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One star of Netflix hit Uglies reflects on the "degrading" process of upgrading her character's appearance
Brianne Tju says the process of creating her character's final appearance was an eye-opener for unrealistic beauty standards
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Fans of the Uglies book have been looking forward to seeing it adapted into a film for nearly a decade, so it isn’t surprising that it has become a big hit for Netflix. The movie’s central plot revolves around a world that enforces plastic surgery on everyone to make them “pretty,” creating a pretty damning commentary on how society inflicts unrealistic standards of beauty on young people. For one of the cast members, the experience of seeing her character transformed was particularly uncomfortable.
Brianne Tju, who plays Shay in the film, opened up about the experience of watching her character receive the cosmetic “upgrade,” which involved focusing heavily on how they could improve Shay’s appearance. “We had to choose her hair,” Tju explained. “We had to talk about the size of her butt, her boobs, the makeup, all these things. It felt very degrading in the moment, in a way. Not that anyone made me feel that way, but just analyzing it like that. Like, what we could do to make ‘Shay’ beautiful?”
Tju insists that the first version we see of her in the movie is close to her everyday look. “That is me with very little makeup, and that’s how I normally look," she says. "Then, to turn into [the Pretty version of] Shay, it took so long, and they had to cover up all my tattoos. They had to put a wig on me. Full beat. They kind of pulled back [my eyes and cheekbones] to make me look snatched. I had so many cutlets in my push-up bra, and I wore a silicone butt, and then I was wearing high heels the whole time, even in action sequences when I’m running away.”
The transient nature of beauty is a central point of Uglies, something that wasn’t lost on Tju either. As she puts it, “it really dawned on me right then and there, all this effort and all this time expended in order to achieve something that, at the end of the day, you wash off, and you go to bed as you woke up.”
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