Matt Smith is not ugly, Hollywood is just Facially Boring.

Matt Smith has a face. and I mean a FACE. Im not talking Hollywood glam God, Grant, Brando, Redford face. I’m talking Cagney, Robert Ryan, Richard Widmark face. The kind of face that earns you a different kind of power. That kind that comes with a strange intertanglement of masculine and feminine energy. Faces already in constant communication with the subconscious. Now I don’t think hes as good at those cats but he is on their spectrum of actor. He gives off a “man who hides things” vibes with one wrinkle of his face, and your best friend with another.

Theres a scene in the most recent episode of HBO's Game of Thrones prequel “The House of the Dragon” where Prince Daemon who is played by Matt Smith is making an internal decision on what to do after reading a letter from his brother (whom he loves and hates ) in and at his most frustrating moment. Now a lot of the story preempting this particular killer moment is part of what should inform us as to exactly what's going on in Daemon's head, but without any dialogue the rest of this lies completely on Smith's shoulders, and the look Smith gives upon hearing his brothers assistance is coming, and just before he beats the messenger badly - is a doozy. It's an outstanding example of the way in which certain actors faces can find that perfect valley that sits in between exactitude and ambiguity. None of us knows exactly what motivates Daemon to do what he does, especially to beat the messenger, but it is Smith's face that informs us that hes about to do something rash. There's a tad bit of mischief and a rather large dollop of brooding. So it is exactly enough that before he does it we can see it and therefore its almost all of the tension beyond musical cues. Once he does, it gives us enough to fall upon some objective idea about why Daemon does this, but it also gives us enough to decide for ourselves each one of us what is being reflected back to us through this form of ambiguity.

Due to a number of varying domino's falling forward, Hollywood is no longer interested in original films, and it is no longer interested in original faces. An era that has struggled to produce any real movie stars is also struggling to produce their counter balance; character actors, and more specific to what Im discussing -the combo-lead character actors the 70s produced. It is an era also heavily struggling with ageism, colorism, fatphobia, sexism, gender, and racism all of which exacerbate those problems. It's interesting to note that at times where politically we were even more constrained than now, we still ended up with deeper, more profound representation than this wheat thin plastic we get now. It'd be nice to have both for once. As it is, in this particular world of cinema Matt Smith is near an anomaly, lucky to be where he is, as most men who have his facial complexities are locked in a Hollywood cell awaiting judgement on just what the hell to do with them. Think Miles Teller, Barry Keoghan, Tye Sheridan, Lucas Hedges. Its not that these actors aren’t used, its that they're not used correctly, to their full potential, or in any way imaginatively. Hollywood barely imagines sex and when it does it imagines it with an increasingly limited type of looking people. In that particular world yeah Matt Smith (a weird sort of handsome ) makes them have to do a little more work selling his appeal, and look they're not wrong. If you put him or any actor (who is not hot as hell upon immediate arrival) in the wrong placement in a role that suggests beauty, or extreme sex appeal it can be risky, you may have your audience completely turn on you, and that's probably at least one reason why Smith is more a TV actor than a film actor. On the other hand his contemporaries like Chris Hemsworth and Channing Tatum though largely in far less interesting projects than even his TV work are facial sure bets and we know Hollywood loves its sure bets.

I loved the new Top Gun but I have to be honest, when you look at the crew of the old, and the crew of the new the facial difference is drastic. I mean going from Val Kilmer to Glenn Powell whether people want to acknowledge or not is a notable difference in and of itself for a number of more covert reasons than readily available, and it only gets much deeper and further a divide after that progressively. The faces are bordering on perfect and so are the bodies. After all, the audience like sure bets too, especially in their castings. They don't look for room for interpretation, and they clearly don't care about capturing the soul or essence of a character as much as looking exactly like what they want to see. Remember awhile ago when everyone was so upset that they cast Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher (over basic aesthetics) that the company and lovers of the film spent the next 10 or so years explaining it, with the industry eventually rectifying this “great” wrong finally putting out a fun successful new show this year that everyone promptly praised ? Thing is its debatable that TV show is actually better than the original films ( it isnt I'm sorry) it's different and yes more anatomically correct, but not necessarily better in any way that isnt mostly superficial and I really think that's all folks care about. Think about how everyone responded to Maggie Gyllenhaal being cast as the district attorney that everyone found so beautiful in “The Dark Knight”. Sure it did prompt one of the greatest and funniest Tweets of all time on Twitter but also, that's pretty telling in and of itself, especially when you consider how Maggie's career has shaped out in comparison to her brother when shes at the very least as talented as her brother. I mean sexism always; women have struggled with this dubious ideology longer and harder going back to Bette Davis, but there are I think actually more women in constant lead roles with very very interesting faces. Viola Davis, Tilda Swinton, Noomi Rapace, all have great faces that they employ wonderfully. Its really mostly the leading men that are so bland and homogeneous and thats not the audiences fault its the industry. Think about all the times that folks found out actors known or thought by most to be unconventionally attractive (if at all) were found out to be actually conventionally attractive at some point in their career ( Steve Buscemi). There was alot of loud surprise, but this is the nature of Hollywood it doesn't really hire ugly people. It at best hires people from time to time less conventionally attractive than its hyper conventionally attractive stars and then let's them cos play as “ugly” people which I argue don't exist save for in a collective insistence on some agreement on an objective rendering of beauty, one which Hollywood doles out to us rigidly and many times cruelly.

