Don’t know if this will add anything to the thread.
Edward G. Robinson:
If I were just a bit taller and I was a little more handsome or something like that, I could have played all the roles that I have played, and played many more. There is such a thing as a handicap, but you’ve got to be that much better as an actor. It kept me from certain roles that I might have had, but then, it kept others from playing my roles, so I don’t know that it’s not altogether balanced.
I think a lot of most popular actors today skew shorter then average. The OG Avengers themselves:
Hawkeye: 5’8"
Iron Man and Hulk: 5’7" (Though i think Ruffalo is even shorter.)
Widow: 5’3"
then there’s Cap at 6 and Thor of course at 6’3"
I’d wager it’s about half of them. Hard to spot, though, because lead characters are almost never short, regardless of their actors’ height. Have you ever seen Tom Cruise in a film where he looked 5’7"?
Yeah, when you can make normal humans look like hobbits with just trick camera angles and the like, making up for a deficit of a couple of inches is trivial. You don’t even need to make an actor “look tall” to make them not “look short”: Just do a lot of shoulders-up close-ups where you can’t tell height at all.
Only one of your examples is much shorter. The average height for a man in the USA is 5’9".
The average height of all your examples is only a third of an inch shorter than that.
I think the point is though, that contrary to the quote about “if I had been taller”, you don’t need to be taller than average to be a successful actor, even playing mostly “tough guy” roles.
I’d add to the examples so far Tom cruise, cillian Murphy and Tom Hardy.
You’re leaving a piece hanging in your hypothesis, or more accurately I am (Sorry I just joined Chess.com) The “One example much shorter” you’re referring to I assume is Scarjo…and she also is just one inch below average.
That said, I posit that if we did a 'most successful actors working today height study", i still believe we’d see them below average. Especially if we compared them to their rich NON-Acting peers!
Ah. That point does hold.
Whoops, you’re right. I should have looked more closely.
What? Thanks for the early Christmas present! Great news!
I watched the documentary Confessions of a Superhero with a few friends of mine back in 2008 or so. The movie is about four people, all aspiring actors, who work side jobs dressing as superheroes to let tourist take photos of them for tips. The woman who dressed as Wonder Woman, Jennifer Wenger, is absolutely beatiful, and one of my friends simply couldn’t believe she was having trouble finding work as an actress. But Hollywood is full of young women who are just as beautiful as she is. Checking IMDB, she’s gotten steady work since the documentary was filmed, including a part in the sexy vampire sketch by Key & Peel.
We can talk about lookism in movies, but I think nepotism is more interesting. How many actors don’t have some connection Hollywood connections prior to beginning their career? One of the few actors I’ve heard abmit he got his break via nepotism was Jeff Bridges. It’s a sensitive topic for the likes of Ben Stiller and Jamie Lee Curtis.
Ironically…IMHO Jeff Bridges is the finest living actor today. It’s Jeff Bridges, a time travelling Mickey Rourke (So I guess he doesn’t count) Josh Brolin and Matt Damon on a good day. And no I havent seen the Coens True Grit.
Re: conventional looking Hollywood women, I once had a friend who I thought was very very talented. She was a burlesque dancer, and a fairly good actress. I implored her to move to Cali and take a stab at it. She said “I’d just be another pretty face”. Which couldn’t have been further from the truth. I thought she was pretty in an unconventional way. And with her charm and personality, she’d have stood out.
It is likely that casting directors and directors have seen these people before. There is also the safety factor. You don’t want a new actor to screw up and put a production behind, and there is a good chance that the child of a professional knows their way around a set. Plus there are genetics. Remember, you’re only seeing a small subset of the children of actors.
When my daughter was acting my younger daughter, who was about 6, came to a casting call with us. The casting director asked her if she was interested. She wasn’t, not a big, but it was an opportunity some kids would never have gotten.
As for attractive versus unattractive, remember it is easier to turn an attractive actress (usually actress) into an unattractive one rather than vice versa, Look at the head shots in Playbill for women playing unattractive characters on Broadway.
Also, agree with the beginning of the thread about how nice it is to see normal looking people on British TV.
One of the fun things about going out to eat at upscale restaurants in Los Angeles is having beautiful servers. Both female and male. While some of them might be great looking people who just happened to become servers, no different than any other city, plenty are the stereotypical wannabe actors waiting for their breakthrough.
When 5’9 Ingrid Bergman did Gaslight with 5’7 Charles Boyer, there were lots of scenes where she is sitting and he is standing, or vice-versa (including the famous “if I were mad” scene), and scenes where they are on stairs, but there are still a few scenes where you can see that he is wearing “elevator” shoes.
I think one of the reasons there are so many attractive people in films and tv (forgive me if this has already been said above) is the fantasy element, where the viewer may see the protagonist or other characters as themselves, sort of like an avatar, and it makes sense for a lot of people to fantasise themselves as this attractive ‘ideal’. I bet there are plenty of men around who would love to be James Bond, Superman etc. I think this is what the studios believe anyway.
As we say around the house “All actors are short.”
Well, not all, but nearly all. When you see them IRL, they’re always a good six inches shorter than you thought. Some are considerably shorter.
Well, not to mention, if you see any actor or actress out doing whatever, without hair professionally styled, or make-up by a Hollywood artist who get 4 figures an hour, not to mention, in sweats, and no foundation garments, they are going to look a lot like you and me. Maybe still a little better, but not much.
Proposing a slightly different “last acceptable prejudice”, I’ve been watching the HBO show The Sex Lives of Teenage Girls (it’s produced by Mindy Kaling, I hasten to assure you, lest you think it’s just smut). And it is, as you would expect, VERY progressive and diverse. The four main (female) characters are all conventionally attractive and fit, but on screen and accepted are people of all races, sexualities, one in a wheelchair, one woman who is VERY big (heightwise, but also not at all thin), etc.
But, there is one group that the show just repeatedly dunks on mercilessly, which is nerdy UNNATRACTIVE guys.
At one point, if you can imagine how ridiculous this is, there’s a guy who (get this) actually mentions something about a digital trading card while trying to flirt with one of the girls. I mean, could you just DIE? What the hell was that loser even THINKING?
Honestly, it’s kind of jarring that a show that is so totally accepting of so many things that have until recently been taboo just takes it SO for granted that a schlubby guy with nerdy interests is just so ludicrously not even in the universe of being an acceptable romantic partner for any of the four main characters; even though two of them are fairly nerdy/geeky in their interests.
I think Jamie Lee Curtis spoke up recently in response to a recent New York Magazine piece on the rise of the “nepo baby”.
On the general topic of looks-ism (the way I prefer to say it), I note that Japanese entertainment shows seem to embrace non-standard looks, in scripted dramas and comedies as well as variety shows. There are lots of examples, but the one that comes to mind, since I was watching this evening, is a middle-aged male actor with a prognathous jaw and a serious underbite who has his own series (where he plays an adult struggling with autism) and who had an important role on this year’s prestige NHK period drama, which was about the Kamakura shogunate. There are still plenty of pretty people, but also a lot of actors in lead roles with character-type faces. So it can be done, without losing audience appeal.