BARING SCARS
HERE’S a new Hollywood heroine in town shaking things up. And Icelandic actress Hera Hilmar, who plays her, reckons a character like this is long overdue on the big screen.
The role she’s referring to is Hester Shaw in Peter Jackson’s new big-screen epic, Mortal Engines.
Hester is a fugitive, who wants to avenge her mother Pandora’s murder. She forms an unlikely friendship with Tom Natsworthy (played by Misfits star Robert Sheehan), who lives in London, and the pair embark on a journey to stop Thaddeus Valentine (played by Hugo Weaving) causing chaos and destruction.
A talking point about Hester has been her appearance and a deep scar across her face that she received years earlier amid the tragedy that took her mother’s life.
Discussing how Hester’s appearance speaks to women having power beyond their looks on screen, Hera says: “To have a heroine that happens to be scarred on the face, is something that is still hard for Hollywood to swallow and it’s a huge step in terms of letting women be flawed.
“It asks the question ‘What is beauty and what is beautiful?’ and that’s a lot of what Hester is about, that part of the story that beauty is flawed and it isn’t being perfect like all the Instagram filters tell us.
“It’s nice to put something like that out there in the world today, I feel.”
Hera, who has had a recurring role in TV series Da Vinci’s Demons, was pleased when she saw Hester’s scar for the first time.
“My first reaction to seeing the scar was, that ir was really cool, because that’s how we see a lot of the heroes who are usually male: they have scars, they’re cool, they’re rugged,” she says.
“And women want to be that too – they don’t want to be men, but they want to be allowed to be free and colourful and flawed.”
Her part does more than this to advance women on screen, she argues.
“Even if we forget the scar for a second,” says Hera, “if you look at how she’s written, not enough female characters are written in that multi-dimensional way. They have a story arc that is usually used for male characters, and so that’s something that is exciting.”
The film, directed by Christian Rivers and with a screenplay written by Peter Jackson and his long-time collaborators Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, is based on the books penned in the early 2000s by British author Philip Reeve.
The narrative is set years after an event called the Sixty Minute War has destroyed humankind as we know it. Gigantic, mechanised Jihae, left, and Hera Hilmar appear in Mortal Engines, a sci-fi adventure about a mobile post-apocalyptic city