Make-Believe Faces

I look 71. That's how old I am. In fact, I look not only my age but like someone who had a stroke five years ago. Because I did. In my admittedly distorted vision, I look better than I did at 51 or 61, when I was fleshier and felt more stressed. (My father's looks improved with age, too.) Maybe I'm fooling myself. But if I did, I tricked myself without a plastic surgeon's scalpel. What you see is what you get with my face. I kind of like my weathered contours -- they reveal a life fully lived.

But Hollywood, where I'm from, is a different place. They expect men and especially women NOT to look their age even as they get older. This realization hit me, well, in the face yet again the other night as I watched (cringed) at Michelle Williams play the mother in Steven Spielberg's autobiographical The Fabelmans. Williams, a favorite actor of mine ever since "Brokeback Mountain," now looks like... an animated duck. There's no kinder way to put it.

Hollywood is obsessed with avatars and other fantastic creatures, so why not turn its live action performers into anime characters? That must be the reasoning. But there is something creepy and UNNATURAL about the physical demands placed primarily on female actors. (Although some male actors --- like Don Johnson -- also feel a need to obliterate their facial identities.) Even radical Jane Fonda felt compelled to redo her face.

Call me strange -- but I prefer to see my favorite actors, both male and female, age with time on the screen. I celebrated one thing about the Covid pandemic -- it encouraged most of the women I know to finally go gray, which men have been doing forever.

I know -- most men (especially studio chiefs and casting directors) have been telling women for years NOT to gracefully age. To look like Barbie dolls. Well, fuck them. Or, better yet, don't. I find women who look and act their age sexy. And there are many men and women like me.

So, please, please, Hollywood stars -- the next time you feel the entertainment industry compulsion to undergo plastic surgery, RESIST! We want to see what you really look like at 71. Not some weird, cosmetic version of yourself.

Michelle Williams in The Fabelmans