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The most impressive transformation on the upcoming Starz series Gaslit is not the one that grabs your attention immediately; that would be Sean Penn, under massive prosthetics, puffing himself up to believably become Nixon’s bourbon-soaked attorney general John Mitchell. If you’re not familiar with the show’s cast list, you might even spend the first few minutes of John Dean’s onscreen arrival trying to place the actor playing him. He’s so carefully coiffed and midcentury mannered, believably good-looking for D.C. but not life-alteringly so.
And then, maybe, it will click: That’s Dan Stevens in there. The onetime Downton Abbey heartthrob, the handsome human waiting at the end of Beauty and the Beast, the guy with such sinister allure there’s an entire movie about how you can find him hot even if you suspect him of murder.
In the years since Downton Abbey made him famous, Stevens—like many handsome men before him—has seemingly struggled to find a role worthy of what he can bring to it. He’s so good-looking you ought to put him in everything, but he’s so good-looking that his appearance can be a distraction. If you’re not playing a superhero or a prince, being the blue-eyed golden boy can make it surprisingly hard to fit in.
But in Gaslit, Stevens gets to play an insecure striver—the lawyer in the Nixon White House whom everybody overlooks, and who gets involved in Watergate basically because he can’t think of any other way to impress his bosses. On a date with Betty Gilpin’s flight-attendant-cum-novelist, you believe John Dean would screw it up by being too awkward, too Republican. It’s a winning, fully lived-in performance, made possible by Stevens’s talent. And also, one small magic trick: brown contacts.
The power of brown contacts has also been on vivid display for weeks now in an entirely separate show: Apple TV+’s WeCrashed, which ends this week. Playing WeWork’s doomed CEO Adam Neumann, Jared Leto uses the full extent of his movie star charisma, convincing investors and his employees and the media that his shared-office-space empire is capable of “elevating the world’s consciousness.” But the show begins with Neumann as a nobody, schlepping all over New York trying to hawk things like baby pants with kneepads. To be frank, it’s hard to imagine someone with Leto’s looks and Neumann’s charisma having to work that hard for anything.
The answer? Brown contacts, of course. They make Leto look more like the real Neumann, but also dim the intensity of his famous eyes, cloaking him a bit—who can really know what Neumann was thinking, anyway?—and turning Leto into someone you can believe has earned an intense fear of failure. In House of Gucci Leto played a character with remarkably similar motivations, buried under prosthetics and an accent as thick as a Parmesan rind. But in WeCrashed, it’s his very Jared Leto-ness—his arresting stare, his unpredictability—that makes his version of Neumann come to life.
Both Leto and Anne Hathaway as Adam’s wife, Rebekah, are more movie-star attractive than their real-life counterparts, which is to be expected in any story ripped from the headlines (just look at Naveen Andrews, cast as a true glow-up version of the real Sunny Balwani on The Dropout). But even with their beautiful heads of hair and gym-toned bodies still on display, both pull off impressive transformations into people who have to persuade the world to pay them any mind.
Just as we are probably over eager to fawn over an actor’s transformation, we probably allow too much pity for the poor pretty boy who just wishes someone would look beyond his perfection and take him seriously. And if Brad Pitt’s recent career is any indication, the best solution may just be to loosen up and look great. But Stevens and Leto aren’t uglying themselves up in these roles, or even leaning away from the charisma that made them stars in the first place. They’re just masking their arresting eyes, the attributes that take them from handsome to otherworldly—that celebrity It factor—and allowing these fascinating, sometimes pitiful characters to peek through.
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