Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | September 3, 2026
Has anyone else had this experience lately? I was watching a big film, one that had been hotly hyped for months and one I was greatly anticipating. There was much to enjoy, but I couldn't immerse myself in its world for one major reason. The lead performer couldn't move their face. In one scene, they needed to have a panic attack, and not one muscle on their forehead moved. Their entire visage was frozen and it was too distracting to deal with. This, sadly, wasn't the first time I'd seen this happen. I could be here for a while recounting the most recent examples. And it's obviously not just me. Jameela Jamil has some strong words on the current plague of Botoxed faces removing the emotion from cinema.
"I can't look at Botoxed faces anymore. I miss the faces that move. I miss women frowning and laughing without it looking painful. I am in my forties. My peers are injecting all the *wild* out of themselves and I miss it. I miss it terribly. I'm so sorry. I don't mean this with judgment or to offend. I just miss the facial freedom of women. Botox is a prison that presents as stoicism in a time women should be fucking ROARING. We should not be paying to take risks with our faces and health, to be tamed by a bunch of men who fancy children. I can't watch TV anymore without being distracted by how expressionless my favourite actors have become. It's too much. We have lost a grip of reality. Emotion is POWER."
Jamil added in the caption, "I truly believe this is a ploy to make it so easy to replace women with AI on screen and online. It's easy to replicate a motionless face that looks like every other face. It's already happening."
Look, when she's right, she's right. It's a prevailing problem and it's ruining film and TV. And it's not just the Botox. It's the glaring veneers and modern make-up styling regardless of the role or setting. Why do all these period dramas feature actors with zero body hair and blinding white teeth? It's really weird and kind of embarrassing to watch a big dramatic scene unfold where the actor is crying but their face is as still as stone. They're fighting so hard against the botulism and it looks like it hurts.
As Jamil notes, it's hard to overlook how women being forced to freeze their faces and slim their bodies down feels like an act of losing one's power. So many of the most famous women on the planet are getting smaller and smaller, and their faces are nipped and tucked and stripped of their ability to express. Hollywood's never been a bastion of autonomy for women but now more than ever it feels as though our options have been stripped down to nothingness. And you can hardly blame those who give in to the unbearable pressure of agents, executives, and producers who think women are over the hill at the age of 35 and that even the skinniest of us need to lose 20 pounds to be passable. Why are we telling 27 year olds to get facelifts?!
All the AI "actresses" being shoehorned into the entertainment space are, let's be honest, designed to look like sexy babies. They're all animated to be painfully young, barely 19 or 20, and convey an image of submissive womanhood that appeals to the grossest of men. They don't want a woman who will talk back or say no, and they don't want ones who can convey that anger effectively.
It's no wonder so many of us have found ourselves hungry for those great faces that reject this smothering and impossible standard. Think of Dale Dickey in Widow's Bay or all the women in Furious. We love acting because it helps us to find ways to explore our humanity. Unmoving faces forced upon us by a bigoted system is the opposite of that.
