I wish more ugly actors were cast in movies/TV.

Bear with me on this one.

I'm not here to rag on the fact that every leading man/woman in Hollywood is attractive, let your main characters be as attractive as they like. My point pertains more to characters who should be repulsive to look at. Characters who we are told are ugly by the show/film, yet don't really look all that bad.

This thought was sparked when I saw a photo of Pennywise in the upcoming IT remake. He's just incredibly attractive. He looks like an attractive dude in face paint, because he is, It's Bill Skarsgard. He also looks far too young. It just isn't frightening, especially when compared to Tim Curry's version of the character.

Tim Curry played the character like a skinny John Wayne Gacy, whereas Bill Skarsgard's rendition looks like that weird guy at school who collects knives. Now, I do understand that in motion he might be incredible, so I'll take this all back if he's totally kills the role, but right now he just seems extremely unthreatening.

A couple other examples come from the recent Preacher TV show.

The first is Arseface. This is what he looks like in the comics. And this is what he looks like in the TV show; he isn't exactly pretty, but he's far from the repulsive mess that is Garth Ennis and Glenn Fabry's Arseface.

My other example from Preacher is The Saint of Killers. In the comic he looks like this grizzled motherfucker. Whereas in the TV show he looks like this. I would let TV Saint of Killers babysit my children, he looks so nonthreatening.

Even Freddy Krueger, while not made more 'attractive,' was given a more slick, serpentine, less obviously repulsive appearence in the 2010 remake of Nightmare on Elm Street.

These aren't even close to the only examples...

Wolverine is played by Hugh Jackman. Brienne of Tarth is played by Gwendoline Christie. Hell, Edward Rochester was recently played by Michael Fassbender!

My problem isn't just that these ugly characters are being made less ugly, it's that the ugliness of these characters is intrinsic to their character. Arseface's appearence in the comic can make people vomit on sight. The Saint of Killers scares people to tears, even before they know he can't be killed. Pennywise is meant to be scary and unsettling.

I feel like more and more often Hollywood is eschewing interesting or unsettling character design in favour of 'cool' designs. But i don't feel like cool works for every character. Sometimes characters, especially horror movie villains, should be ugly.

I also feel that it's a shame that we don't have a new generation of high profile, strange, unique looking actors and actresses. There aren't any 20 year old Ron Perlmans or Steve Buscemis in Hollywood right now, and I really think that's to the detriment of film and TV.

---

EDIT - I think some of you are missing my point. Just to be clear, I'm not asking for more actors in general to be ugly/normal. I'm saying certain characters, like Pennywise and Arseface, need to be ugly for them to be effective, functional characters. A character shouldn't be noticeably attractive when the entire purpose of said character is to be unpleasant and visually repulsive.

Submitted August 06, 2016 at 07:55PM by finnylicious http://ift.tt/2apwPVk