A few years ago, New York dermatologist Dr David A Colbert received an unexpected call from a Hollywood director. The director was shooting a film starring a high-profile actor who had plumped his face with so much filler it wouldn’t move.
The director proceeded to berate Colbert, whose practice has treated famous faces such as Sienna Miller, Naomi Watts and Robin Wright, for stilting his star’s ability to emote. “He was kind of rude,” Colbert said. “He was like, ‘Hey, can you stop doing what you’re doing [to his face]?’”
The director was mistaken: Colbert had never given dermal filler, or Botox, to the actor. “But I felt for him, because he wants his actors to look like people,” said Colbert, who did not disclose the identities of either.
That director was fighting a losing battle. These days, the new “it” product among celebrities isn’t a $280 La Prairie concealer or $1000 Decorté moisturizer. It’s an entirely new face, with pillowy lips, stretched-out skin and a stationary forehead. For the rest of us, that means staring at faces on movie screens and streamers that look enhanced – and therefore restricted – by expensive cosmetic procedures.
When the trailer for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey dropped, armchair critics griped that Anne Hathaway, who has denied cosmetic surgery rumors, could not move her forehead enough. They found it unbelievable that Penelope, Odysseus’s wife, would have access to that good a dermatologist in ancient Greece.
In the Wicked franchise, Ariana Grande plays Glinda the Good Witch in the Land of Oz, where apparently beauty standards are just as rigid as the real world: Grande’s airbrushed lack of expression led one Dazed writer to ask: “Is Botox ruining cinema?” Ditto for Margot Robbie as Wuthering Heights’s Cathy, whose Barbie-smooth features inspired speculation of cosmetic surgery, which could inhibit the lusty facial contortions one might make during a bodice-ripping scene.
Much of this nip-tuck speculation is mean-spirited. It reeks of misogyny, blaming women for unrealistic beauty standards that are widespread in film-making and muffling necessary discussions on ageing in the industry. Millie Bobby Brown, only 22 years old, said that audiences’ responses to her unchangeable expression during the Electric State press tour left her holed up and “depressed for three, four days”. The pitchforks have come for men, too. Barry Keoghan said that online abuse about the way he looks (fans have speculated on whether or not he got filler) has made him “shy away” from acting and public life, and Ryan Gosling’s ageless appearance on a recent episode of Jimmy Fallon had an uncanny valley vibe, or so some fans tweeted.
But it is also true that some of the best acting comes from total abandon and a willingness to be ugly – whether that’s Lucille Ball chucking chocolate down her gullet in I Love Lucy, or Charlize Theron’s unflinchingly raw depiction of the poverty-stricken serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster. Apparent dermal fillers, Botox, lip augmentation and jawline contouring do not exactly allow for expressive, soul-stirring performances. “It’s almost become standard that the face doesn’t move as much as it used to,” Colbert said.
That lack of movement presents an existential threat to the craft of acting. Beauty has always been a job requirement for being a star, but so has facial dexterity. Is all that filler going to make for worse performances?
Actors have sculpted their faces for as long as the film industry has existed – and audiences have always voiced their opinions on the topic.
Marsha Gordon, a historian and professor of film studies at North Carolina State University, cites a 1929 article in Motion Picture magazine titled The Flesh and Blood Racket. The piece named and shamed mostly men who had gone under the knife, such as the boxer Jack Dempsey, who fixed his battered nose in preparation for a screen career. The bullish actor Louis Wolheim, known for playing thugs, wanted a rhinoplasty to help transition into leading roles; studio executives at United Artists successfully served a restraining order to stop him from changing it.
“The close-up was so crucial to moviemaking. I just imagine Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo or Clara Bow’s face filling the screen,” Gordon said. “It wasn’t just about conveying emotion. It was an opportunity for audiences to sit in the palace of a movie theater and see a beautiful face.”
These women were not immune to face-sculpting rumors back in their day. Legend has it that Dietrich removed her molars to achieve her famously arch cheekbones, and MGM reportedly secretly sent Garbo to see a surgeon. Neither actor is remembered for hamming it up onscreen – both projected a subtle coolness – but they were celebrated for their signature features. Dietrich’s pencil-thin brows, for instance, or Garbo’s sunken, hooded eyelids.
“Films have become less intimate in terms of framing a performer’s face,” Gordon continued. “As we shift away from a culture of movie theaters, from big screens to tiny screens, I wonder if that has something to do with this tolerance [for filler].”
Dr Anthony Brissett, a Houston-based cosmetic surgeon and president of the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, points not to screen size but modern high-definition cameras, which reveal more than the naked eye. “There are things that actors and actresses will share with me that bother them” about their appearances, he said. “I have a hard time seeing it. Then I’ll watch them on television and yeah, sure enough, there it is. They’re under a high level of scrutiny and feeling this desire to look the same continuously.”
