Let’s cut to the chase: this is about House of Gucci. I still haven’t seen this movie. I may someday, but my criticism of the movie does not require me to have seen it, and I’m not judging it on its merits as a film. We just need to stop letting hot guys pretend to be bald. To be clear, I am defining bald not like smooth headed, sexy bald like The Rock, I’m talking season one Frasier bald.

I find it’s good to operate on the basis of the honor system for most things. We don’t need to make a rule if no one is abusing the unwritten rule. Of course we can’t really count on unwritten rules to withstand in our modern society, and now we have to have signs at pools that say you can’t swim if you have active diarrhea.

Letting Jared Leto play a fat bald guy is the one little nudge past the line that makes us require a rule. As a bald, I let it slip when Matthew McConaughey balded in 2016’s Gold. Not a lot of people talked about this movie but trust me, bald guys knew about it. Then we had Vice in 2018 with Christian Bale playing a balding Dick Cheney. OK, this is a role of historical relevance, I guess you cast first and worry about costume/makeup later. Fair.

These movies may also get a pass because these are good actors. Hard to argue against the charm of McConaughey or the intensity of Bale. They’re pros. This is the blurry line of the unwritten rule. Nothing has been flagrantly violated and there’s some justification for the choices. But now we ask Jared Leto to dawn the rubber cap? Get the fuck outta here. No, we just can’t. This is the pool full of diarrhea that warrants the sign. 

Sorry. We had fun dressing up and playing around and I’m sure there’s movies and TV shows currently in development that use hots pretending to be balds. Shut those down too. I don’t care how much money you lose, Hollywood. 

We need to load the system with balds right now and yes, I am bald, and yes, I have mild aspirations to be in TV and film (watch Derek’s Dead now streaming on Tubi), but that does not change the fact that we have serious bald problems in the entertainment industry. In fact I may not even be writing this if I hadn’t seen a commercial today featuring Rob Corrdry and Brian Huskey, two very funny, very bald comedic actors, and Brian Huskey is wearing a wig. I won’t claim to know how this decision happened on set, but I’m going to put my money on some ad exec saying, “We just can’t have two balds, it would be chaos.”

I just want it to be heard loud and clear: we can handle two balds at once. Watch old episodes of Deadwood or The Sopranos or any movie made before 1990. There were balds all over the place running free. Ugly people too! It was a better time, and I know we have the ability to go back. It’s not going to be easy, but it has to start with acknowledging there’s a problem.

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