A story that caught my eye last week in The Sun (sadly not available online, but the Mail also ran it) that the public are more likely to expect those with physical disfigurements to be cast as big screen villains.
The story sounded too ludicrous not to be worth looking at further, so having gone in search of the evidence, here it is:
While the disfigurement thing is a convenient hook on which to hang the launch of changing faces campaign (obligatory plug here) the other features that we expect from our bad guys is fascinating.
Bald people, presumably men, are also often expected to be silver screen scoundrels, with 30 per cent of the public expecting them to be thus.
But intriguingly the aspect of appearance that we most expect to represent reprobate is bad teeth, a whopping 66 per cent of people picking this as the facial equivalent of a big sign with the words 'EVIL' pointing at the character.
Respondents were apparently not asked as to whether possession of a pet cat made a character more likely to be a baddie.
Of course there is a serious point here about why we feel that people who look different, be it dentally, facially or follically, should be the people we feel most cut out to play the antihero.
But at the same time, I can't help wondering in the age of lowest common denominator cinema, why we aren't seeing more bald, bucktoothed, burned-faced baddies?
Maybe I am not watching the right films but why can I only think of Blofeld as even potentially falling into this category? Come to think of it I can't even remember if he had bad teeth...
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