Mortal Engines star wears her scars proudly
But Hera Hilmar’s disfigured character draws controversy online
Who is that mysterious masked woman in Mortal Engines? For Hera Hilmar, the Icelandic actress playing Hester Shaw, she’s a disfigured protagonist who’s picture-perfect for the current state of Hollywood.
Hester has a tragic backstory that left her emotionally and physically scarred, was raised by a half-human/half-machine “stepdad” after her mother’s murder, and is a vengeful assassin when audiences meet her. “What I found really cool is that’s basically our hero,” Hilmar says.
Produced by Peter Jackson, the new action-adventure Mor
tal Engines (now in theatres) features a civilization wiped out by a cataclysmic event and reborn on wheels, with predator cities like London gobbling up other moving towns for resources.
Hester tries to kill the man she holds responsible for her mother’s death, powerful London archeologist Thaddeus Valentine (Hugo Weaving), and a botched assassination leads to a reluctant friendship with nerdy historian Tom Natsworthy (Robert Sheehan).
Scarred individuals in Hollywood are usually villains: Joker in The Dark Knight, Scar in The
Lion King. But with the #MeToo movement and emphasis on women in Hollywood, Hilmar says Hester is “a really important piece in that puzzle of what we’re making in terms of films and characters and heroines for young people and for anyone out there.”
Although Hester is new to film audiences, she’s beloved among fans of author Philip Reeve’s young-adult Mortal Engines series. And among them, movie Hester’s distinguishing scar on her chin and left cheek has been a controversy on social media, because it doesn’t match the grisly one across the one-eyed literary heroine’s entire face.
In Reeve’s words, when Hester meets Tom, she is described as “hideous,” her features “like a portrait that had been furiously crossed out. Her mouth was wrenched sideways in a permanent sneer, her nose was a smashed stump and her single eye stared at him out of the wreckage.”
In a June blog post where the author quipped about “my mental scars having to field 1,000,000 angry comments about Hester’s shortage of physical ones,” Reeve wrote that while Hester isn’t “ugly,” she’s disfigured enough to believe she is. “Beautiful faces are Hollywood’s most precious natural resource, and the studios are very reluctant to let filmmakers muck about with them.”
Hilmar also defends the decision to keep Hester more attractive than not, and she, Jackson and director Christian Rivers discussed how much of a scar there would be. It needed to be strong enough to work “on a huge screen cinematically” as it does in the book, “but also be able to express her in the best way as well, everything that’s going on inside her. That’s probably the reason why both eyes were left, so we would be able to see even more into her.”
Hester’s facial scar gives her an instantly recognizable visual element in the film, but she’s also uncomfortable with it, leading to the red scarf she wears that resembles a bandit mask.
“The world she lives in is really not forgiving when it comes to how she looks and who she is. She hides it (but then) she decides to go, ‘(Screw) it, this is me, take it or leave it,’ ” Hilmar says. “It’s such a strong focal point. Like anyone experiences, from silly things you could be insecure about to actually having something serious, the scar definitely informed her physique, how she holds herself in a group of people, how she feels on her own, everything.
“But it’s interesting to also see how it affects her: What does that scar mean to begin with and what does it mean in the end?”