A current “One Chicago” crossover occasion on NBC aired three hours of docs, firefighters and detectives racing to cease a chemical assault. The villain throughout the episodes was a person named Thomas Marr, a burn survivor recognized by facial scars and motivated by revenge for a childhood hearth that killed his household.
For hundreds of thousands of NBC viewers who might by no means encounter a burn survivor in every day life, that is what one seems like on tv: disfigured, consumed by bitterness, harmful. It’s a story as outdated as storytelling itself, and it’s nonetheless being informed in primetime.
I do know this story firsthand. In March 1994, I sustained second- and third-degree burns to 64% of my physique, together with my face, in a personal airplane crash that killed my fiancé. I spent seven months hospitalized, underwent 49 surgical procedures and five-and-a-half years in rehabilitation. I’m now the founding father of Going through Ahead, a nonprofit empowering individuals with facial variations, and co-founder, together with Dr. Lise Deguire, of C.A.R.D.D., the Coalition for Genuine Illustration of Disfigurement and Distinction.
The “One Chicago” crossover occasion acquired large protection. However not a single reviewer talked about the villain trope. Nobody requested why, in 2026, a burn survivor with a facial disfigurement was as soon as once more forged because the menace to be neutralized.
The character of Thomas Marr joins an extended firm. Darth Vader’s masks is eliminated in “Return of the Jedi” to disclose a pale, ravaged face, the product of lava burns, offered because the second of his full ethical transformation. The burn didn’t merely injure him; it symbolized his evil.
The Phantom of the Opera hides his disfigured face behind a masks; when Christine tears it away, the staging is traditional horror. Probably the most acclaimed movie of 2025, “One Battle After One other,” contains a white supremacist whose third-act disfigurement was designed, within the prosthetics designer Arjen Tuiten’s phrases, to make audiences gasp. One reviewer referred to as it “visual shorthand for moral corruption” and famous the irony, then moved on. That’s how entrenched this shorthand is.
Upcoming movie initiatives proceed this misrepresentation, together with: “Is God Is,” the story of dual sisters on a quest “to revenge the maiming and scarring of their mom and themselves,” out this month; “Clayface,” a textbook instance of the monstrosity arc in a canonical Batman adversary; and “Darkman,” a reboot of Sam Raimi’s pulpy 1990 movie a couple of burned, disfigured vigilante that’s now reportedly in development.
These aren’t coincidental decisions. They’re the identical narrative alternative, made throughout centuries, encoded so deeply that writers attain for the scarred face by reflex.
What writers, make-up artists and filmmakers might not know is that analysis confirms most individuals first encounter somebody with a disfiguring situation not in actual life, however on display screen. Analysis revealed in JAMA Dermatology discovered that 60% of the highest ten all-time movie villains have seen pores and skin circumstances — scars, burns, alopecia — in comparison with precisely not one of the high ten heroes. A Phoenix Society evaluate discovered that characters with burn scars had been etched as villains 62% of the time, and hid their scars 69% of the time, and had pals solely 16% of the time. We’re invisible, besides after we are the villain.
The hurt is well-documented and extreme. Analysis by Altering Faces and Savanta-ComRes discovered that only one in 5 individuals with a visual distinction have ever seen a personality like them portrayed as a hero on display screen, whereas 39% have seen somebody with a visual distinction forged as a villain. Almost 1 in 4 report feeling depressed or anxious as a direct results of insufficient illustration; 1 in 3 report low confidence. A peer-reviewed meta-analysis discovered pooled prevalence charges of tension at 26.1% and melancholy at 21.4% amongst individuals with facial variations.
Melancholy related to facial trauma locations sufferers at elevated threat for suicide, poor remedy compliance and diminished rehabilitation outcomes. In 2025, the James Lind Alliance International Burns Analysis Precedence Setting Partnership, representing greater than 1,600 respondents from 88 international locations, ranked each the psychological impression of burn damage and the stigma of burn scarring amongst its high 5 international analysis priorities, revealed in The Lancet International Well being.
This discrimination finds me wherever I am going: the hostess who tries to seat me in the back of the restaurant, the diner who requests one other desk, the airline passenger who asks to be moved. Probably the most painful type is when individuals ignore my existence solely, as if I had been invisible. This isn’t sensitivity. It’s the logical consequence of a tradition that has educated itself, by way of centuries of tales, to worry the face that resembles mine. Greater than 100 million individuals worldwide stay with a scar or situation affecting their facial look.
Change is feasible, and 2024’s “A Totally different Man,” produced by A24 and directed by Aaron Schimberg, gives proof. Its most compelling character is Oswald, performed by Adam Pearson, who lives with neurofibromatosis. Oswald is personable, charismatic and achieved, forcing audiences to ask whether or not the protagonist’s struggling originates from his face or from the world’s response to it. Pearson mentioned the movie intentionally averted the three dominant tropes: victimhood, villainy and false heroism. Hollywood has merely not chosen to make it the rule.
The late overseas correspondent Ruth Gruber noticed that people have two instruments to combat injustice: phrases and pictures. The identical instruments create it. Writers and producers who attain for the scarred face to sign evil aren’t merely being lazy, they’re inflicting critical hurt to people who already navigate by way of a world that flinches, and to a public that has not often been provided a greater story.
Genuine illustration will not be a distinct segment advocacy concern. It’s a civil rights subject, one which begins not with casting administrators, however with filmmakers and screenwriters, and the creativeness they bring about, or fail to carry, to the faces they create.
Charlene Pell is the writer of the award-winning memoir “In This Altered Physique,” with analysis revealed in Psychology Right now and the Journal of Burn Care & Analysis.
