Are A-List Stars Having Digital "Work" Done?
Photo: Getty Images/Tetra Images.
Ever go to the movies and wonder how that action-hero star just never seems to age? Or how a 24-year-old actress can play a 17-year-old character—and convincingly look the part? It’s all due to “beauty work,” Hollywood’s best-kept post-production secret. Done by a handful of highly skilled artists, the digital retouching technique is responsible for making stars look fitter, slimmer, and younger on screen.
In a new feature that took nearly three years to write and research, Mashable entertainment editor Josh Dickey reveals the fascinating story behind beauty work: its results (impossible flawlessness), how much it costs (beaucoup bucks), and who’s doing it (everyone). “You’ll see a 55-year-old actor smile and have crows feet, so you think they didn’t have any beauty work done,” he says. “Believe me, they did.” Here, Dickey talks about the story that’s making audiences wonder whether they can believe their eyes.
How did you hear about this happening?
A friend of mine—and I can’t say who that person is—is an actor who plays a character that nobody else could play. He had been working on a sequel for many years. Ultimately, the problem was that he was getting way too old to play this character, which was hurting his chances of getting greenlit. The actor told me about a new facility, where they thought they could possibly put him through the de-aging process through the entirety of the film.
This was a few years ago, right?
It was a lunch date in spring of 2012. I was fascinated by that. Word on the street was that the upper echelons of Hollywood were getting this done, not as a special effect or for the wow factor, but in really subtle ways. The idea was that people would be able to act in films and appear much more young and appealing for a long time. As I began to pull on that thread, I found that it was much more widespread. At the time, it was an elite thing, but it’s become basically part of the production process on almost every movie.
Why has beauty work been such a well-kept secret?
Because the group of people who knew about it was very small. By and large, it was a small cottage industry, and the stars didn’t want anybody to know. This post-production version of plastic surgery was not yet in the mainstream. Literally, you list off the five biggest movie stars in the world—male and female—those are the people who are involved. Now that it’s more widespread, more people are doing it.
And yet, nobody will name names.
The biggest fear about talking was that if I named names, those [editors] would be fired. [Studios] bring their movies to these shops, and they rightly assume that their clients would be very upset [if people knew], so everyone stays quiet.
What’s a typical “fix” within beauty work?
The most common beauty work today, which is in almost everything at this point, is under the eyes. I’m a fairly young-looking 42-year-old man, but ever since I was a newborn baby, I’ve had these big dark circles under my eyes. It would be a very short, very simple edit job for one of these beauty artists go in and remove the bags and dark circles. And I would look significantly more appealing, I think, in a way that you wouldn’t recognize or realize. It’s the most subtle thing that is done to almost everyone.
I think it’s interesting that men and women are both having beauty work done.
Those kinds of things don’t just apply to women. You know, when a guy takes off his shirt, he could have been eating nothing but chicken and broccoli for the past six months and working with a trainer. But if he turns a certain way, a little skin will bulge. [Beauty work] doesn’t just apply to men, to women, to old people—it applies to everyone. It’s fixing people who don’t need fixing up.
So, basically, nobody is not doing this.
There’s a woman right now who’s very young, she’s beautiful, thin—one of the big stars. From head to toe, there is nothing about her that you’d criticize. She’s flawless. And yet, if she turns her head a certain way, there’s going to be an amount of skin from the upper part of your chest to the chin that is not perfectly taut against the jawbone. Not a single human being in the world doesn’t have that skin. But you can take that angle out—that’s a common practice, to get rid of that skin.
How can viewers tell if beauty work has been done?
I think if you didn’t know about it, and you were sitting through a film, you would never know. If you know about it and look in the right places, though… It’s not like strings or special effects; it’s much more subtle. It’s like plastic surgery: the eyes just know. The flip side of that is a film like Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice. It was shot on 35mm, and I doubt that anybody had beauty work done. You can see all of the freckles in Maya Rudolph’s face and the hairs coming out of Joaquin Phoenix’s nose. When you see imperfections like that on screen, you can assume it’s either from a filmmaker who shot on film or an aesthetic choice. Did you see Captain America: The Winter Soldier?
No, I didn’t.
Well, Robert Redford, who has famously eschewed plastic surgery, has a big cold sore on his lip. Now, did Robert Redford have a cold sore during the shooting of that film? Possibly. My guess is he didn’t, because if he did, it would have been nothing to erase it. More likely, they wanted his character to have a cold sore. If you perceive any imperfection on a movie star, whether that’s a mole or a hair out of place, that is an artistic choice, because they now have the ability to easily remove those things.
So, are we all going to feel like hags if we don’t have beauty work done? I’m joking, but…
At one point, we all have to meet each other in person. There always comes a day when you gotta walk out the house and see other people. There’s nothing you can do about that. For now, we’re going to have to live with the way we look—at least in person.
