In his new action movie ‘Flight Risk’, Mark Wahlberg plays a villain – and you can tell because his character is balding. It’s the latest in a long line of films that uses an absence of hair as a visual cue for evil, writes Chris Edwards – and it may have real-world consequences.
![[The horror... the horror: Marlon Brando in ‘Apocalypse Now’]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/23/14/newFile-2.jpg)
As someone who has to strategically style their fringe in order to hide a rapidly receding hairline, I take particular exception to Mark Wahlberg’s new film, Flight Risk. In it, the actor plays a pilot tasked with transporting a US marshal and government witness to a trial, only for him to eventually turn on the pair, take off his cap and reveal himself as a murderous villain. A bald murderous villain. Yes, it’s not often that we get to see Wahlberg portray a weirdo brute, but the second we do, someone (presumably director Mel Gibson) immediately deems it necessary to give him a Mr Burns haircut.
“You’ll never get a bald Superman,” hair loss expert Spencer Stevenson tells me. “The bald guys are always the bad guys.” Though there are a few notable exceptions to that rule, with the likes of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Jason Statham and Bruce Willis typically playing tough guy heroes, history shows us that those without hair are far more likely to be depicted as freaks and outcasts. From Ernst Stavro Blofeld and Darth Vader to Lex Luthor and Lord Voldemort, the list of follically challenged antagonists is about as long as the history of storytelling itself.
Unfortunately, when it comes to crafting characters, baldness is often used as a visual cue to signal someone’s evil nature, making them easily distinguishable from the hero by showing off their menacing skull. That’s how you quickly transform a typical good-guy actor such as Wahlberg (who has a great head of hair, by the way) into someone you’re willing to hate. It may also explain why the Flight Risk marketing team decided to conceal the actor’s baldness by cropping the top of his head off its poster. The assumption being that the mere sight of Wahlberg’s bare cranium might, in some way, damage the actor’s image – and be considered too unattractive to whack on the side of a bus.
