Here's the Problem with Actors Getting Tattoos

It is a common lament among actors that typecasting sucks. "I want to be dramatic," cry the men, "and Hollywood only wants me to be funny!" "I want to be a homely character actress," cry the women, "yet studio executives cannot see past my breast implants and perfume ads to cast me in any other part besides the love interest!" Truly, it is a sad thing when a performer cannot flex his or her muscles by disappearing into a wide variety of roles, for it is channeling that vast diaspora of human experience that makes an actor great.

So stop getting so damn many tattoos, actors.

Here's the problem with actors getting tattoos: We can put a man on the moon, yet we cannot come up with makeup that skilfully obscures an actor's tattoos in today's age of HD, IMAX, and Blu-Ray. You can use all the Dermablend you want, but as you can see from these pictures snapped of Mark Wahlberg walking to the set of The Fighter, those tattoos still shine through like grubby bruises.

Though Angelina Jolie was able to shed her modern, tabloid allure to play a 1920s mother in Clint Eastwood's Changeling, I might have believed in her character a little more if, as she was being hosed down in a dramatic sanitarium scene, I didn't see five sentences of Khmer script written down her left shoulder blade. Similarly, the digital video look in Michael Mann's Public Enemies may seem jarring, but it's not as anachronistic as glimpsing Johnny Depp's knuckle tattoos in a period piece.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm not some old man standing on my lawn, sneering at some youngster's tramp stamp. I like tattoos! I just don't get why actors are so determined to cover their bodies with them when they're inevitably going to need to sit in the makeup chair for (poorly-executed) penance. Is it fulfilling some deep psychological need for permanence in a profession that demands a schizophrenic change of identity every few months? If that's the case, here's my reasoned, professional advice: Cry into your vast supply of dollar bills and stop with the enormous, uncoverable tattoos.

· Funky Bunch [ONTD]