi and Willem Dafoe, are starting to get up there in age. Philip Seymour Hoffman, the king of modern-era character actors with real faces, is tragically no longer with us. The lion’s share of “regular guy” roles are going to Paul Giamatti and Adam Driver, but they can’t do it all. Michael Shannon might be a little too weird. So instead, we get half-hearted attempts at giving actors like Glenn Powell and Dan Stevens (who looks like he was genetically designed specifically to play Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights) bad haircuts and unflattering glasses, as if it does anything but make them look like they’re wearing Halloween costumes.
We still have actors like John Hawkes, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Tim Blake Nelson, I suppose, but none of them are carrying an entire movie, nor are they young. There might be hope for Barry Keoghan, who constantly looks like he’s recovering from a bar fight, and Jesse Plemons, although he walks a very, very thin line between being unconventionally attractive, and just plain old attractive. While they do stand out in an era of ethereal fauns like Timothee Chalamet, living Ken dolls like Jacob Elordi, or Dickensian chimney sweeps like Mike Faist, I still don’t think I’d buy either of them playing New Jersey bus drivers like Adam Driver, or a curmudgeonly file clerk, like Paul Giamatti.
I blame the advent of HD television and movie screens. In such an unforgiving format, you can’t even have visible pores, let alone facial scars or crooked teeth. Normal people have scars, and blemishes, and wonky eyes, and crow’s feet, but your average actor today has a face so smooth it looks like it was sculpted out of Silly Putty. It’s a little eerie and depressing, and you’ll note that I’m not even getting into the state of actresses’ faces and how many of them now look like praying mantises thanks to that buccal fat removal shit, which should be illegal.
Let’s do a little speculative exercise: if they were to make Jaws today, who would be cast as the three leads? Who is best suited to play a small-town sheriff who’s had enough of your bullshit, a nerdy marine biologist, and a salty sea cap’n who’s also had enough of your bullshit? Maybe they could put some wire-frame glasses on Austin Butler and give him a perm to play Matt Hooper, why not? We don’t come to the movies for realism, after all. However, I would like to go to the movies and not think that our robot overlords are already here, and they are super hot.
Yes, I’m aware that Sam Worthington is in the Avatar movies and doing just fine, but also I doubt that anyone can name anything Sam Worthington has been in besides the Avatar movies, or that anyone sees the Avatar movies because Sam Worthington is in them.
When the students in Hit Man turned to each other and said, "Since when did our professor get HOT?" I burst out laughing. He was hot since minute one!