Age used to be an actor’s enemy. During the Hollywood star system days, when studios controlled every aspect of actors’ lives, a fortysomething woman might quietly fade away, such as Dietrich did, or accept more character roles, which were often undignified (Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? comes to mind). Now, female actors are no longer expected to disappear from the limelight after turning 30. A woman in her 40s can carry a film – but it helps her career to look as if she never aged. (It would also help her career if she never turned 60 either.)
“I just sort of expect female actors somewhere between 30 and 60 are probably doing stuff, and they’re not going to move their foreheads,” Colbert said. Male actors do it too, but “it’s very competitive, especially for women.”
Hollywood’s filler-mania mirrors national interest: an estimated 1.6 million Americans received facial procedures last year, with neurotoxins and fillers being the most popular. Then there is the sudden rise in GLP-1 drugs, such as Ozempic and Wegovy, which have slimmed down famous bodies and faces to the extent that fillers are required to correct for the gauntness.
At the same time, forgoing these kinds of doctor’s appointments has become a show of dedication to one’s craft – an indication that the industry’s new beauty standards are not aligned with the work, or representative of how the regular people being portrayed in films look. Kate Hudson said that she quit Botox while filming her Oscar-nominated role in Song Sung Blue, since the film was set in the 1980s, before the procedure hit the market. Jennifer Lawrence told the New Yorker she gets Botox but draws the line at forehead filler, which shows more on camera.
In casting, there are two types: bankable stars and actors who lack name recognition. Stars don’t audition for parts, actors do, and the stakes are higher for actors debating whether to get in on the cosmetic enhancement trend.
“Visible plastic surgery is an immediate audition killer for almost every project I’ve worked on,” said Marie, a Los Angeles-based casting director who has worked on network TV shows and major film releases. (Marie is a pseudonym.) “Networks really hate plastic surgery unless it’s on someone who’s already famous, then they magically don’t notice it. The more famous you are, the more you can fuck with your face before it starts to hinder your chances of getting on in a movie.”
Marie said that some younger, up-and-coming actors clearly have filler, which looks good in a selfie but prohibits them from embodying a role. “It’s really sad, a lot of younger actresses feel the need to be beautiful on Instagram, but then it makes them less realistic and accessible,” she said. “Being a model and an actress are two different things. I wouldn’t send someone [to a director] with visible plastic surgery, because they would look at us like we’re crazy and have bad taste.”
Still, Marie said that cosmetic surgery or filler is never directly addressed in casting processes she has been involved with. “It’s completely unspoken,” she said.
Zak Barnett, 50, is an acting coach in Hollywood. He does not have conversations about cosmetic enhancements while training actors on their artistic processes, but said his students talk to their agents about it, debating whether it will help them land jobs.
Barnett believes that AI’s recent infiltration of Hollywood might help to reverse this trend. “The desire to be perfect will be taken over by AI projects and AI actors,” he said. “I think what audiences are going to want to see more and more is the truth, which is imperfections. If we get back to character-driven stories, then we won’t want anything to obstruct that authenticity.”
It’s a nice thought. But Jessica M Goldstein, a journalist who has covered Hollywood aesthetics and culture, is not as hopeful. “Beauty standards under capitalism require there to always be something new to purchase,” she said. “There might be a superficial change – humanmade things become a badge of prestige or class, like how brands will talk about something being made in America. But that doesn’t mean that people are going to stop paying to have work done. It just means the nature of the work will change.”
Goldstein predicts a shift toward more subtle enhancements. Fifteen or 20 years ago, actors started to get veneers en masse. Famous smiles all looked identical. These days, veneers are less standardized – though they’re still nice-looking, and very expensive.
To some extent, this shift is already happening with faces. Brissett, the cosmetic surgeon, says patients are reporting “filler fatigue”, either opting to dissolve their filler or not re-up when it wears off (most fillers last up to a year). “It’s something they’ve outgrown,” he said.
More people are turning to facelifts, Brissett said, which is the second most popular cosmetic surgery procedure in the US. The “deep-plane facelift” can cost up to $40,000 in major metropolitan areas such as New York or Los Angeles. It’s a newer, more natural-looking procedure intended to make someone look refreshed but not necessarily radically different. Crucially, it allows for facial movement. “Celebrities, public figures, and high-profile individuals are having it done quietly,” one surgeon told New York magazine last year.
Jennifer Lawrence might shy away from filler, afraid of how it would impact her acting. But when asked if she had had a deep-plane, she eagerly responded: “Believe me, I’m gonna!”
