This month, Netflix is releasing a film with a very famous movie star who has had some of the most egregious plastic surgery I’ve ever seen on a man. This actor has been around for a few decades now, but his face is comparatively newborn. His cheeks are fuller. His jaw is unusually square. His skin bears an uncanny shine. Because of how we’ve been conditioned to talk and not talk about celebrity “tweakments”, I cannot name this man, nor the film he’s in. But when you and your family are huddled around the TV this Christmas and watching one of the streaming platform’s key Oscar hopefuls, at least a few of you will probably ask the same thing: “Has he had something done?”
To watch a modern movie or television show is to watch a sea of often identikit faces that have been pulled, tweaked and injected. It is distracting and regularly incongruous, clashing with what we already know about characters (is no one going to talk about the Marvel superhero who seemed to get an enormous jaw implant between sequels?), and sometimes it’s historically inaccurate, too (they had Botox and fillers in the era of Oppenheimer? Who knew?!).
