By Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent
Hollywood dubs them “unforgettable,” “faces made for the silver screen,” but above all as “bankable.” Then executives pull a whammy on these famous faces, occasionally taking a blade, a blowtorch, or a bucket of putty to this most valuable studio merchandise. With Warner Bros.’ Clayface now open wide in theaters, Tom Rhys Harries joins a cinema stud list of leading men with a wounded moneymaker.
Mel Gibson, Kevin Costner, Ralph Fiennes and others have surrendered their award-winning visages to scar stories that unpack identity, narcissistic vanity, cold violence and all-out ego effacement.
Sometimes it works.
Sometimes it falls flat on its… yeah, face.
Here’s looking at you, DIGGER. Tom Cruise qualifies twice: once with actual screen scars, once with Digger’s disappearing movie-star act.
Here are 10 star-driven pictures in which saving face becomes considerably more than an expression.
Clayface ranks at the top of this very impressive list. So in case it tanks at the box office, it made history here anyway?
It’s risky business to mess with your kisser when you’re an A-lister.
Besides giving you a reason to see DIGGER and boost its paltry box-office haul, these face-mash movies arrive just in time for Halloween. Mask season is the perfect time to reflect on all those close-ups—and the changing mug of Hollywood itself, now that CLAYFACE’s Warner Bros. shares the sheltering Skydance banner* with Paramount. Even the studios are swapping identities. The stars, at least, get to take their prosthetics off.
BONUS: Face/Off (1997) — Nicolas Cage and John Travolta
Why merely scar the moneymaker when you can swap it? John Woo’s surgical identity exchange sends FBI agent Sean Archer and terrorist Castor Troy into battle wearing each other’s faces. Cage and Travolta trade the merchandise, then transform into the personality underneath—a two-for-one special in Hollywood’s identity department. But John Frankenheimer did it best some say with his original version?
Happy FaceTime this Halloween.
*Extra points if you got the Paul Bowles reference?
# # #