By From the Lon Chaney's sellotaped-up nose in the 1925 Phantom of the Opera onwards, cinema's been in love with the idea of a disfigured monster. However, the British Film Institute says that from now on, it won't fund any more films which feature villains with facial scars.
It's part of charity Changing Faces' #IAmNotYourVillain campaign, which aims to shift the stigma which people with facial disfigurements have to deal with, and which isn't helped when films signpost evil with scars.
"Film is a catalyst for change and that is why we are committing to not having negative representations depicted through scars or facial difference in the films we fund," the BFI’s deputy CEO Ben Roberts explained. And do you know what? Fair enough. It might take a bit of reworking, but the pantheon of scarred villains could be just as unnerving without their cuts, gouges and explosively embedded diamonds.
Kylo Ren
Ren's scar is a bit more mobile than most: in The Force Awakens, the lightsaber burn inflicted by Rey ran down his forehead, across the bridge of his nose and onto his right cheek, but by The Last Jedi it had morphed into more of a classic Blofeld-style eyebrow slice. It "honestly looked goofy", director Rian Johnson explained. If it looked goofy there, why not just shift it completely? Pop it on his arm or something.
Heath Ledger's Joker
Tricky one, this. "You wanna know how I got these scars?" is about as menacing a line as a cinematic villain's had, especially when he keeps telling different stories about their origins. Think about it, though: the scars are there as a reminder of an instability and extremism. "You wanna know how I got this fedora?" could have done just as well, and maybe Ledger could have kept switching to more and more ostentatious hats to keep things interesting.
Tony Montana
Again, hard to get around this one. He's Scarface. There's a scar on his face. He's facially scarred. Hence: Scarface. If you mess with that, you're messing with a merch empire that's kept Freshers' Week poster salesmen in business since 1983. Changing the title to Scarleg or Scarshoulder would mean a relatively minor rebadging which could avoid crashing that economy.
Alec Trevelyan
Sean Bean's villain in Goldeneye had a lot of axes to grind. He was hacked off at Britain for sending his Mum and Dad, Lienz Cossacks, to Russia to face Stalin's death squads after World War 2, and extremely annoyed at Pierce Brosnan's James Bond for blowing him up on a joint MI6 mission while they were both still on the same side. That's where he picked up the burns on his right cheek, though the same reminder of British untrustworthiness could have been achieved by writing POST-IMPERIAL DECLINE on Trevelyan's forehead.
Blofeld
The Bond-iverse is full of malevolent types with facial disfigurements: beyond the bomb-blasted Trevelyan, Bond's sorted out evildoers with cyanide-melted teeth (Raoul Silva in Skyfall), elegant cuts from eyebrow to cheek and slightly less elegant tears of blood (Le Chiffre in Casino Royale), gigantic metal teeth (Jaws) and diamonds embedded in the face of a North Korean (Zao in Die Another Day). Blofeld was the first, though, and his vertical slice from duelling is the disfigurement villains keep referencing. Duelling scars are a bit 1760 though. Swap it for the 21st century equivalent: calloused fingers from hammering out furious subtweet upon furious subtweet.
