The other day, during a rare minute of downtime at the Venice Film Festival, I opened Instagram and learned that my friend Marco had just shaved his head.
“OK Bugonia,” I commented.
Call it a coincidence, but Marco had chosen to rock the Venice Film Festival’s hottest hairstyle, which is no hair at all. In “Bugonia,” Emma Stone’s head is shaved on film, while in “Frankenstein,” the monster (played by Jacob Elordi) has an aerodynamic chrome dome.
Stone and Elordi hardly suffer for the shearing: You could call these bald bids an admirable repudiation of vanity, if it didn’t make their cheekbones pop all the more. Still, since transformation is a crucial element of Oscar-contending performances, the magnitude of their makeovers should not be underestimated this awards season.
In “Bugonia,” her latest collaboration with the director Yorgos Lanthimos (“Poor Things,” “The Favourite”), Stone plays Michelle, a formidable pharmaceuticals executive, who’s kidnapped by an unstable underling named Teddy (Jesse Plemons). Convinced that Michelle is secretly an alien with nefarious plans for humanity, Teddy tries to torture her into a confession.
Before that, he has the bright idea to shave her bald, just in case her alien overlords could use strands from her hair to track her. (A more plausible concern should be if it would jeopardize Stone’s beauty contract with Louis Vuitton: You know those fashion houses don’t mess around.)
“Bugonia” may not prove to be as much of a crowd-pleaser as “Poor Things,” the Lanthimos film that won Stone her second Oscar, but her commitment to the look mirrors her commitment to the bit: For this director, she’s willing to pour everything into her performance. And though her hair has grown back since filming, Stone almost seemed to miss being bald at the Venice news conference.
“It’s the easiest thing ever, you just take the razor and go,” she said. “So much easier than any hairstyle.”
Unlike Stone, I don’t think Elordi actually shaved his head for “Frankenstein,” but he pulls off the look so well that I can forgive him some stolen valor. Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of the Mary Shelley horror classic takes its time to reveal Elordi’s creature in full, but he makes a striking impression. Like the muscular and marble-white Engineers in the Ridley Scott sci-fi film “Prometheus,” Elordi’s creature is bleached, bald and buff.
At the news conference for “Frankenstein,” del Toro said the bald pate was inspired by 19th-century phrenology diagrams, but it also emphasizes the creature’s initially childlike innocence.
“A lot of the interpretations of the creature usually are almost like accident victims, and I wanted beauty,” del Toro said.
Elordi’s certainly got beauty to spare, even when buried underneath the creature’s prosthetics: Though some characters in the film behold him as a monster, I thought he looked ready to headline an Equinox ad campaign.
Still, the bald-and-pale look can unlock a handsome man’s inner character actor, as Nicholas Hoult so ably demonstrated in “Mad Max: Fury Road” or Austin Butler in “Dune: Part Two.” And there’s a meta touch to watching Elordi play this role, since I went in wondering whether the “Euphoria” actor, who looks stitched together from other generically attractive matinee idols, could be animated anew by the electricity of his director’s auteur touch.
Perhaps it’s because he’s so made over, but Elordi feels like a genuine discovery in the film, gentle and precise with some real soul in his eyes. It’s the sort of performance that could push the actor into contention for the supporting-actor race, though Oscar voters are famously stingy when it comes to nominating young hunks. (For once, going bald in your 20s could work in a man’s favor.)
Whether or not Stone and Elordi win awards attention, I don’t expect this trend to abate anytime soon. The ranks of the bald and the beautiful are swelling, even if some celebrities may flock to the look simply to remind you how unbeatable their face cards really are.
Kyle Buchanan is a pop culture reporter and also serves as The Projectionist, the awards season columnist for The Times.
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