Ever since Adam Driver first reached international attention by playing Adam in Girls, the world seems to have struggled with what to do with him. The character he depicted was, shall we say, complicated. He was cruel to Hannah. He was blunt and rude. He had curious sexual proclivities. But Girls has been off our screens for years, and he has since become an undisputed film star thanks to his roles in BlacKkKlansman, the Star Wars franchise and, most recently, Marriage Story. His performance in the Noah Baumbach film, in which he stars opposite Scarlett Johansson, has been rightly lauded, and he has been nominated for his second Oscar for the role. But throughout his continuing rise, there's one thing that just doesn't sit right. People need to stop calling him ugly.
Sure, people don't stop short of ugly. They add that he's hot too. Ugly hot. The New York Times calls him 'ugly-handsome'. There is a list on IMDb, the International Movie Database, naming him as a 'Sexy Ugly' Celebrity. A quick Google unearths a long list of similar articles with headlines like 'Ugly Hot Celebrities Who Are So Ugly They're Hot'. There's a YouTube video wondering if Adam is too unattractive to play Kylo Ren, the Star Wars villain. When he appeared topless in The Last Jedi, he was ridiculed online for his sheer, hulking size thanks to his broad shoulders and a physique that harkens back to his time in the Marines.
How did Adam Driver fool the world into thinking he was ugly? He fulfils many of the traditional, though hugely flawed and reductive, standards of male beauty. He is tall, standing at 6 foot 2. He is white. He has shiny black hair. His apparent ugliness comes down to features like his 'hooded eyes, strong brow, long nose and wide mouth' (the words of The New York Times, not me). But I'm not seeing anything other than an insanely attractive man. I know I'm not the only one. A colleague of mine was once within touching distance at The BAFTAs and was so struck by his hotness that she found herself smelling him as he walked past. If Adam Driver is ugly, then I don't even want to think about what category I come under.
He is slightly complicit in this. He has called himself 'a sight gag'. Maybe he's even capitalised on it, cornering the market as the 'unconventional leading man.' But that doesn't make it ok. It can't be a nice thing to hear or read, even if he has welcomed the joke. And it also strikes me as a double standard: I would rightly be pilloried for calling a woman 'ugly-hot.'
Or am I being sensitive? Another colleague reminds me of 'Jolie Laid', the French term used to describe a person who exhibits this apparent trait and is predominantly used against women. Others point out that we do call women ugly-hot, but with less honestly. Take the word 'striking': it seems to be used by many to describe women who don't match the cookie-cutter specifications of beauty.
Adam Driver, then, is the poster boy for something very curious: a willingness to offer an insult wrapped up in a compliment. In dating, it's called negging, and is rightly criticised as demeaning and potentially cruel.
We need to think about why we use these terms so readily. Why are our beauty standards so rigid that anyone who breaches them must automatically be considered to not be attractive? Surely it isn't okay to call someone something, just because they don't shoot us down when we say it.
Adam Driver is not ugly hot. Not ugly handsome. Not even jolie laid. He is hot. Let's get that straight before he shows up in a tux at the Oscars.
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