Once you cripple or hobble the larger aspects of what makes cinema great ( see regulation of monopolies, and encouraging a healthy variety of offerings at the theater as a couple ) there's a domino effect that brings crashing down a lot of the minutiae of what makes cinema great as well. In this particular case one of those minutiae is that not only is there a lack of variety of cinematic offerings in the macro, we are seeing a lack of variety in faces and people in the micro. In this way Hollywood seems to be in the era that most closely resembles the studio era in the Golden Age than maybe the new Hollywood that formed with directors like Coppola and Scorsese and a new type of A-typically hot actors like Pacino, Hackman, Hoffman and Nicholson. Notice I said closely in regards to the era it resembles, because it is not a one for one and it is still just a resemblance. That era still made use of its “otherish” beauties like Bette Davis, Joseph Cotton, Peter Cushing, Vincent Price and Peter Lorre. Also, notice I still place the word hot in there because these actors were in fact good looking actors, but it is not the type that immediately grabs you and arrests you from jump. It is not Cary, or James Mason, or Roc Hudson beauty. It needs spurring on, it needs some underneath qualities to follow to move it into that zone of attraction. Those actors in places brought those qualities, but they also had something the more typically beautiful actors struggled with. The ability to be pathetic, to be absolutely repellent, ugly not as an aesthetic, (almost every actor has some quality of beauty) but as a personality trait. Chris Pine can struggle here though he's actually pretty damn good, Hemsworth will definitely struggle, Tom Holland..forget about it. Chris Evans, even Timothee Chalamet for all his character traits and abilities would and will struggle. The future and standing leading men of today they don't have it. We have homogenized the face. The actors don't look like identical twins, but a great deal of them do look fraternal, and in this is a fraternity. Sometimes it's not even that they don't have the ability it's that we won't let them, or our minds won't let them, because the industry won’t let them. We know that because we have had eras where plenty of these types of “oh I don’t know normal” - looking people were our greatest from Jimmy Stewart to Tom Hanks and the audiences accepted and loved on them as leading men. Nobody batted an eyelash when Jack Nicholson played a man who could woo just about any woman for years.

I am brought back to an article for The Guardian which chose as its subject the career of one Angelina thee Jolie. Reductive in its claims, vicious in its conclusion, and overall dumb, the piece only served to reify the very psychological phenomenon I'm discussing; that sometimes we don't even let egregiously pretty people perform to their best in front of us for a myriad of reasons from misunderstanding them to jealousy. If we won't let them act or be truly ugly without aesthetics, and we then have others who don't possess the ability, then who then shall take up the mantle? But that's the argument around beauty levels and it's important to state as much because it still comes under the umbrella of why the face matters and why we need more interesting pretty faces not just pretty faces. Film theorist Béla Belázs talked about the power of the face as a silent soliloquy or monologue “an association of ideas, a synthesis of consciousness and imagination.” is what he says about what undergirds the power of a close-up. He talks about the importance of a glint in Liv Ullmans eye as Elizabet Vogler in Ingmar Bergmans “Persona” to the “visual anthropomorphism” between the audience and the film. What a really good face can do is make the road map to linking each and every or any one of these ideas together as a whole- a lot more concise so that they don't become totally lost in the details. This is the same to some extent with the close-up. When making a film that doesn't want to spoon feed the audience the pleasure of associating these ideas in a way that allows them to realize what the film says to them and to filmmakers and films want this feeling to be more natural and organic - understanding a good face is good face is vital to that. When you want to speak volumes but your actors face can only mumble sentences? …Well that's definitely Hollywood now. Makes perfect sense when you look at it, Hollywood is more and more averse to the risk of any sort of ambiguity between the story and the audience. More and more movies beat you over the head with their politics, with their themes, with their conclusions. You don't need the great faces of Hollywood to do this kind of work- they can and they should, but you don't need them. Frankly to a lot of Hollywood I think they consider these people risks, which is again why I think Smith is relegated mostly to television and not film, though I do think he works really well there. This is really not about complaining - although I do have complaints. It's not about Matt Smith although I do really enjoy Matt Smith. It’s not me working through the time that we are in wherein somebody like somebody like Matt Smith can make waves like this simply for not having a face that speaks to everyone as the most beautiful thing in the world. It's not about hating on those people who are even acknowledging it, it's about saying that the very fact that it's making waves like it is speaks to the dearth of faces like Smith's in the current industry, how that hurts said industry, how it's shaped its audience, and how that hurts people and the world that we live in which I leave with this..