Liz Lemon slept with Matt Damon, Jon Hamm, James Marsden and LITERALLY James Franco.
I think she’s doing ok.
Tina Fey weighed 150 pounds when she came to SNL as a writer. She lost 30 pounds while on the show. She didn’t get the Weekend Update job until she did. The skinnier she got, the better her career did. I smell a connection. So did she.
She told The New York Times, “I was a completely normal weight, but I was here in New York City, I had money and I couldn’t buy any clothes. After I lost weight, there was interest in putting me on camera.”
Rhys Ifans, Emma Chambers, Jo Brand, Matt Lucas. But note that none of them ever play the protagonist or love interest - they’re almost always the quirky sidekicks.
That’s kind of the point. Tina Fey is an attractive woman, and when an attractive woman is the butt of ugly jokes it kind of makes an impression on the audience. If Tina Fey is considered ugly, what about the rest of us?
I think both Adele and Rebel Wilson both got some crap in some circles for losing weight. So some people can’t win for losing. I was thinking this might be a gendered thing, as I don’t recall Roker or Goodman getting crap for losing weight, but then I don’t recall Lake or McCarthy getting crap either.
Downey could have made a great Doctor Strange, as well. But they cast that one perfectly too.
So, instead of going with Sherlock Holmes, they could’ve gone with Sherlock Holmes?
And, both of their Watsons played MCU characters, too:
One of the very few movies to go against the grain was “Eight on the Lam,” a Bob Hope movie that co-starred Phyllis Diller. She made a career out of being funny, not beautiful.
‘Lookism’ is deeply rooted in humans. I don’t think you can make it go away.
In UI design there is a phenomenon known as the ‘aesthetic usability factor’. It’s been shown repeatedly that attractive looking user interfaces are learned quicker and the people claim they are more powerful and easier to use than the same UI but with ugly rendering. Attractive lecturers cause students to learn better. Attractive news people cause the news to be retained better. Our preference for attractiveness goes very deep. It may not be fair, but it’s human.
Part of the reason we want attractive actors is simply because we get enjoyment from looking at them. It doesn’t have to be sexual attraction. An attractive man will cause straight men to pay more attention to him compared to an ugly man. And a Pontiac Aztec is a joke car because it’s ugly, even though on specs and utility it was as good as anything around.
Comic actors are not supposed to look good. Female comics especially. Phyllis Diller was very attractive in real life, and had supposedly a playmate’s figure. She deliberately deglamorized herself because she realized early in her career that audiences would not accept a good-looking female comic. There are many biographies of Diller that detail her early struggles. The awful history of female comedians is a recurring subject in academia. A more popular treatment can be seen in In On the Joke: The Original Queens of Standup Comedy, by Shaun Levy, a good recent book that’s easy to find.
Weren’t most of the Liz Lemon jokes about her being a slob, not her being ugly?
Pretty much.
I find this thread interesting. Its basically saying “The death of the normal looking character actor” = prejudice. Interesting cause it means in that department we’ve gotten less progressive. Maybe things have got better, I don’t really know cause I’ve mostly stopped watching TV and movies.
But I did note it (The beautiful people, the beautiful people) around the time of Lost. Even a critic noted it, commenting that it looks like a plane full of models crashed. YES we had Hurley, Locke and Ben…but two of those are practically ‘the villains’, so they don’t count. And besides they are vastly out numbered. Some of the actors being ACTUAL models.
And again the above mentioned ‘Ugly Betty’ was around the same time.
I WILL note that almost every actor I’ve seen that was an ex-model or who is incredibly good looking, try and succeed acting wise instead of just collecting their paycheck. (Ex: Jeri Ryan on VOY)
As a formerly goofy-looking person who is now more in the generic elderly-obese universe, I have to say I don’t mind the plethora of attractive people in entertainment. I’m not comparing myself to them, although I understand that happens. There are a fair number of older male actors still working; I would not be unhappy to see more older women actors be able to continue their careers so I would have an opportunity to witness their talent. I would not be unhappy to ban fat-shaming from entertainment programs, not because I take it personally but because it is just repugnant.
Lookism will always exist, for sure. But there are valid reasons to go with unattractive or plain actors/actresses: it adds to the immersion for the audience. The audience can much better relate to someone who looks like them, or the average person, than some handsome/beautiful star.
I was just posting about the show Somebody Somewhere which features a fat actress of average attractiveness with a bunch of normal looking or even slightly outcast-looking people and I really dig the vibe. It brings a level of realism to the show that would otherwise be lacking. Would I want that in every show I watch? No. But I would like to see it more often.
I write romance where it’s really hard to avoid conventionally attractive characters (your readers will hang you in effigy) but I rebel in little ways. My current leading hero is 5’9" which is short for a Romance hero, especially in a genre with seven or eight foot tall alien warriors. And since he’s an amputee the story is (I’m hoping) showing a fully realized sexual being with a disability which is something lacking in today’s media. But of course he’s hot as hell. I also want to read and write about attractive people.
But it pays to remember that women in particular tend to have a large variation in what they consider attractive. At least they do relative to men. This is why I theorize people like Seth Rogan can carry a rom com. He’s not conventionally attractive but I like him just fine in those roles and I imagine many other women feel the same.
Take more risks, Hollywood. It wouldn’t kill you. Movies are so bad these days we’ll watch anything anyways.
I very much get that. And I’m not overly eager to watch grotesques on TV. But to me it makes the presentation of “non-traditional” lifestyles/relationships seem more artificial. If film makes an effort to show race and/or gender in ways that do not represent much of reality as I perceive it, but they all must be “pretty,” to me it sorta makes those representations stand out more - seem less “realistic.” As tho they are going to great lengths to present SOME sorts of “equality,” but ignoring others.
I apologize if my imperfect phrasing in attempting to represent my thoughts which are not entirely clear to myself offends anyone. I’m not saying any minorities/lifestyles/preferences/orientations ought not be represented and portrayed favorably. And I guess it is too much to ask that entertainment address all of society’s inequities. But it seems to delegitimatize things to say “Look, we acknowledge/celebrate all colors/lifestyles - so long as they are photogenic!”
While I’m not bothered in general by everyone in Hollywood being hot, I will agree that it’s jarring when it’s supposed to be a plot point that a particular person is ugly. In fact, in stories where there’s supposed to be a “pretty woman” and an “ugly woman”, the “ugly woman” is usually even more attractive than the “pretty woman” (to my tastes, at least). I can accept when the other characters have different views than I do on who’s more attractive (after all, plenty of real people have different opinions than me on that, too), but when one is supposed to actually be not just less attractive but unattractive, it’s jarring when they’re not as described.
Of course, half the time that “so-and-so is unattractive” is a plot point at all, it’s because the punchline is “Oh, wow, she’s attractive after all, once she changes X, Y, and Z”. Which is also problematic.
In an era when movies cost more than $100 million to make, the mere act of making movies is risky enough.
Takes off her glasses, and shakes her hair out of the tail/bun.
How much do I win?
And sometimes gives up all of her hobbies, interests, and life plans, to subsume them all to the hobbies, interests, and life plans of the guy she’s trying to impress.
That was one of the things I appreciated about Real Genius: When the nerdy guy and the nerdy girl finally hook up, they both stay their own nerdy selves, because that’s what attracted them to each other in the first place.