Why Hollywood’s Most Beautiful Stars Keep Cosplaying As Ordinary People

It has been 48 hours since I watched “Digger,” and all I can say is I have never seen anything like it and hope never to again. In fact, I’m not sure if I will be able to go to another Tom Cruise movie. Let’s just say that “Top Gun 3” had better be exceptional.

What follows here is not so much a review of “Digger” as a reflection on what might have motivated Cruise — after all that goodwill he had accumulated with “Top Gun: Maverick” and the “Missions Impossible” — to lend his star power to such a dire movie. Cinematic talking heads claim this is Cruise’s bid to win an Oscar. However, could it be that in his choice to don “ugly-face,” Tom Cruise is also mocking us, his audience, made up of ordinary people who are not blessed with his level of beauty?

That was certainly my view watching Cruise play the fat and charmless Les Grossman in 2008’s “Tropic Thunder.” I know it was supposed to be funny, but I confess I didn’t get the joke. I like my satire to be more subtle than Cruise’s blatant mocking of those who were not born as beautiful as he (aside from those unfortunate teeth, that is). Cruise seems to want to have his cake and eat it, in his donning of outlandish prosthetics to give himself a fat belly and jowly face for “Digger,” all the while showing us his chiseled abs and what appears to be a plastic surgery-enhanced face while promoting the movie. What is going on here? 

Now, we all know that actors are emotionally like children, and children love to play dress-up. The pattern of ridiculously beautiful people who owe their careers as much to their looks as to their talent taking pleasure in performatively playing ugly people does have a “look at me, look at me” quality to it. Insult is added to injury when said actors divest themselves of their prosthetics and makeup and expect to be applauded for their bravery and artistic “integrity” in permitting themselves to cosplay as ordinary people for a while.

It is one of Hollywood’s self-evident truths that beautiful actors need to “ugly up” to win awards. Charlize Theron famously gained weight, used brown contact lenses and fake yellow teeth, and applied disfiguring prosthetics to play serial killer Aileen Wuornos in 2003’s “Monster,” for which she won an Oscar. Nicole Kidman applied a prosthetic nose to become Virginia Woolf and win her Oscar for 2002’s “The Hours.” Leonardo DiCaprio had to get mauled by a bear for his Oscar.

This pattern of gorgeous and glossy Hollywood actors needing to play gritty and unglamorous to become Oscar-worthy is probably most hilariously illustrated by Kate Winslet’s Academy Award in 2009 for playing a frumpy Nazi camp guard in “The Reader.” Winslet’s success had been predicted by Ricky Gervais four years earlier in his TV comedy “Extras,” where Winslet gives a speech bemoaning how only films about the Holocaust win people Oscars. 

These performances are presented as acts of artistic humility but feel more like acts of vanity. When an ordinary-looking actor plays an ugly character — Steve Buscemi, for example — nobody notices. But when Tom Cruise does it, the whole exercise depends upon our remembering how handsome he really is. It is a peculiarly heightened form of showing off. Cruise is not simply asking us to admire his acting. He is asking us to admire his rejection of his own beauty. 

Yet it all raises a curious paradox. Why do beautiful actors so often want to be seen as ugly, while biographical films so often want ordinary-looking heroes to be seen as beautiful? This is not always the case: HBO’s 2008 miniseries on John Adams cast “character actor” Paul Giamatti in the titular role rather than a more conventionally handsome leading man. Yet historical films routinely beautify their subjects, replacing ordinary-looking reformers or politicians with implausibly attractive actors.

An example is last year’s “The Testament of Ann Lee,” a deeply weird but also beautiful film about Ann Lee, the founder of the religious sect known as the Shakers. No reliable portrait of Ann Lee exists, and the only engraving we have was done by a clairvoyant nearly 90 years after her death. A contemporary description of her, however, states: “Mother Ann Lee was a woman of a strong constitution, rather exceeding the ordinary size of women; rather thick but very straight and well-proportioned in form.” Another account describes “a woman of low stature, thick made, and of a masculine appearance.” Yet the filmmakers decided to go with the elfin and doll-like beauty of Amanda Seyfried to portray her on the big screen. 

Hero of the U.K.’s abolitionist movement William Wilberforce is another historical figure given a Hollywood glow-up for his biographical movie “Amazing Grace.” His sons remembered Wilberforce as a small man, “little exceeding five feet four inches in height,” whose eyes possessed an “overpowering brightness.” Another contemporary summary states: “His frame from infancy was feeble, his stature small, his eyes weak,” while another describes him as “the little person, with the mild voice and winning manners.” One physical feature stands out here. Yet rather than picking up the phone and calling a Tobey Maguire, or a Tom Hollander, or even a Tom Cruise, the casting directors went with six foot tall, gorgeous Ioan Gruffudd. “Amazing Grace” is a fabulous, inspiring movie, and Gruffudd a charismatic leading man, but why did the casting directors not pick someone who more physically resembled Wilberforce?

Human beings seem always to have assumed that beauty and goodness belong together. Our oldest stories are full of handsome princes, radiant queens, noble knights, and beautiful maidens, while evil is marked by crooked noses, warts, and physical deformity. The witch is ugly because she is wicked; the hero is attractive because he is good. We instinctively want outward appearance to reveal inward character. Beauty suggests harmony, vitality, and wholeness, while ugliness hints at disorder and corruption. Even when experience teaches us otherwise, we continue to read faces as though they were moral texts. We know intellectually that virtue and beauty are not the same thing, yet some part of us still expects the morally good person to look good and the bad person to look bad.

Might we, the viewing audience, therefore be complicit in this strange elevation of outward appearance when it comes to historical figures? Does Hollywood beautify heroes because we demand it? It is true that we reward the tall politician, the handsome newsreader, and the job candidate with perfect teeth and excellent hair. We profess to care about character yet constantly mistake appearance for competence.

The classic 1987 movie “Broadcast News” is a brilliant exposé of how humans respond better to beautiful faces regardless of what might be going on, or not going on, behind that exterior. William Hurt plays aspiring TV news anchor Tom Grunick, whose extreme good looks are in contrast to his lack of brains, education, or journalistic curiosity. Fellow newsman Aaron Altman, played by Albert Brooks, is more intelligent and better educated, yet he does not have the looks to succeed in front of the camera. When Tom asks the understandably resentful Aaron, who desperately wants the anchor job his homely appearance will never grant him: “What do you do when your real life exceeds your dreams?” Aaron wisely responds: “Keep it to yourself.” 

Tom’s seeming lack of awareness of the pivotal role genetic luck played in his career success rankles Aaron, who has had to earn his professional achievements the hard way. Returning to Hollywood, it is no secret that exceptional actors are routinely denied roles because they are deemed not sufficiently attractive. Which is why the self-congratulatory application of prosthetics by the beautiful stars feels somehow offensive. It is a form of aesthetic tourism: a privilege available only to those who can safely shed their ugliness at the end of the shoot to return to magazine covers and red carpets. The rest of us do not get to remove the costume. Therefore, a little more humility next time, please, Mr. Cruise — and a little less prosthetic posturing.

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Bridget Riley studied modern history at Oxford and completed a Ph.D. in medieval history at the University of Reading. She writes on history, culture, and the philosophy of religion.

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